Bless the lottery, not only for the fun it provides those who slavishly throw money at it, but also to us who mostly sit on the sidelines chuckling.
Case in point, the Mega Millions operation went without a big winner again Tuesday, meaning Friday’s drawing will be more than $1 billion. Now that would be a very merry Christmas.
There were four players, including one in Pennsylvania, who won $1 million each Tuesday by matching five white balls, but not the pivotal gold ball. Chump change, some lottery players would say.
Me? I pick up pennies on the sidewalk. And I laugh when people who have a net worth in the negative category find $1 million jackpots not worth their effort. This seemingly common sentiment is why, as years have passed and would-be ticket purchasers have become somewhat jaded, games have been re-jiggered to produce larger payouts.
But there is no free lunch in the lottery game, so the ticket prices have increased, and the odds against participants winning have been elevated greatly.
Back in the era of the Lotto game in Pennsylvania, in which players needed to pick six numbers out of 40 to win the big one, my wife made the mistake of creating a play list of of numbers based on family birthdays.
Those numbers were 5 8 9 15 25 28. I remember them well because, as I told my wife at the time, I was now bound to buy tickets for every drawing lest those numbers would be picked with me lacking an entry, me knowing I’d missed out on $1 million, and then me having to find a quiet place to off myself.
Fortunately, the game went to the lottery trash heap, to be replaced by an ever-increasing list of state number games, not to mention the scratch-off tickets.
My late mother somehow had a gift for buying scratch-offs and netting a modest profit. If she bought tickets for you, not so much.
But we did have a minor Christmas lottery miracle in the household this year.
My wife, easily the nicer person in this marriage, does things like save newspapers for someone from another part of town who noted online the need for same due to their dog using them for toilet matters.
When my wife left the house last week to drop off papers at the meeting spot, she was on foot due to her car being worked upon at a nearby garage. As she left, I noticed she had a plate of Christmas cookies to be given to the paper person.
As an aside, my wife blankets the neighborhood with gift cookie trays and, until my former union brothers decided to cut off retirees at the annual Christmas party, her cookies were huge favorites in the ticket-bag raffle at those events.
I was astonished she was giving cookies to virtual strangers for whom she already was doing a good deed and told her this. That’s my role. Her role was to return and note they’d given her a scratch-off lottery ticket as thanks.
Said I: It would have been better if they’d just given you the $5 bucks. At least then you could have bought yourself some coffee.
Later that night I was informed that the ticket was a $100 winner. There was one symbol in the main area providing for a five-times payout of the number beneath, which was $5. Then, on the bonus portion of the card, there was not one, not two, but three winning symbols worth $25 each.
Now if only I can get them to buy her a Mega Millions ticket.
I will leave with a lottery story from decades back, when I still worked in sports at the local Woke Gazette. I was covering what I recall to be a night Steelers preseason game with Cleveland (the original Browns, not the current replacement team of that name).
Ohio had begun a Lotto game and after numerous drawings without a winner, the jackpot was big. I can’t recall the number, but I’m thinking something like $10 million might be right.
There were lines at all the ticket selling locations. Some Steelers assistant coaches, short on spare time, gave sportswriters money to buy tickets for them.
There was a huge crowd in ancient Municipal Stadium for the game. I still remember the scene, the dull roar of a crowed anticipating a football game and then the numbers were drawn and given out over the stadium PA system.
You could hear the collective groan, both from the crowd and the press box. The game had become an afterthought.
It turns out, inexplicably, each one of us ticketholders actually thought we’d had a good chance to win, and that is the magic of the lottery.
Sam Ross Jr's site 