Spring was always time to plant the garden in the home of my parents. My father said that having food from garden was necessary during the Great Depression of the 1930s. His father was cut to only occational work at the steel mill in Canton, Ohio, and they needed the garden to have enough to eat. My mother said that the garden was necessary for her family too. Her father’s business of designing, building, and repairing houses in Duluth, Minnesota fell to almost nothing because few had the money to pay for his services. And then for even the little work he had, he sometimes was not able to do because of bouts of rheumatoid arthritis. My mother remembered him spending many days in steam tent in their living room.
My mother said that in the early 1930s the family’s fortunes seemed to get a little worse with each passing year. “But then my dad won the Irish Sweepstakes,” my mother would say cheerfully when she told the story. “1000 pounds was a lot of money in those days. It was $5000, the best exchange rate in history. My dad said that the horse won the race, and if the jockey hadn’t fallen off, he would have received even more money.”
The Irish Hospital Sweepstakes were started in 1930 to finance hospitals and medical services in the young Republic of Ireland. It was a lottery. Sons and daughters of Ireland in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States, and the Irish Free State itself would buy tickets in the hope of getting paired with a horse running in a series of races. On the surface it seem like gambling for a good cause, perhaps something like Bingo in the church basement that I had known about growing up.
After my mother retired from library work she wrote about many of the her life experiences. But she never wrote about winning the Irish Sweepstakes. She never had the complete story. After she died when I was putting together her biography from these stories, I decided to find out what I could about my grandfather and the Irish Sweeps. So here is what I think happened.
The first thing I found out was that the Irish Sweeps lottery was illegal in the United States. It had been illegal since its inception. In the big cities of the East Coast in the 1930s many Irish emigrant ticket sellers were arrested, and the U.S. Post Office confiscated many bundles of tickets and cash bound for Dublin. Lotteries were also illegal in the British Commonwealth but postal lotteries did not become specifically illegal until an act of Parliament in 1935. I found out that the very favorable exchange rate of $5000 for 1000 Pounds Sterling occurred in 1934 and has never been that good before or since.
So my grandfather won his money in the 1934 lottery. When I tried to find out about prizes in the 1934 Irish Sweeps, there were none that amounted to 1000 pounds. There were many for less for the horses that were also-rans and three for the top finishers which were quite a bit more than 1000. Then I discovered that the 1000-pound payments were made only to sellers of tickets that were drawn. The ticket buyers got differing amounts.Ticket sellers also got paid by chance too, their names along with the buyer’s name were on each ticket. The chance of a seller getting paid were much greater than those of an individual ticket buyer getting paid. The odds of a ticket seller in Duluth getting his bundle to Dublin were also greater than one in Boston, Baltimore, or New York. And the fact that tickets were confiscated in the East also helped my grandfather’s chances.
So I picture my grandfather, builder of the communion rail at his church, standing next to Father after mass selling tickets bound for Dublin and the Irish Sweeps. He might have gone to other Catholic Churches in and around Duluth too. But I don’t think the tickets were mailed from Duluth. My grandfather probably took a trip to Ontario to visit one of his aunts. He was a good mathematician and estimated that his chances of winning from an Ontario mailing would be good, about 2000 times better than the average ticket buyer, but still only about 5%. The blessing of the priest probably helped too.
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