The Ice Lottery

"A channel has just opened up!" cried the excited announcer on station KFRV. "There's a four-foot ice jam across the river! My prediction now is it'll go tomorrow. A big chunk just broke loose below the radio shack! That's the way it starts. Stand by--if anything happens, we'll be back on the air."

What the announcer was reporting from his eyewitness perch to intent listeners all over Alaska was not an impending natural disaster, but the Alaskan equivalent of the Irish Sweepstakes: the yearly pool on when the ice would break up in the Tanana River at the little town of Nenana, southwest of Fairbanks. This year hopefuls all over the 49th state and Canada's Yukon Territory (no tickets are sold to "outsiders") bought 170,000 tickets at $1 apiece for a chance to guess the exact day, hour and minute of the breakup. The exact minute is determined by an apparatus of Rube Goldberg complexity: the churning ice pushes against a tall pole stuck into the frozen river; the downriver drag on the pole tenses a wire running from the pole to a clockhouse on the river bank; the pull of the wire trips a weighted meat cleaver, which cuts through a rope, triggering a device that stops a clock at the winning instant.

The Nenana lottery started in 1917, when railway workers got up a $600 pool, won by a man who guessed that the ice would break up at 11:30 a.m. on April 30, still a favorite date among pool guessers. Not since that first year, mourn citizens of Nenana, has anybody from the lottery's home town won a prize. But Nenana (pop. 350) runs the contest as a civic enterprise and rakes in some 40% of the total take every year without any help from luck. In the spring, just about every adult in town works for the lottery for a while, at an average $2 an hour, sorting tickets, keeping records, guarding the clock to see that nobody tampers with it.

Last week the ice started grinding downstream, setting off a siren that brought everybody in town to watch the ice batter at the pole. At 11:26 a.m., May 8, the clock stopped. Holders of the eleven winning tickets, worth $8,454.50 apiece, ranged from a Fairbanks truck driver who had been betting on the Nenana lottery for 30 years to an Anchorage oil-company employee who had been in Alaska less than a year.

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