Bowie woman finds Maryland Lottery luck on third try
A Bowie woman who tried not once, not twice, but three times to buy Maryland Lottery games on the day before a snowstorm arrived finally found success – and a $50,000 winning scratch-off – at her hometown Giant grocery.
Her saga began at midday, when the grandmother of four headed to the Annapolis Giant near her employer to do some power shopping during her lunch break. She and her husband of nearly five decades needed a few items to get through the impending storm and she wanted to pick up her Lottery games. The loyal player favors Pick 3, Pick 4 and Bonus Match 5; she rarely plays scratch-offs.
To her dismay, she saw the store was swarming with shoppers. She left and returned to work. “I only get half an hour and I knew I couldn’t wait in those long lines.”
Her second attempt to shop on her way home also hit a snag. She stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy her terminal games only to get bad news. “Their machine was down,” said the mother of three adult children. For the heck of it, she bought a scratch-off at random and won $100!
“By now, it’s five o’clock,” she said, and she still needed to buy groceries and play her lucky numbers. The 60-something woman resigned herself to standing in a long line of snow-fearing shoppers at the Giant in Bowie. “I cashed in my $100 ticket, played all my regular numbers and then saw the scratch-off marked ‘new,’ ” she said.
The Prince George’s County resident bought that $20 Instant Millionaire ticket, which went on sale statewide on Feb. 23, and took it to her car to scratch. After revealing her $50,000 win, she raced home to hide the scratch-off in her china cupboard. She didn’t even tell her husband about it for two days and, when she did, her childhood sweetheart promptly hid the ticket in a safer place.
The happy woman plans to pay off bills with her prize and do some home improvements. The lucky Bowie store, which sold a $1 million winning Powerball ticket for the Feb. 11 drawing, is located at 15520 Annapolis Road.