On the night of the draft lottery, I was working at the campus radio station at Duke University. For all the men on campus, this was the news story of the decade. As the birthdays and numbers came across the ancient, clattering teletype, the newsmen and women would rip them off and rush them to the DJ to read.
The news was making news, because military service was something most of us had spent years avoiding. A guy I knew got a number like 364 or 366. His commitment to higher education disappeared within a day or so. I hit the middle at 187, but my draft board was Memphis, Tennessee, and the board never got close to my number. Had they got to around 177, I was going to join the Navy.