ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 22, 1996 TAG: 9611220043
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
A LUCKY PERSON will have 4 million additional reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving.
To keep the job or not keep the job?
To buy a new house or stay put?
What to do with all the friends and relatives who will be calling for gifts and loans?
What's that travel agent's phone number?
And the Cadillac dealer's?
Those are a few of the questions that may be on the mind of the lucky person - probably a resident of the Roanoke area - who may be sitting on a lottery ticket worth $4.35 million.
The state lottery agency says one of two winning tickets for its $8.7 million Lotto jackpot was sold Wednesday afternoon at CJ's Mart, a Salem convenience store. The winning numbers are 7, 17, 18, 19, 33 and 43.
The Chestnut Avenue store is off a main drag and owner Jim Pickard says most of his customers are locals, so it's likely that the winner comes from Salem or its environs. An anonymous caller to the lottery agency Thursday morning said the winner lived in Ferrum, but the agency has been unable to confirm that.
The newest millionaire hasn't come forward yet, according to the agency.
"I think I sold the winner, because that's my shift," says Debbie Dooley, clerk at CJ's Mart. Lottery computers peg the sale of the lucky ticket at 2:23 p.m. Dooley can't recall to whom she sold the ticket.
The jackpot winner won't get all the money at once. In accordance with the usual practice, it will be doled out in annual payments of $219,635 for the next 20 years. The same goes for the winner of the other ticket, which was sold at a doughnut shop in Springfield. The take-home will be significantly less after federal and state income taxes are deducted.
Pickard says the ticket is the latest of three big winners he's sold in recent years, but the others were for another game, Cash 5. One person won $100,000, and the other $25,000.
There was little buzz about the jackpot around the store Thursday. Pickard expects that to change after the winner is announced.
"I anticipate that once it becomes common knowledge, it'll help our sales," he says. "People will think this is a hot store."
And he's not surprised that the winner had not come forward as of Thursday night.
"If I won it, I wouldn't let it out until I'd made my decisions on how I was going to spend it," he says. That, plus "get to a lawyer, get to a bookkeeper, get the family involved."
Pickard won't come out of this empty-handed. For owning the store that sold a jackpot winner, he'll collect a cool $5,000. He says he'll use it to pay off bills and loans. "I'll probably share some of it with the employees," he adds.
Lottery agency records list the last area Lotto jackpot winner as Charles Bergendahl of Roanoke.
He split a $1 million jackpot from the Jan. 24 drawing this year. But the winnings from Bergendahl's ticket are a pittance, at least comparatively. He collects $25,000 a year before taxes.
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