Support for Scratch and Win comes from the Cape Playhouse in Dennis Village, now playing

Anastasia the Musical. Up next, the Broadway hit Come From Away. Tickets at capeplayhouse.com.

So how did you start working at the lottery? Okay, so I got out of high school and went to work part

time in the state house.

I was working in a warehouse, sort of a dead-end job, and my dad told me that I should go

apply at the lottery. Sheila DeBroski and David O'Reilly were just teenagers when they

both heard about jobs opening up at the Massachusetts

State Lottery. And they were looking for people to work the night shift. It would be a night job.

Working the overnight shift, six at night to seven in the morning. So it wasn't really that desirable.

They just asked if I had a driver's license and how many hours I could work.

And I said, that sounds like an opportunity.

They hired me on the spot. They needed people right away.

We're picking up the story in 1976. It's been five years since the lottery bill passed into law, and two

years since the first scratch ticket came out. But once again, sales of the lottery's existing

games were in decline. The scratch ticket craze had worn off, and so the lottery was staffing

up to launch a new game, a new kind of game,

really, that required a level of infrastructure and people power, unlike anything the state

had attempted before. For one thing, it was a daily lottery drawing rather than weekly.

But the real difference, the thing that made this game so much more complicated

to pull off, was that for the first time, players got to pick their own numbers. Picking your

own number was a completely different form of gambling. It was called simply the numbers

game.

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