Drawing out the syllables of her name with an exaggerated flair became Ms. Vega’s trademark and helped establish her as a New York institution.
“I’m Yo-LAHNNN-da Vega!”
That distinctive introduction is how Yolanda Vega, the face of the New York Lottery’s on-air drawings for over three decades, made, well, a name for herself.
But Ms. Vega, 66, is calling it quits as the evening diva of the state’s numbers drawings. The lottery announced her retirement this week on Twitter.
Drawing out the syllables with an exaggerated flair became Ms. Vega’s trademark and helped establish her as a New York institution. Anchors of news programs began imitating the pronunciation in introducing the lottery drawings, syndicated to television stations statewide. And in a brief appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1994, even Ms. Winfrey introduced her in Ms. Vega’s trademark fashion.
She has likely presented billions in winnings over the years. It was invariably Ms. Vega who presented on-air the familiar oversized ceremonial checks for oversized amounts to stunned winners of the Mega Millions, Powerball and other games run by the New York Lottery, which calls itself the largest and most profitable in the nation.
But it was the way she pronounced her name, as much as her role, that gained her the affection of millions. “It just took so hard,” Ms. Vega said on Wednesday. “I believe it helped promote me, helped blow me up.”
“It’s melodic and it’s fun,” she added. “I’ve had numerous women tell me that the first words out of their children’s mouths were Yolanda Vega.”
Brad Maione, a spokesman for the New York State Gaming Commission, which operates the lottery, said, “Her ebullient nature, coupled with her playful personality made Yolanda a national icon.”
“There will never be another personality associated with the lottery like Yolanda Vega,” he said.
Ms. Vega became part of an evening ritual for millions of lottery players and a staple at promotional events and lottery news conferences.
In her first decade on the air, she began gaining a cult following. At one point, the lottery held “I Want To Be Yolanda Vega” promotional contests across the state that featured fans dressing up like Ms. Vega and imitating her.
As customer giveaways, the lottery made Yolanda Vega bobblehead figures with a recorded voice announcing her name.
Over the years, as fashions and hairstyles changed, Ms. Vega’s changed with them. But her cheerful on-air style remained a constant as she stood amid canisters of dancing balls ready to be spit out into winning number combinations.
Ms. Vega said she began exaggerating the pronunciation of her name almost as soon as she began appearing on television for the lottery. One morning, she was “hopped up on some espresso” and spontaneously exaggerated her name and a program director warned her that “stretching your name is sucking up seconds of valuable time.”
“I said, ‘I’m proud of who I am,’ and I continued to be true to myself and I continued to do it.”
Ms. Vega became known statewide, from Buffalo to Long Island, a staple at lottery presentations from county fairs to minor league baseball stadiums to the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square.
She was constantly greeted by fans delivering their own attempts at her distinctive name pronunciation, said Margaret R. DeFrancisco, director of the New York Lottery from 1999 to 2004.
“People would imitate it or test it out with her — if she ever got tired of it, it never showed,” Ms. DeFrancisco said, adding that when sporting events occasionally pre-empted the lottery drawings, “we would get phone calls from people saying, ‘How dare you pre-empt Yolanda.’”
On Wednesday, one Twitter user, @JoeRashbaum, called Ms. Vega “as iconic a part of NYC as the subways, bagels, the Garden and everything else” and thanked her for “making the drawings ‘Must Watch T.V.’”
She could be presenting a $400 million check to a truck driver from Brooklyn, or $7 million in scratch-off winnings to a Staten Island construction worker.
She was there jumping in jubilation in Madison Square Garden with the guy who swished a long shot shot in 2002 to win $1 million dollars in the Mega Millions, and atop the Empire State Building in 2005 for the King Kong Millions jackpot for $55 million.
Born Yolanda Antequera, Ms. Vega said she grew up one of six daughters of Puerto Rican immigrants in public housing in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
She attended public schools including Hunter College in the city university system and began working as a bookkeeper, eventually moving to the Albany area.
In 1990, on a lark, she auditioned to be a television personality for the state lottery. At age 34, with no relevant experience, she had no real hope of landing the job, “so I was just being my old Brooklyn self,” she said. She was hired.
Ms. Vega said she turned down job offers from television news networks to remain the face of the lottery. In a 2019 appearance on The Wendy Williams Show, Ms. Vega said she did not want to retire. But after weathering the pandemic, she said on Wednesday that she was eager to spend more time with her husband
She added that she recently “hit the jackpot” with the birth of her first grandchild, a 5 month old boy named Isaiah.
“He was the final straw” in her decision, she said.
Ms. Vega said her upbringing as a New Yorker may have helped prepare her to relate to many lottery winners on the cusp of going from working class people to multimillionaires.
Before the cameras began rolling, she said, she would pull them aside.
“I would say, ‘Look at me, baby, look at me, mama — it’s going to be OK,” she said. “I made them feel comfortable and they ended up talking to me and connecting with me.”
