El Gordo Thrives in the U.S. of A.

By Ed Boyer — June 25, 1999

Back in my ill-spent youth, when I thought it was more valuable to float around the world with one bag and a double-digit bankroll rather than map out a career, I landed in Madrid during the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

It didn’t take long to realize that a staple of life in the Spanish capital were those stout ladies in full skirts who sat at busy intersections shouting, “El Gordo, tengo El Gordo.”

They were selling “the fat one” literally, the big prize in Spain’s lotería nacional. As I recall, El Gordo was worth about $300,000 back in those days, a real fortune then and not a bad piece of change now. But EI Gordo wasn’t the only game. Spain had what was to me a dizzying array of lotteries, and I never did really sort them all out.

But I remember smugly wondering what kind of jacked-up economy Spain must have for so many worthy causes and institutions to have to depend on a lottery to stay afloat.

A few years later, I was in Mexico City where every time traffic stopped for a red light, cadres of young men rushed into the intersection with spray bottles and dirty rags hoping to collect a few pesos by washing windshields.

Vendors selling lottery tickets were as abundant there as they were in Madrid, and I couldn’t help but think that if the money spent on lotteries went into infrastructure and development, those youngsters washing windshields might have regular jobs rather than the risky work done dodging traffic.

When I buy a ticket, I always wait until the next day to check to check the results. That way, I can buy an overnight fantasy for a buck. It’s cheaper than a movie, and the script is always better.

There was a certain condescension infecting many Americans abroad during those days, even though those attitudes were rarely given voice. Lotteries and windshield washers were clearly signs of a Third World country, traveling Americans would cluck, often to themselves.

How naive we were. Lotteries have become as American as apple pie. And they have a lot of company. Casino gambling is spreading like wildfire. The American Dream has somehow become picking the winning six numbers in the state lottery.

Before you begin to think this is some great sermon against the evils of gambling, let me assure you it is not. Unlike the lotteries in Spain, I understand the California lottery. And I make no secret of buying a few tickets each week – especially when the jackpot soars as it did a couple of weeks ago.

When I buy a ticket, I always wait until the next day to check the results. That way, I can buy an overnight fantasy for a buck. It’s cheaper than a movie, and the script is always better.

None of this is in any way intended to promote wagering or to dismiss the real tragedies that befall compulsive gamblers. A new federal report says there are 4 million compulsive gamblers in this country, and it urges a moratorium on the growth of legalized gambling.

The report also proposes banning Internet gambling, restricting the marketing of state lotteries and prohibiting so-called gambling cruise ships, among other recommendations.

But for all of the report’s good intentions, the genie is out of the bottle. It probably always has been. It was just underground and made illegal. But when the stakes reached a certain level, even the state wanted in, and it may take decades or generations to get this genie back in, if ever.

Even back when I was considering this country far superior to Spain and Mexico because there were no legal lotteries here, I also knew that a big swath of America’s rural areas and urban inner cities had yet to escape Third-World status. When I thought about it, a lottery had always been an integral part of black neighborhoods in the East and Midwest.

That lottery was called playing the numbers — betting on three digits with a payoff of 500 to 1. Back when Jim Crow was the rule in northern and western cities as much as it was in the South, numbers men were the bankers in the black community.

They financed small retail businesses, hotels, restaurants — even small resorts. Then as now, commercial bankers were not lining up to invest in black communities. So, entrepreneurs turned to one of the few sources of capital available — numbers bankers.

Moving to California in the 1970s, it struck me as odd that numbers were not as widespread as in cities back East. Drugstores did not carry stacks of those best-selling dream books — “The Three Wise Men” and “The Red Devil.”

If feces turned up in your dream, for example, you checked the book and found that the digits for feces are 369. That number migrated in earlier generations to general conversation as in when someone would say, “Don’t give me that 369.”

So the lottery has been made legal. The games have been embraced by the state and the public. All that is missing are the stout ladies in full skirts shouting over the traffic: “Tengo El Gordo.” ◼︎