We got an interesting blast from the past this week from a woman who found an old lottery ticket while going through her mother’s things after her mom had passed away.
With the ticket was a note from her mom stating that it was the very first lottery ticket ever sold in Iowa. The woman wondered if it was true. We did a little research, and found out that we can’t answer her question for sure. It may have been the first ticket sold at the Indianola gas station where her mom worked at the time, but that’s as far as our review in that regard can go.
The first lottery tickets sold in Iowa were in the "Scratch, Match & Win" scratch game. It was a $1 game with grey tickets featuring a hand holding a coin and scratching a ticket.
That game was the Iowa Lottery’s debut product on Aug. 22, 1985, the first day that lottery tickets were sold in Iowa. It was the only game sold by the Iowa Lottery at the time. And while the kick-off celebration that day was at the Iowa State Fair, lottery ticket sales got underway at the thousands of retail locations across the state that sold tickets.
We know that during the first week of sales, lottery players bought 6.4 million tickets in that game, and by Nov. 1 when the game ended, they had purchased 28.1 million tickets in it.
It’s always fun to look back and see how much things have changed in the past 35 years. Thank you to this player for a walk down memory lane! 
I love that, Mike! What a great memory.
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | September 23, 2020 at 08:44 AM
My brother won $500 on a scratch ticket early in Iowa Lottery history. He even got to shake Iowa Governor Robert Ray's hand on that occasion.
Posted by: Mike Irwin | September 22, 2020 at 10:37 PM
Very Interesting.
Posted by: dennis Asche | September 18, 2020 at 06:19 PM