Three weeks ago, Carter and Joan Giles won $100,000 in the Powerball lottery. Then on Saturday, their next-door neighbors won $40,000 in the Montana Cash drawing.
"I went over to the Giles and said, 'Hey, guess what just happened?' " Charlie King said after he and his wife Pat discovered luck had not left the neighborhood. "Three weeks earlier, I was over there saying, 'Man, they just missed it by one house.' He won a little more, but we're all pretty happy here."
"One of the clerks there told me she's going to put up a tent and camp between our houses until she wins," Carter Giles said.
The Gileses just missed a $13.6 million Powerball win. Their ticket had the numbers 15-24-49-50-52, but missed the Powerball number, which was 40.
"We had 38," Carter said.
Upset?
"Nah," Carter said. "The other way to look at it was we were one number away from $5,000 instead of $100,000."
A ticket that matches four of five numbers and hits the Powerball is worth that amount.
In fact, that's what Carter, a retired teacher, assumed they'd won.
"I still thought it was a big joke, and someone was playing it on him," Joan Giles said.
Carter had bought the ticket as he drove home from work, after Joan called and asked him to pick up something to eat at the store.
"She's getting all the credit for being hungry," Carter said.
He carried the ticket around in his pocket all day the day after the drawing without bothering to check it. When he finally did, looking up the winning numbers on the Internet, "I thought someone was pulling my leg," he said. "But I didn't know how - the thing had been in my back pocket all day."
He mistakenly thought matching five numbers but missing the Powerball was worth $5,000. A co-worker clued him in: the ticket was worth 20 times that amount.
Three weeks later, next-door neighbor Charlie King checked his Montana Cash ticket - with the numbers 5-20-24-25-30 - against the winning numbers posted in the Sunday Missoulian.
"I've hit four out of five numbers and won $200 twice," he said. "So I'm looking at the ticket, checking the numbers, and after four of them I said, 'Wow, I hit four of them again!' Then I looked at the 30 and went, 'Oh crap, that's worth more than $200.' "
Charlie, 69 and a retired law enforcement officer, and Pat put most of the money in the bank as an emergency fund.
"When you get to our age, the end of the ruler starts getting shorter," he said with a laugh. "We bought a few things we've been putting off, but no big-ticket items. We figure now we'll have something set aside in case we need it."
For the Gileses, who lost their home in the forest fires of 2000, "it couldn't have come at a better time," Carter said. "Not to complain, but it's been a bit of a struggle since we were burned out."
The Gileses' check was for $65,000, after $25,000 was deducted for federal taxes and the state took $10,000.
"I did buy a welder, and Joan got a carpet cleaner," Carter said. "Those were our Humvees and Corvettes."
The Kings beat odds of 1 chance in 217,949 to match all five Montana Cash numbers.
The Gileses' odds of matching five but not the Powerball in the other game were much longer: nearly 1 in 3 million.
Does luck still run in the neighborhood? Joan's willing to buy another ticket and find out.
"Heck, maybe we'll be the first people to win it twice," she said.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)