Generous gesture leads to good luck on all sides

By Kate Northrop

SAUGUS, Mass. — A restaurant worker was given a huge tip from a customer after they bought her what turned out to be a winning lottery ticket.

Last month, one of Shirley Rose's customers gave her a massive tip in the form of a winning lottery ticket worth $2,000.

Although Rose, 79, was not scheduled to work on Friday, May 27, she's glad she agreed to cover for a coworker. She runs the Keno lottery game counter at the Kowloon Restaurant on Broadway in Saugus.

During her shift, a customer named Eddie approached the counter and asked for two $10 Keno tickets, but not just for himself — he wanted to keep one and give the other to Rose.

Eddie asked Rose to pick out the numbers for both lottery tickets. Using her and her son's birthdays, as well as her age, she chose 4, 6, 17, 18, and 79.

"It fit on the card because Keno goes from 1 to 80," she explained to Boston 25 News. "When he said, 'your age,' I said, 'I don't think it goes that high."

She circled back to the computer at the counter about 20 minutes later to see if her numbers had "hit."

"Sure enough, it did, and it was over $600, because it told me: 'Do not cash,'" Rose said in an interview. "You can't cash anything over $600. You have to go to the Lottery Commission."

After checking the ticket on her phone, she found out that the tickets were each worth $2,000.

"We were like, 'Oh my god,'" Rose recalled. "For like, half and hour, an hour after this happened, I was a mess, but it worked out. The cash drawer balanced out at the end of the night. Phew!"

Rose said she is grateful for the stranger's generous gesture. Having worked at the restaurant part-time since last December, the timing of the payout could not be better.

"I have had a lot of extra expenses this year, and I'm looking at putting in a new boiler for next winter," she told the news outlet. "So, this will help pay for that."

The good luck and wonderful news didn't end there. While having their meal, Eddie and his wife had found out about the birth of their grandson.

"He definitely is special, and there's something about him... I can't thank him enough," Rose said of Eddie. "It gives you hope that there's more people like him in this world than there are the bad guys."