Nevada gamblers rush to buy California lottery tickets

Sam Stanton

Wednesday, June 9, 1999 | 11:41 a.m.

VERDI -- "Play here," the sign near the Gold Ranch Casino says, and the people of the gambling-mad state of Nevada do so by the thousands.

But they aren't flocking to the slot machines or gaming tables at the gas station and casino just off Interstate 80 on the California line in Northern Nevada.

Instead, they are lining up for a crack at the most popular type of gambling not allowed in Nevada -- the California state lottery.

And with the jackpot for today's drawing expected to top $75 million, the Gold Ranch's annex for selling lottery tickets has been jammed for days.

"I think I'm going to have to get another clerk in here," Gold Ranch general manager Rob Medeiros said Tuesday as he watched dozens of people lined up to buy tickets from a single cashier. "This is getting out of control and it's only 10:30 in the morning."

By today, the lines likely will be out the door, into the 66-space parking lot and up toward the interstate where the main casino building is located. Waits of 90 minutes or more are not uncommon, customers say.

With the constant influx of customers, Gold Ranch's lottery sales business has made it the third busiest among California retailers of lottery tickets in the year since it opened.

The secret to its success is the same as the old real estate adage: location, location, location.

Although the casino itself rests inside Nevada's Washoe County, the property owned by Peter Stremmel and his brother, Steve, extends just a sliver across the state line into California's Sierra County.

And from that lucky quirk of geography came the inspiration for a boost in the Gold Ranch gambling business.

After two years of careful negotiations with officials in both states, the Stremmels received permission to build a small, nondescript building directly on the state line, with a large brown line marking the division between California and Nevada.

On the Nevada side is a television set, some soda machines and tables. But on the California side sit the two powerful magnets drawing Nevadans -- the distinctive, forest green computers spitting out creamy golden tickets that fuel dreams of yachts, limousines and farewell speeches at the office.

"Somebody's going to win it," said 52-year-old John Hickey, a Reno resident who echoed the sentiments of millions of other lottery players as he stood in line Tuesday to buy 40 tickets.

Indeed, the odds would suggest that someone will win it, either today or Saturday. The $75 million figure would be the third largest jackpot in California history. The largest was $118.8 million in 1991.

The lottery madness surrounding this sales outlet stems almost entirely from the residents of Reno and Sparks, about a dozen miles away.

They stand in line representing every social level and ethnic group. Men in suits, teens in shorts, older folks leaning on canes and twentysomethings with infants resting on their shoulders.

But why would people pile into their autos and drive down the highway past numerous casinos -- all of which offer better odds -- to pump money into California's state-run gambling concern?

"That's too much work," 38-year-old Jessi Alarid said of casino gambling as she filled out lottery ticket forms Tuesday. "It's not the same thing as giving a casino your money. This goes to a good cause, it goes to your schools."

Given the lottery fever that grips Nevada residents when the California jackpots hit this level, that 6 cents a ticket is hardly peanuts. On Monday alone, Gold Ranch sold 13,258 tickets. Since opening last year, the outlet has sold nearly 800,000 tickets.

This is not an anomaly, as the Stremmels and the lottery well know.

Gold Ranch's owners originally came up with the idea because they noticed how well Nevadans have supported California's lottery over the years.

The No. 1 lottery outlet is, by far, Bluebird Liquors in the Los Angeles-area community of Hawthorne.

But Nos. 2 and 3 in the pecking order have traditionally been sites along the California-Nevada line, with No. 2 being the Dry Lake store in Baker on Interstate 15 on the way to, naturally, Las Vegas.

No. 3 had long been the Hallelujah Junction general store just inside California north of Reno. That outlet was the closest available for Reno-area residents, who thought little of traveling 25 miles or so to buy their tickets.

But when Gold Ranch opened its outlet last year, traffic at the store dropped 25 to 50 percent, said cashier Kellie Pato. Since then, many loyal customers have returned to the fold, she said, but not quite enough. Last week, Hallelujah Junction ranked 15th among outlets selling lottery tickets in California.

The irony of Nevadans leaving one of the West's gambling meccas to buy chances in the lottery -- where the odds of hitting the jackpot are 18 million-to-1 -- is not lost even on gambling officials.

"I think the lottery is an entirely different animal," Stremmel said.

"Something happens to people and I don't quite understand it myself. As the lottery grows, your chances diminish almost geometrically, but there's something in the back of their mind that tells them someone is going to win this."

Spud Berolo, an 84-year-old Reno man who drove to Gold Ranch Tuesday, could hardly dispute that.

"I come here every week," Berolo said. "Maybe one day I'll hit it before I'm 90."

And besides, it is not a one-way street. Medeiros, the Gold Ranch general manager, said Californians flock by the dozens to the Nevada side of his establishment for their own version of gold: cigarettes noticeably cheaper because of lower Nevada taxes.

"You'll see people carrying out grocery bags full of cigarettes on the weekends," he said.