Headline Is the Winning Numbers 14 17 22 23 30 47

By Frank Trippett

Some of them had not even heard the news when they arrived before 7 a.m. at the factory in Mount Vernon, N.Y., 25 minutes up the train line from Manhattan, to begin assembling printing presses. When one of the employees roared up to the plant in his auto shouting "We won! We won!" some of his friends figured he was just kidding around. After all, such good fortune was hard to believe: against odds of 6 million to 1, who could believe that 21 blue-collar workers, all but two of them immigrants from such places as Poland, Paraguay, China, Czechoslovakia, Italy and Germany, would prove to be joint possessors of one of three winning claims to New York State's unprecedented $41 million lottery prize? )

The winners remained incredulous even after they had double-, triple- and quadruple-checked the lucky ticket, one of 21 they had purchased and agreed to share. Celso Manuel Garcete, the Paraguayan who had picked the numbers at random, said it all for the group: "I'm a little nervous, surprised, excited. It's a very big change." What more was there to say? By equally splitting their almost $13.7 million share of the jackpot, they will each receive 21 annual after-tax payments of about $24,000, starting this year. As the winners contemplated new houses and cars and college tuition for their children, even the losers--and there were a lot of them--seemed to agree: it could not have happened to a nicer bunch. "These guys are like a cross section of America, with every ethnic, racial and religious group represented," said Karl Wallburg, their boss at the George Hantscho Co. press manufacturing plant. "It's like a fairy tale, and all of us here, even those who didn't win, are on cloud nine."

Such was the unexpectedly heart-warming climax to a thoroughly manic chase after the biggest prize ever offered in the U.S. The award had swollen to epic size because no winner had been declared in seven successive plays of New York's Lotto 48 game. As the jackpot climbed first to $23 million, then $33.5 million and finally to its peak, serpentine lines of ticket buyers formed all over the state, each person shelling out $1 for each chance to choose two sets of six numbers. In Manhattan the queues were so long and contained such a variety of people that an unaware visitor might have assumed it was the eve of a joint concert by Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Welk. But the tickets, belched out by computers at a peak rate of 22,000 a minute, bought admission to something else: the Great American Get- Rich-Quick Fantasy. As what the tabloids promptly dubbed Lotto Lunacy became epidemic, some 4,000 outlets across the state handled 72 million separate bets. The storm of ticket buying reached such a pitch that thousands of hopeful pilgrims flocked in from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even farther afield. Players who spent as long as three hours in line came with big dreams of what they would buy (a Tudor house, the New York Yankees), small ones (roller skates for little brother) or get-even ones (buy the firm and fire the boss) if their luck prevailed. In the final hours before the drawing, it seemed nobody could be thinking of the mathematically exact odds of 6,135,756 to 1. Banker Jurgis Savaitis, 64, who doubtless knew better, said while waiting in line that as an investment, a Lotto ticket purchase was "better than a C.D."

Given the buildup, the televised picking of the winning numbers could only have been a trifle anticlimactic. When a machine built of suction tubes and a transparent box full of numbered plastic balls picked the winning combination --14, 17, 22, 23, 30, 47--nothing happened to almost the entire audience except the abrupt popping of their balloons. The holders of the three winning tickets could not be identified for several days.

Besides the lucky 21 in Mount Vernon, one was a 36-year-old bachelor computer consultant from Brooklyn, who announced, "I can afford to live in Manhattan now." The other was a 29-year-old mother of three from Troy, N.Y., who waited two days to step forward because she had to discuss how to split the money with her family. In the end she took 50% of the nearly $14 million, with the remainder divided equally between her mother and sister.

Such a binge of communal gambling was certain to provoke sober afterthoughts, and did. Said Monsignor Joseph A. Dunne of New York City, president of the National Council on Compulsive Gambling: "The state approved drinking but it doesn't promote it. Yet the state is promoting, advocating and pushing risk-taking behavior like gambling." Some critics complained that in using games of chance to raise revenue, states mainly exploit poorer people, whose tight financial straits tempt them to give in to dreams of hitting it big. Said Sociologist Eric Hirsch of Columbia University: "It's the American dream to get rich quickly, but the lottery holds up false hope for people. Nobody who has any real understanding of the number 6 million would participate in the game." Arnie Wexler, a recovering compulsive gambler and the head of the New Jersey chapter of the National Council, asserted that the chances of hitting Lotto 48 are about a third those "of getting hit by lightning and dying, which are about 2 million to 1."

New York's Lotto Lunacy recalls the mania that swept Illinois last year when its lottery prize reached $40 million. The craze is spreading. Twenty-two states plus the District of Columbia either already run lotteries or have plans on the drawing board. On Sept. 3, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont will launch the nation's first multistate lottery. In 1985 government-sponsored gambling is expected to generate revenues of $10 billion and net the states $4.1 billion. As lotteries reach across the U.S., criticism will doubtless grow. But with billions at stake and new tax revenue hard to come by, it would be risky to bet that the politicians will pay much attention, or that millions of ticket buyers want them to do so.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/New York