LANSING, April 15, 1999 – The eight members of a Saginaw lottery club are celebrating in a big way – they are recent winners of a top Michigan Lottery prize!
The "Lucky Losers" lottery club matched the first five numbers drawn in the April 6 Big Game drawing, collecting the game’s $150,000 prize. That day’s winning numbers were: 12, 17, 22, 33, 44 and the Big Money Ball number was 25.
Club members, who work together at Ameritech, include:
- Lori Bentoski of Flint
- Mieka Buck of Owosso
- Robert Dilley of Grand Blanc
- Virginia Hazlinsky of Swartz Creek
- Richard Larobardiere of Fenton
- Joseph Myers of Montrose
- Rick Parfitt of Saginaw
- Janice West of Flint
The club members range from 26 to 51 years of age and are a mixture of married and single individuals.
"On the day after the drawing we heard that a winning ticket had been sold at the store where we bought our ticket," Rick Parfitt, the club representative, said. "I went to the store right away and got a winning number printout. I compared our numbers to the numbers on the printout and decided we didn’t have any winners. I then looked at the printout again and realized I had been looking at the wrong draw date. I went through the tickets again and sure enough we had a $150,000 winner! We were all in shock but there were a lot of big smiles!"
The winning Big Game "easy pick" ticket was purchased at 7-Eleven 112A, 2032 Bay St., in Saginaw. Prior to turning the winning ticket in at Lottery headquarters in Lansing, Parfitt slept with it overnight to keep it safe!
The club members, who have only been playing together as a club for two weeks, plan to use their winnings in many different ways, including: paying bills, taking trips to Hawaii and Toronto, buying a jet ski, making investments and buying a new "bauble!"
The Big Game is a six-state lottery game which held its first drawing in September 1996. Lotteries in Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Virginia contribute to the joint prize pool. Big Game drawings are conducted every Tuesday and Friday at 11 p.m.
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