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Wide World, Acne Photographs
Louise Popp, telephone girl, who won $118,500.
America’s record winner Clayam Woods of Buffalo.
His ticket drew $886,360.
A sweepstakes winner must be prepared to face
news- reel cameras and microphones.
Here is Peter Dolan, dock builder,
receiving word of his $150,000 luck.
Mr. and Mrs.Rotovnik. He was a New York
janitor who won $76,000
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Everyone is always wondering what happens to those who win fabulous sums as prizes in the sweepstakes. So we asked the author of this article to find out and tell us
Sweepstakes Winners
Before and After
by Lamoyne A. Jones
MOMENT AGO they were the stoop-shouldered janitor, the weather-beaten dock builder, the pomaded bootblack-each plodding along in his own rut, but sharing a common hope. Now the pounding hoofs of horses racing half a world away have made them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Their ship, to alter an old phrase, has not come in. But their horse has.
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Keystone Photographs
Alma Mamay, ex-show girl, who won $151,200.
William Meringer, a chef, received a sweeps ticket
as a tip. It won $153,000!
Dan Dougherty and his sons got into the headlines
for their squabbles over $1499,262.
continued on page 170 |
Only a year or so ago, William Meringer, swarthy Hungarian-American chef, was working in a small New York restaurant, gloomily contemplating the depression that had pitched him from a position in a large hotel to this obscure post. Then a few days before Christmas a Bronx gourmet wandered into the restaurant. He tasted Mr. Meringer's hasenpfeffer and was so pleased that he left behind a sweepstake ticket for the chef.
On Christmas Day, 1933, Mr. Meringer gave the ticket to his wife, Margaret. Margaret had no illusions about her chances, but she could not refrain now and then from stealing a peek at the bit of paper lying in the bureau drawer. There is no premium on dreams.
And then one March morning the Meringers awoke to find that in faraway Dublin a sweepstake drawing had been held. Their morning newspaper carried the names of a score of Americans whose numbers had been plucked from the huge drums and matched with the names of horses running in the Grand National at Aintree. The newspaper shook in Mr. Meringer's hands as his eyes roved down the list of names. Margaret didn't dare look. And then suddenly a cry of joy and wonderment burst from her husband's lips. Their ticket had been drawn and mated with Golden Miller, one of the favorites in the race.
The day of the race Margaret, her husband and William, their eighteen-year- old-son, are hovering about the small cabinet radio in their dark little rear apartment as a British voice drawls out a description of the Aintree course. The drawl suddenly vanishes, and the voice barks excitedly, "They're off!" As one, the three Meringer's draw nearer the radio. Southern Hue, the voice proclaims, takes the lead at the first jump, but can't hold it. Gregalach is moving up and at the second jump pushes out front. Then Forba at the next jump has forged into the lead.
Beads of perspiration gleam on the chef's round face and his wife's breath comes in gasps. Golden Miller has not been mentioned. The voice drones on. Forbra loses the lead. Coming up fast on the inside is a horse whose colors aren't quite clear. But now they are. It is Golden Miller. Golden Miller takes the lead at the seventh jump. No! He's falling back, but fighting. They're coming to the last fence! They're neck and neck. Miller is pulling away-Golden Miller wins!
The voice rambles on announcing the other places, but the Meringers are no longer listening. Margaret slumps back in her chair. She begins to laugh hysterically and then to cry. The uneloquent chef tries to soothe her and yet contain his own exultation.
The Meringers had won $153.000, joining the ranks of their hundred-odd countrymen who have made small fortunes on the Irish Sweeps.
Since that day about a year ago, a dozen more Americans have realized their most extravagant dreams through sweepstake windfalls and it is estimated that a million others are even now looking forward expectantly to the next running of the Grand National late in March.
More than 99.9999 percent of that million are doomed to disappointment. The remaining .0001 percent. however, will take their place with the Meringers. Abruptly they will find themselves catapulted onto the front pages; hear themselves discussing their good fortune from motion-picture screens. and discover that for every dollar they won there is someone with a scheme to take it from them. What their reaction will be to such a heady dose of fanfare and wealth, no one can say positively. We can only look back and attempt to predict from past experience.
For the most part, those who have won sweeps money bathed briefly in the public eye and then retired gratefully, preferring seclusion to the publicity that brought hordes of promoters and salesmen clamoring about them. Many were reluctant to emerge even momentarily, and a few whom I talked to refused pointblank even to discuss their good fortune. From the less adamant, however, a fair picture was obtained.
It was an amazing picture, too. I had begun the task of looking up these sweeps winners with no little trepidation, having something of an aversion to uncovering the skeletons I expected to find. But I soon learned that my fears were unfounded. These American winners have proved a substantial group. True, a few of them went haywire for a few days after getting their money, but most of them straightened out immediately. Blandly they accepted the publicity and congratulations tendered them, and went on to live a quiet, if somewhat fuller. life.
Take the Meringers, for example. After they had recovered from the immediate effects of their good fortune, the little family packed up and set out for Ireland to collect their fortune in person. They remained abroad only a short time but long enough for Mr. Meringer to give a dinner for seven hundred needy Dublin children at the City Hall. Needless to say, the principal dish was hasenpfeffer.
Upon returning last July, the stocky chef purchased a small home, assured his children an education by creating an annuity fund for them, and banked the rest. Now he's working two days a week in a restaurant.
If Mr. Meringer was far from affluent when his windfall came. Stanley Mendarla a Bronx pastry cook, was desperate. For more than a year he had been unemployed and unable to find work of any kind.
Here again the Irish Sweepstakes took a hand. Mendrala awoke one cold March day in 1933 to find that he had won $102,000. His first thought was of his wife, who would have a vacation from all work, he promised, and after that he remembered and kept an oral agreement with a friend, an unemployed ironworker with whom he had premised to split any winnings. The Mendralas immediately left the squalid tenement in which they had lived and bought a small home in New York State. A trip to Bavaria for his uncle's silver-wedding anniversary followed, and now he is planning to establish a small business of his own.
Valerio Zerbo, a Brooklyn mirror worker, won a $42.000 prize back in 1930. Zerbo’s first reaction upon learning of his good fortune was to quit his job and take his little family to Ireland. From there they went on to his native Italy and for six months toured the Continent. Returning to Brooklyn, the glazier was prepared to take life easy. He had a comfortable income. For a time he was satisfied; then the days began to drag.
One day he returned home with a new gleam in his eyes. He had purchased a mirror works of his own. and now he would have something to do.
"Yes," Mrs. Zerbo said to me. "he is happy now. And, too, the plant makes money."
Other winners did not quit work at all. Peter Dolan, for example. who is an Irish dock builder for the City of New York. He won $150.000 last October. The good news came to him while he was working. and he promptly announced that he would keep right on working. He kept the promise and has been on the job every working day since then.
Peter and his two grown daughters still occupy their old four-room walk-up apartment in Queens, but now the Dolan name does not appear in the lobby-a move made to thwart the mobs of salesmen, insurance agents and lawyers who continue to storm the little apartment house. The sandy-haired Irishman has invested his money wisely in savings banks and annuities and can't for the life of him understand why people are so interested in his doings.
Mrs. Emelia Lenz, matronly New York housewife. also won $150.000 last October. She and her husband, who quit his job when news of the windfall reached him, set out on an extended trip. The other $150.000 American winner in this sweeps was nineteen-year-eld Simon Koss, son of a lower East Side candy-store proprietor. Simon's father immediately sold the store. Mr. and Mrs. Koss. Simon. and his youngest Sister. Gertrude, packed up and departed for Ireland, abandoning even their household furnishings in their haste. They are still touring Europe.
Almost as amazing as the calm with which the majority of average Americans have accepted sudden riches is the adroitness they have shown as financiers. I discovered only one winner who lost his money through bad investments.
The largest American winner of all time stands out as perhaps the most astute financier of the lot. He is Clayton C. Woods. middle-aged Buffalo auto mechanic, who had $886,360 dropped into his lap by a sweepstake ticket in 1931.
(Editor's Note: At the next drawing of the Irish Sweepstakes, the distribution of prizes was altered to increase the number of first awards. fixing a maximum of about $150.000 for each entrant.)
Woods and his wife permitted themselves one extravagance when news of their luck reached them. He visited a barbershop, and his wife, a beauty parlor. Both got the works. After this initial splurge.
Woods settled down. He was besieged by a battery of lawyers, ready to collect the money for him for a price. Promoters willing to let him in on the ground floor of gilt-edged propositions popped up wherever he went, and envious townsmen recalled an antiquated city ordinance that permitted the Overseer of the Poor to sue lottery winners for their prizes-and collect.
He turned tail and ran. winding up on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, where he bought a comfortable cottage. From this haven, he issued an ultimatum: "No one is going to take this money away from me."
And no one did. The smooth-tongued promoters flew off to easier prey, and the Overseer of the Poor dropped his threatened suit. Woods returned to his native haunts. His first thought upon returning was for his friends, a number of whom had been unemployed for months. He bought weekly grocery orders, paid off mortgages and saw to it that all were comfortable. Then he purchased a large estate in a Buffalo suburb and settled down to manage his fortune. He has done the job well, but his only explanation is, "I've invested it safely."
Although he has moved to a new neighborhood, Woods still prefers the friends of his working days. He drops around frequently to the bar near the factory where he worked and the drinks are always on him-that is, the drinks for his friends. Ringers who try to edge in on the setup soon learn their mistake. He also spends a lot of time at his Canadian lodge, hunting with his two dogs, or simply wandering about the countryside in his old touring car.
With so many winners on the list it was inevitable that one should have found sudden riches too novel an experience. It proved too much for Arthur Court, a Noblesville, Indiana, mechanic, who won $85,000 in a sweepstake on the 1929 Derby. A carefree Middle Westerner, Court was no match for the schemers who descended upon him. They sold him a fifty-nine-acre farm near Indianapolis and another of two hundred acres near Columbus. They persuaded him to purchase a large part of a spar mine in Illinois.
It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long. The mine was tied up in endless litigation and the farm near Indianapolis, despite a barbecue stand and filling station which Court erected as a last resort, proved to be practically a dead loss. By July, 1930, Court's winnings were so tied up that he couldn't raise a thousand dollars when he needed it. At this time, Mrs. Court surveyed the situation wearily and announced, "I'll be glad when the last few dollars are gone. Then we can go back to sane living again."
Ask any average group of Americans what they would do were they to come into a fortune and you can be sure most of them will mention travel. Feminine winners, especially.
For instance, there was Eleanor M. Hanley, who had read of many glamorous faraway places while working in a Hoboken high-school library. She dreamed of visiting them some day, but a librarian's salary would not permit much travel. She contented herself with dreaming. Then, in 1932, her ticket on the Derby won and brought her $110,475. At last her dreams could be realized, and she set out. So far she has confined her travels to America. Her money is invested principally in securities, but savings banks hold enough of it to assure her ready cash for any new jaunt she may plan.
A score of others might be placed in this category. There ill Steve Boursoukes, a New York bootblack, who took the $40,000 he won in 1932 and headed for a suburb of Volo on theAegean Sea.
There is Thomas Hamill, a Holland Tunnel guard, who on the strength of a $82,500 piece of luck last year, quit his job and began touring the country with his wife and small daughter.
There is Mrs. Barbara Frank, who with her husband left her lams Brooklyn apartment in 1933, when lady luck tossed $140,000 her way, and headed for Europe and her native Germany.
When Miss Louise M. Popp won $118,500 in May, 1933, her picture appeared in newspapers throughout the country and proposals of marriage began to pour in. She moved from her former apartment, but the matrimonial applicants trailed her to the office of the New York Telephone Company, where she worked. Finally, officials of the company transferred her to Hempstead, Long Island, and gave her a roving assignment. She has eluded the pests.
Miss Popp's experience was shared by Alma ,yamaM a retired Follies showgirl. Miss Mamay won $151,200 last June and a photograph, taken during her theatrical career, was resurrected by the newspapers to accompany the story. The hotel at which she stayed was bombarded by suitors who saw an opportunity to marry both beauty and money in one fell swoop. But Miss Mamay’s Broadway training came to her rescue. She had handled chiselers before. She barred even reporters from her suite. However, the callers became so persistent that she was finally forced to move, and no one seems to know where she is now.
Sweepstake winners on the whole have been singularly generous. As Woods thought first of his indigent friends, Miss Mamay of an unemployed brother, and Meringer of seven hundred destitute Dublin children, so others have shared their winnings with relatives and friends. They want no publicity. They are merely mindful of the days when they were less fortunate.
When a $75,000 prize fell to Julius Hader, good-natured Brooklyn restaurant owner, last October, his business was prosperous and required no additional investment. Therefore, he immediately divided $25,000 of his winnings with two less fortunate brothers. The remainder he placed in trust funds for his children, and in annuities for himself and his wife.
For years before they won $71,000 in the sweeps of 1933, Christian H. Droge and his wife had been helping out indigent neighbors with groceries and pin money. He owned a large wholesale hardware store in Manhattan and had a comfortable income. After coming into a fortune, Mr. Droge and his wife decided that there must be some reason for their luck. They decided it was their generosity in the past, and have been out-doing themselves in this respect ever since.
A three-year lease he is tied up with, on the store building, has kept him from retiring-as he'd like to do.
"Once the lease expires," Mr. Droge confided, "we'll buy a little farm upstate. I'll be a gentleman farmer and spend two days a week fishing and three hunting. There will be open house always for friends and pinochle games on Saturdays. But for now there is nothing but worry. Worry over the high rent and no business."
One exception to the general rule, however, was the battling Doughertys of Brooklyn, who couldn't even agree among themselves as to the distribution of their winnings. From that day in June, 1930, when Danny and Eddie arrived home, having left their "jobs in a Wall Street brokerage house, to find their father telling reporters what he would do with the $149,262 he had just won in a Canadian sweepstake, the trouble began. Daniel Senior, admitting that the ticket was in his sons' names, argued that he had put up the money, but his sons entered a vigorous denial. For several weeks the battle royal continued, and the father finally agreed to accept $22,000 as his share of the take.
There followed a temporary calm, broken only by the appearance of a woman who claimed to be old Dan's former wife and demanded half his share, and a suit for alienation of affections against one of the boys. These actions were settled quickly and the boys began enjoying themselves. They furnished a new apartment at a cost of seven thousand dollars, going in for red-plush furniture, a smattering of antiques and a romantic painting depicting two lovers against a background of shooting stars and blazing comets. Each of the boys also bought a two-thousand-dollar roadster, took a trip to Bermuda and toured the South.
After about a year, the troubles of the Doughertys made a final comeback. Old Dan sued his sons for a third share of the prize, declaring that they had never kept their agreement with him. Father and sons berated each other vehemently in court, but the suit was finally settled out of court, with the father being guaranteed a hundred dollars a month for life and scuttling off to Ireland for a vacation. He recently returned and is now living on his income in a small New York town. Eddie has married and now owns a bar in Easton, Pennsylvania, while Danny maintains bachelor quarters in Brooklyn and occasionally wanders down to Wall Street to visit old friends, expressing the wish now and then that he could find a job. The urge to work has hit him also.
As these sweeps winners of yesterday have marched by, there has been a startling absence of anything verging on tragedy in their stories. It is a Greenwich Village janitor who supplies this missing note.
Since that day last June when Frank Rotovnik first learned he had won $76,000 on the Derby, the house of Rotovnik has been wreathed in gloom. The homely janitor and his work-weary wife saw in the light of the first announcement an education for their son and a comfortable income for their old age. Their dreams were blasted,
The first blow was when Rotovnik discovered that it was not his ticket, but one purchased in his name by a nephew, Prank Schmidt, that had won, This disappointment was alleviated when the nephew promised his uncle twenty thousand dollars for the use of his name, and everyone was happy, But this time the janitor's happiness was even shorter lived, The landlord for whom he worked appeared on the scene with a lawyer relative, who, he suggested, should be permitted to bring the money back from Ireland for him, The fee would be only a thousand or two, he promised.
But the janitor balked, became indignant and ordered them out, losing his job through his impetuousness, A little later, the same lawyer filed suit against Rotovnik for half of the winnings in the name of a friend of the janitor, with whom the latter had promised to share any winnings on tickets they purchased personally, Since then the money has been tied up in litigation, and neither Rotovnik nor his nephew has received a cent. I
Rotovnik has borrowed several thousand dollars, has gone to Ireland to appear in court once and already has more than two thousand dollars in lawyers' fees against him, On the first wave of good fortune he leased a four-room apartment in the Bronx, but even this small establishment is more than he can afford and he has borrowed heavily.
When I visited Rotovnik recently at his home, he was the picture of desperation. His face has acquired many deep lines during the last ten months, and there is a cynical note in his voice as he relates the story of his disappointments, When he had completed his tale of woe, he leaned back in his chair and surveyed the little apartment wearily,
"This place I cannot afford," he muttered bitterly, almost to himself, "I will get out of it when the lease is through, I have no job and I can find none. I have no money, When I do get what is left of the prize, what will be left? No, I tell you if you come to me with a ticket and say, 'Here, Prank, I give you this, and you win a hundred thousand dollars,' I would not take it, What good to me would it be? When I try to get I have nothing but trouble, anyhow.".
And now, within a few weeks, fortune's wheel will spin again and perhaps a few more Americans will ride the waves of sudden riches to joy and happiness-or to trouble and despair, like the Rotovniks and the battling Doughertys. But one thing is certain, that the biggest story-which will as usual remain uncommented on-will concern not the sweepstakes winners, but the losers. For it is estimated that foreign sweepstakes and lotteries are taking out of this country more than a billion dollars a year.
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