A Dollar and a Dream

THE BIRTH OF THE OHIO LOTTERY BY ERIN ESMONT

In 1971, Ohio Senator Ron Mottl Sr. was an up-andcoming Democratic lawmaker from Parma intent on making sure the state didn’t miss out on what he thought was a golden opportunity.

Lottery fever was sweeping the country, and states all around Ohio were catching it. They were rushing to copy the example set by New Hampshire, the first state out of the gate in 1964 to adopt a lottery system, debuting what it then called a sweepstakes.

“I wanted to keep Ohio’s money in Ohio,” Mottl says. “Illegal numbers flourished in Cleveland and other big cities in Ohio. And we could put a dent into that if we had a legal lottery.”

But convincing his fellow lawmakers was no easy task. Plus, there was opposition from religious groups and others, as well as worries about problem gambling and addiction.

After months of legislative haggling and a judge’s ruling that kept the measure off the ballot for a year, voters in 1973 made their wishes known, approving Issue 1 by a 2-to-1 margin.

Mottl, now 89, became known as the “father of the Ohio Lottery,” and his efforts led to Cleveland becoming the headquarters of the lottery enterprise.

The Ohio Lottery turns 50 in May, and the gambling landscape today is a crowded one. The lottery gave rise to racinos (a combined race track and casino), casinos and the newest entrant, sports betting, which came online in Ohio on Jan. 1, 2023.

Mottl isn’t a fan of sports betting: “There’s too much gambling in the state at this point.”

MILLION-DOLLAR MAN

In 1974, Omar Watts was struggling to make ends meet as a factory night watchman.

He and his wife, Josephine, were raising five kids on $113 a week, and that led to two of the youngest children being placed in foster care.

Watts’s life had been a series of hardships from his earliest days on a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina—and the future wasn’t looking much rosier.

But one can dream. Each week, he’d buy four tickets at 50 cents each at a discount store in Burton, Ohio, hoping for a winner. He would soon get his chance—and become the state’s first million-dollar winner.

Two months after the Ohio Lottery debuted, officials declared Oct. 27, 1974, Lottery Day at Thistledown Race Track, offering its first million-dollar first prize. Ten finalists picked a horse, and Watts pinned his hopes on Grand Action. There was another racehorse with a similar name, Grand Dandy, and when the winning horse was announced, all Watts heard was “Grand.” Was it his horse? He couldn’t see the finish line from where he was sitting.

“I didn’t know I was the winner until a guy came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and told me my horse had won,” Watts said, according to a history of the lottery compiled to commemorate its 40th anniversary.

That night, Watts took his family out for a celebratory dinner at McDonald’s. He would use the money to improve his family’s lot: His two children in foster care rejoined the family, and he bought a modest, four-bedroom house in Huntsburg, Geauga County, and purchased new furniture.

He would open a small repair shop and maintain a low-key life.

“We’re not going to live like millionaires,” he said at the time. “I don’t want to be no big shot. After being poor for so long, it wouldn’t feel right.”

He would eventually move back to North Carolina, near where he was born, and pass away on Feb. 25, 1998, at age 81.

Today, many of the biggest lottery winners remain nameless (not all states allow winners to remain anonymous, but Ohio does), claiming their prizes through an anonymous trust to avoid unwanted publicity or fortune hunters. The Ohio Lottery doesn’t track winners or chronicle how the windfall affected their lives positively or negatively.

“IT WAS A SIMPLE LOTTERY”

Greg Bowers began at the Ohio Lottery Commission as an intern, with no firsthand knowledge of how to play. He eventually landed a full-time job and has been there for more than 30 years, serving now as finance director.

“The games back then were your basic numbers games … Pick 3, Pick 4,” he says. “We had the Super Lotto, maybe $4, $8, $12 million—it never really reached the numbers you see today. We had scratch-off tickets, and back then, they were very minimal. It was what I call a simple lottery … and that was it.”

Fast-forward a few decades.

“Now, we offer a more comprehensive suite of products for our players,” Bowers says. “We have 10+ draw-based games, 40 to 60 scratch-off tickets in the market at any one time, keno. Now we sell at bars and restaurants, and gas stations and supermarkets. We try to be where our customers are.”

Then there are the payouts.

The most recent ones across the United States are nothing short of jaw-dropping: A California winner claimed a $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot in February, followed by a $1.35 billion Mega Millions jackpot winner from Maine.

When Edward Castro was identified as the California billion-dollar winner, he issued a statement saying the real winner was the California school system. Lotteries nationwide either exclusively or primarily earmark lottery profits for education.

In Ohio, all lottery profits go to fund K–12 public education, and the tally to date is $29 billion and counting.

Mottl is proud of the billions raised for schools in the state. But it wasn’t a slam dunk at the beginning. Lawmakers resisted the idea of devoting profits to education, and for the first few years of the lottery, the money went into a general fund.

Lawmakers came around in 1983, voting to set aside lottery profits for education. Four years later, Ohio voters amended the constitution to make sure education was the permanent beneficiary. Lawmakers still have a say in what education priorities to fund.

Constance Miller, who recently retired from the Ohio Lottery Commission after 31 years and was director of operations, said in recent years lottery profits have paid for everything from school computers and broadband technology to additional school buses, among other expenses.

Keeping Up With Technology

The Ohio Lottery has also modernized with the times, enabling today’s players to use mobile apps to check their numbers, build a bet list, scan their tickets and cash in.

The move to add mobile features isn’t endorsed by everyone.

In 2019, when the Lottery Commission was weighing whether to launch what it called an iLottery, a leading religious group and retail merchants raised concerns.

Aaron Baer, president of the conservative Center for Christian Virtue (formerly Citizens for Community Values), said at the time: “Growing the lottery in any form is bad policy for the state of Ohio. It’s a regressive tax in its truest form. There are plenty of other ways for us to fund education without exploiting impoverished people.”

For now, the one thing lottery players can’t do on their phones is place bets. That’s only allowed through sports betting, and it’s a controversial feature at that.

When it comes to sports betting, Bowers and Miller are taking a wait-and-see approach. But they’re concerned about the impact.

Bowers said the typical sports bettor is more likely to be young and male.

“We’re competing with discretionary income from our players and that’s what worries me,” he says.

“Even if you are a player of both lottery and sports, are you going to make a choice to spend less on the lottery? That’s something we’re going to keep an eye on.”

“A DOLLAR AND A DREAM”

The lottery mantra of “a dollar and a dream” plays into the aspirational aspect and thrill of the game. But critics of the lottery say it’s a waste of money, especially for those who can ill-afford to play. They point to the billions that the states take in, even with the education spending, and raise questions about the outside companies with lucrative state contracts that profit off the massive money-making machine that today’s lotteries have become.

In 2022, data journalists and reporters from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland documented how lotteries nationwide target poorer neighborhoods that tend to have higher concentrations of people of color.

The five-story package, called “Mega Billions: The Great Lottery Wealth Transfer,” detailed how more advertising dollars are funneled into those areas. It found that for every dollar spent on advertising nationwide, the lotteries have made about $128 in ticket sales.

Mottl acknowledged the economic inequalities.

“I have a deep concern about that,” he says. “It’s unfortunate. It seems like poor people feel this is my way out of poverty if they win, and it really doesn’t happen that way.” and Chicago’s south side” and how that attracted the attention of the police.

Winning the lottery remains a long shot, to say the least: For example, the odds of picking all six numbers in the Powerball jackpot are estimated at 1 in 292.2 million. Still, lottery officials say the mission today is the same as it was 50 years ago: play often and responsibly, support education and have a little fun.

Sucker’s Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America by Herbert Asbury was originally published in 1938 and reissued by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2003. The classic overview takes “a complete look at old-time gamesmanship in America. From Midwestern riverboats to East Coast racetracks,” Asbury “explores the legal, and illegal, history of gambling in pre-World War I America. … of ‘sharpers’ and ‘suckers’: those who excel at the games by cheating and their victims. From notorious gambling havens like Chicago and New Orleans to lesser-known outposts in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio.”

In 1949, Blues shouter Wynonie Harris released Grandma Plays the Numbers on the King Records label, a cultural artifact of the days when playing the numbers was largely an African American enterprise. (“She’s at the fruit stand every day, buys bananas by the bunch,” Harris sings, “She looked at all the price tags, that’s where she gets her hunch.”) In Running the Numbers, historian Matthew Vaz “reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy.” The book, subtitled Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling, explores how “the games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem

Find a short history of the Ohio Lottery at ohiohistory.org/gambling

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