By David G. Firestone
Since I’m on vacation, I’m rehashing an old Driver Suit Blog Radio script. This one is on a lottery ticket.
Most times, if I talk about an item, it’s something I own. In this case however, the eBay purchase had to be canceled, for reasons not worth getting into here. But I will post photos of the item. Now I’ve gotten into collecting lottery “test tickets” or tickets that were made to be inspected by lotteries that have since been encased in one form or another. I’ll do something on them later.
The only one I wanted, was the one I didn’t get, is this. This is one of the first tickets printed at a printing plant in Gilroy, California, home of the famous Gilroy Garlic Festival. It’s not so much the ticket itself, but the rabbit hole I went down while researching this. This just gets crazy! In order to understand, we have to start at the very beginning of the California lottery…
In California, the Lottery Act of 1984 was presented to voters in November of that year as a ballot proposition, Proposition 37, and passed with 58%. The Act mandated an extremely tight timeline for establishing the Lottery and bringing it to operational status. As such the governor appointed the first Lottery commissioners on January 29, 1985. The state government immediately built the Lottery’s original headquarters in only three months in the Richards neighborhood of Sacramento, where it still resides today.
Like many other state lotteries, California uses Light & Wonder, Inc., formerly Scientific Games Corporation, to manufacture and sell their scratch-off tickets. SGC dates back to 1917, to a company called Autotote, which made totalizator systems for parimutuel wagering at racetracks. In the build up to California’s lottery debut, SCG was responsible for ticket designs and implementation. At the time, SCG utilized Dittler Bros. Inc. of Atlanta, a printing company specializing in lottery ticket printing. This is where the problems start.
You see SGC was well aware of how lucrative this contract would be. They were the firm that wrote California’s lottery initiative and contributed $2.2 million($6,205,487.62) of the $2.4 million($6,769,622.86) spent to finance the measure. They were lobbying all over California for Proposition 37 to pass.
When assured they would get the contract if Prop 37 passed, SCG started their own ticket printing company in Gilroy California…in September, 1984, two months before the lottery initiative passed. Yes, you heard me right. Two months before the vote even took place, SCG started building a plant. Not a cheap plant either. This plant cost $6 million in 1984, roughly $16,924,057. in 2022.
Even with the tight deadlines, it became clear that there were going to be issues. The Gilroy plant was kept secret, using assumed names, much the same way Walt Disney bought land in Orlando for Disney World. This became a serious issue in the lead up to the debut of the California Lottery on October 3, 1985.
The Gilroy plant came into conflict with Dittler Bros. Inc., who had a deal exclusively produce tickets for SGC. The problem was that Dittler Bros. Inc. was not capable of keeping up with the demand set on SCG by the state of California, and everyone knew it. That, combined with transportation costs made the new Gilroy plant the only real option. So, with a lot to lose, and little to gain from this new arrangement, Dittler Bros. Inc. sued SCG. The judge in this case, Osgood Williams, my new favorite judge name, ruled on June 14, 1985, that SCG had to use Dittler as the main supplier, but then also gave Dittler 75 days–the entire time California is allowing for production of tickets–to produce 700 million tickets for two games.
It very quickly became apparent that this wasn’t going to work. During another set of court battles leading up to June 30, 1986, some new facts became clear. It was clear that California wasn’t happy with Dittler’s work, to the point that they told SGC to fire Dittler on June 12, 1986. This would cost the company $32 million if they didn’t. It also emerged that Dittler had overcharged SGC for materials, as ruled by a court auditor-arbitrator. This would culminate in SGC finally opening their new ticket printing plant on June 30, 1986.
The SGC/Dittler feud would go on a little longer, with a 1991 lawsuit concerning the Florida lottery. Though the company was, by that point, more of a spent force. Dittler’s reputation would further be tainted through the McDonald’s Monopoly fraud. Dittler and Jerome Paul Jacobson crossed paths, when he was hired as a security guard for Dittler, who, in conjunction with Simon Marketing, created the first McDonald’s Monopoly in 1987. Jacobson would quickly figure out how to move the top pieces to allies, and quickly did. This went on until 2001, when the whole scheme came to light. Jacobson and his allies would spend time in jail. Jacobson has said if given the chance, he’d do it all over again.
This is one of the longest and oddest rabbit holes I’ve ever gone down while researching something. It just keeps going. I’ve never had so much news and lawsuits related to an item I’ve researched before, and I had to share it with you.
Next Week, the history of my favorite fast food meal is examined.
Links:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-06-14-mn-2537-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-25-mn-20271-story.html
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