Grandma's lottery ticket detour pays off
Posted: 3/29/2007 12:21:00 AM
Seventy-three-year-old grandmother Margie Coy had plans to visit her grandson Terry Coy II in Greensburg, Ind., last weekend when her boyfriend decided to take a detour into Kentucky.
"I asked him where we were going and he said he wanted to buy some Win For Life tickets in Kentucky," said Coy, who lives in the little town of Windfall near Kokomo in northern Indiana. "I pretty much go along with anything he wants to do."
They motored over the I-275 bridge near Lawrenceburg and followed the I-275 loop to Hebron, where they bought four $5 "Win For Life" tickets and a handful of other lottery tickets at the Ameristop Express on Litton Lane.
Monday morning, boyfriend Ron Tedlock, 50, logged on to the lottery Web site to check the winning numbers for Saturday night's drawing.
Coy quickly learned that she had won a windfall — $1,000 a week for the rest of her life — from the Kentucky lottery.
"I was doing the laundry and he was reading off the numbers and I said if you gave me the right numbers, I won," said Coy, who is retired from General Motors, where she had worked in a voltage regulator plant in Kokomo for more than 33 years until an auto accident forced her to retire in 1995.
"This is a shock to me. Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen," Coy said Tuesday.
After buying the tickets in Kentucky, Coy and Tedlock decided to drive into Ohio to buy more lottery tickets.
Coy rattled off a list of lottery games that she routinely plays in her home state, where she estimates she spends about $100 a week on tickets and scratch-off cards, including an Indiana game that's linked to the Fox hit TV show "American Idol."
Despite her winnings, Coy, the sixth Kentucky winner in the Win For Life game, said she intends to keep playing.
"I'm not going to stop from buying the tickets," she said.
And despite her age, Coy's convinced she's going to be around long enough to collect quite a few of those $1,000-a-week payments.
"I'm in good health and I keep busy. I live on five acres and I've got a nine-room house," Coy said.
After making lottery ticket runs through both states, Coy said it was getting late so they never got a chance to stop and visit her 23-year-old grandson in Greensburg.
Source: Kentucky Post
