'Six million dollar men' share lotto jackpot
Published Thursday October 29th, 2009
Nine Havelock Department of Transportation workers split $6M prize
Have luck?
Actually, it's spelled Havelock, but the New Brunswick village is home to a whole lot of lucky people this week after nine co-workers shared half of Saturday night's Lotto 6/49 jackpot.
The men, all co-workers at the provincial Department of Transportation garage in the village, were all in Moncton with their spouses yesterday to pick up their $6.2 million in winnings.
Don't bother reaching for your pocket calculators. That works out to eight cheques for $689,045.52 each and one made out to Steve Wilson for $689,045.56.
While the reason one couple got four cents more wasn't immediately clear yesterday, the other eight couples were being pretty magnanimous about it, as you might expect.
In fact, there were not nine happy couples, but 10 at the Atlantic Lottery Corporation's headquarters yesterday, as Peter and Trina Ryder were also on hand to pick up their one per cent seller's prize from the big win.
The Ryders own Charlie's Corner Store in Havelock where the ticket was both sold and found to be a "massive winner."
Bryan Duncan reports that's the phrase the display on the lottery's self-checking machine in the store actually read when he held the ticket under the little red light, a detail most of us, sigh, would never know.
"I took it up to Trina at the cash to get her to check it and at first she couldn't believe it either," Bryan said yesterday. "Then she got Peter to go through the numbers too and they matched, and then she looked at me and said, 'you've won six million dollars.'"
Trina said yesterday she was so shocked and happy for Bryan and his group that it took eight to 10 minutes for her to realize what the win would mean for them too. As sellers of the ticket, they received $62,045. Except for supervisor Mike Killam, who lives in Sussex, pretty much all of the others have known each other for many years, a lot of them since they were children. The excitement people were showing for each other's good fortune yesterday seemed almost as strong and certainly as genuine as the excitement each was feeling at his or her own personal good fortune. And while $689,045 is indeed a goodly fortune, all nine men expected to be back at work today. The group, who've been playing the lottery together for just over a year, is gearing up for busy season, when their snowplows will hit the road. They also had already all made their regular contributions to the workplace coffee cup to buy tickets for last night's 6/49, so there is of course a chance this report of their winnings is no longer correct. As it was, they took just a half-day off yesterday to collect their winnings. Of the winners, Stanford Melvin had the most specific plan for some of his winnings.
"I'm going to buy a backhoe," he said, even though that might sound like a busman's holiday for a guy who operates a backhoe on the job most days. Nevertheless, Stanford has a farm and has long thought about the things he could do around his land with a proper tractor.
The Ryders, meanwhile, plan to put some of their winnings towards paying down debt on the store, though Trina thought playing down in the Caribbean for a week might be worthwhile too. Another lucky ticket holder in Quebec won the other half of the $13 million jackpot.
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