On Friday the 13th, Deborah Baker grabbed a dime with her left hand and scratched away the prize area on her $100,000 Jackpot Tennessee lottery ticket.
Scratching from right to left dragged out the suspense after Baker saw that her ticket contained matching threes and knew she was going to win something, which she figured would be just another ticket, a $5 value.
But "I kept seeing zeroes," the Lascassas resident recalled earlier this week.
In fact, five zeroes trailed a one, making Baker, 53, one of the state's biggest lottery winners to date. Among the unknown thousands of people who have spent more than $150 million in six weeks on scratch-off tickets and, since Monday, online games, she's one of four who have won $100,000.
The other three winners are Russell Burks of Shelbyville, John Leegan of Big Sandy and, just last week, Willis Pulley of Brentwood. Their $100,000 payouts are the top prizes awarded thus far, the most that can be won instantly.
"They knew right away," lottery spokeswoman Kym Gerlock said.
But at least three $1 million winners are out there. They just don't know it yet.
Once there's a total of 500,000 entries in the Tennessee Millionaire and Volunteer Millionaire games, Gerlock said, a random drawing will produce a millionaire. Then the 500,000 entries will be destroyed and the process will be repeated after another 500,000 arrive. More than 225,000 have come in so far.
At least three drawings are scheduled. They'll provide the lottery's biggest jackpot until Tennessee joins Powerball, a multistate game, sometime this spring. Gerlock said the minimum Powerball jackpot will be $10 million.
The state's newest games offer more modest payouts. But any payout is money that wasn't in your wallet or bank account before, whether it's $500 the maximum reward for playing the new Cash 3 drawing game that started Monday or $20,000, the most you can get from Cash Blues, a scratch-off game that made its debut yesterday.
The other new scratch-off, Tic Tac Toe, offers up to $2,500.
Pulley, the newest $100,000 jackpot winner, bought his ticket at a Mapco store on Dickerson Pike, where he owns an automobile dealership. Pulley, 53, came to lottery headquarters with his family on Friday to redeem his ticket and said he had no immediate plans for his winnings, Gerlock said. The Tennessean could not reach Pulley for comment yesterday.
Baker said she bought her ticket at a Shell station in Murfreesboro from a clerk named Angel. She couldn't believe her eyes as those zeroes kept coming during the drive home to Lascassas, a small Rutherford County community. She told her husband to "pull over right now" and "tell me if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."
The jackpot, which equaled about $75,000 after taxes were withheld, came as sweet relief for Baker, who quit her job in insurance verification at a local hospital when her mother, Grace, got sick a few years back. Baker hasn't gone back to work since her mother's death in 2001, which left her grieving and depressed.
Then came Friday, Feb. 13, her lucky day.
"All the frustrations and tension and just everything I'd kept inside just came out," Baker said. "And I just felt so relaxed afterwards but excited."
Since then, she and her husband have paid off their two cars more than a year early. They've also set up an Individual Retirement Account, given some money to their two grown children and one grandchild and "set back quite a bit for redoing odds and ends at the house," a 6-year-old, brick-and-vinyl home.
Otherwise, they want to be careful.
"We've got it all tucked away where it's not easily accessible, and (we're) just going to leave it alone and make slow, cautious decisions on our home improvements," Baker said. "I just wanted it out of the checking account where it's not a temptation."
Nobody has commented on this story yet.