FEATURE: Lottery Winner Of The Month (March 2017)

Generous Veteran Wins $300,000 for his Birthday

The saying that you reap what you sow certainly applies to a World War II veteran named Ervin Smolinski. The guy, who says he does not really need much, won a $300,000 lotto jackpot at the ripe old age of 94! But it was not his age, nor service for his country which makes his win so unique – it is how he came to win in the first place.

How it Started

Ervin Smolinski has always played the lottery. But the generous guy is not content in playing by himself; he wants other people to have a shot at the big money too, especially his close friends and family. So for the longest time, Ervin has been keeping up a tradition he started – buying lottery tickets every month to give away to friends and relatives whose birthdays fall in the same month. Over time, this resulted in his friends and relatives returning the favor. Smolinski says he now regularly receives lottery tickets and chocolates whenever his birthday comes around. With a number of people giving each other lottery tickets for each other’s birthdays, the chance one of them would eventually win is as good as those of a lottery syndicate.

His Birthday Comes Around

For his birthday on March 17 this year, he received a bunch of tickets, as usual. Among those were 4 Double Bonus Cashword tickets which his daughter-in-law bought from the CVS Pharmacy located at 22250 Middlebelt Road in Farmington Hills. It did not take him long to discover his big scratch-off win because it was the first of the tickets he scratched which revealed the $300,000 prize. It was the perfect birthday present. More remarkable is the fact that he started the ticket giving tradition which culminated in his big win! Lady luck decided to visit this man for his generosity.

Coming to Terms with his “Birthday Gift”

Smolinski was thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as his son-in-law. At that point, he was finding it hard to believe that the win is real. So he kept the ticket with him for a few more days. During that time, he kept looking at the lucky ticket and checking to see if he had made a mistake. He eventually came to realize that the lottery luck he wished on the people he loves had indeed visited him.

It did not help that he chose to keep the ticket in his pocket; he has this habit of rolling up accumulated pieces of paper in his pockets and throwing them away. But his luck held, and he was able to present his winning ticket at the lottery headquarters on Tuesday.

Enjoying his Win

The winner says that he will hold on to the bulk of the money by investing it. He asserts that he is a thrifty person so nothing in his life will change drastically. He will still wait for sales to buy stuff at a discount. He is planning to buy a ‘newer’ used car and a new shed though.

He says the best thing is that he will not have to worry about money anymore. And nobody deserves that more than Ervin Smolinski, a 94-year old veteran with a really generous heart.