Friday, Feb. 15, 2002 | 11:06 a.m.
Maybe it's because the hills of California -- like those in Nevada -- are still winter brown.
Or maybe things have changed since Aug. 26 -- the last time a lottery rolled to these heights, when the multi-state Powerball hit at $295 million.
Either way, on Thursday afternoon the Nevadans who skipped over the California border to buy SuperLotto tickets were downright unimpressed with the chance at winning a record high single-state jackpot of $200 million this Saturday.
Before Wednesday night's drawing went off without a winner, the SuperLotto had never surpassed $141 million. So was $200 million impressive, something never seen before for one state?
"I'd be here if it was big or small. I'm always here," Henderson resident Fred Preston, 72, a retired Cook County Illinois cop, said.
He was sitting in a fold-out beach chair outside the Dry Lake Lotto store south of Primm, not reading, not minding the 1 1/2 hour wait. Just sitting.
His wife and daughter had his cell number, he said. He had theirs. They were over the state line shopping, about a three-minute walk north of the orange cones and security guards directing traffic. Preston was in a sort of no-man's land, on the southernmost stretch of the mall parking lot -- town property still run with crisp efficiency by MGM MIRAGE, but on the California side where the lottery, not slots, is legal.
"This is my 10th day straight of 12-hour days," Jeanene Straitz said. "Anything over $60 million and you start getting lines."
Straitz was in the grocery aisle tagging bars of soap at $1.39, taking a break from one of the mini-mart's seven machines, which have been running at top speed for several days -- about 30,000 tickets a day.
Like the security guard who wouldn't give his name, but said only, "I do it for the dedication, not the glory," Straitz spoke first of the anonymity of the game, it's esoteric qualities.
For her, it wasn't so much about the inherent democracy that comes with one dollar giving everyone access to their wildest dreams. Instead, she saw herself as an interpreter of strange tongues.
"Standing there for eight to 10 hours a day, everyone's got a different lingo for lotto," she said. "They talk Powerball, a lot of them haven't played in two years so they don't know the new rules. Then there's the draws, consecutive draws, lines, quick picks. You can play for a month, two months, or 10 weeks. No one else in this corporation, not besides the nine of us, knows how to do this."
About 20 miles south in Nipton, a railroad town with a population of 19, and another common stop for Nevadans looking to gamble on blindingly long odds, the wait for SuperLotto tickets was almost non-existent. But the story was the same.
"No big deal. Same thing. Nothing extra. It's the same ol', same ol', " 68-year-old Charlie Teal, a Primm gas station attendant, said.
He was buying his usual week's worth, 10 "plays" total, five tickets each for the Saturday and Wednesday drawings.
Jerry Freeman, who runs the Nipton Trading Post, the general store that serves as the town's hangout and gossip exchange, had an explanation.
"It's all smoke and mirrors," Freeman said. "Back in the early 1990s, people would get crazy at $50 million. Then they (lottery officials) figured out that wouldn't work any more. So they started jacking the numbers up. They increased the odds and stretched out the payout.
"But when it's all said and done, it's still about a $30 million jackpot," he said.
Doing the math, Freeman showed that if a customer wants to collect the full $200 million -- if the pot gets that high by Saturday -- he or she will have to wade through "annuity" payments for 26 years. Winners who ask for "cash" outright, as about 70 percent of people do, find out that the pot doesn't exist today.
For starters, the state will cut about 57 percent from the advertised pot -- the $200 million is based on estimates of the sum including interest accrued over 26 years -- and the federal government takes another 33 percent for taxes.
So, a $200 million jackpot would mean a take-home payment on Saturday of about $57.6 million.
Not forgetting that the odds of winning that pot are one in 41,416,353, according to the small print on the back of a ticket. That's up from the 1-in-18-million odds of the early 1990s.
"I tell people their chances of winning are better than becoming president," Freeman said, given a population today of 286 million. "They seem to be happy with that idea."
If many of the people buying tickets Thursday were regulars, and less dreamy than first-timers, Freeman in Nipton and the staff back at the Dry Lake Lotto were under no illusions about the expected deluge.
They predicted a storm of customers today, with waits as long as five and six hours at the state line, and up to three hours in Nipton -- similar to conditions in June when the lotto hit $141 million.
A pair of Las Vegas newlyweds on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Patricia Contraveos-Beckstead, a doctor, and Jim Beckstead, a cement contractor, were some of the early arrivals from that crowd who show up once the mania hits.
Contraveos-Beckstead, 44, stepped out onto the Nipton Post landing, saying she'd just bought her first ticket -- $40 worth, to be exact, but who was counting? It was Valentine's Day.
"I left my bike home today," she said. "I wanted to hug him (her new husband) the whole way."
What would she do if she won? Back from a cruise and with another planned trip around the corner, she said she would retire. Just as Teal and several others answered.
But not Beckstead, 55. "I'd probably still have to work. I'd die if I didn't work," he said.
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