Lotto Winner Expects $150, Gets $250K
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
BAD AXE, Mich. — Donald Ertman got a little agitated when he found out he’d have to make the 150-mile trip to Lansing to collect his lottery winnings. All that for $150, he complained.
Then the owner of the store that sold Mr. Ertman the $1 Mega Millions ticket set him straight: It was worth not $150, but a cool quarter of a million.
“I didn’t believe him — not at first,” Mr. Ertman told the Bay City Times. The 71-year-old laid-off factory worker bought the ticket in late December at the Bad Axe Party Store & BP Gas Station, and walked around with it for six days without realizing it was worth $250,000. He must have written down the numbers wrong when he saw them on TV, he said.
Mr. Ertman was speechless when store owner Eli Kabban told him what he really had, and his wife, Rosalie “Penny” Ertman, broke down in tears of joy when she learned the news.
“We’re the typical poor senior citizens, and our income from Social Security is not a lot,” she said.
