Boise – Every Tuesday morning for the past two and half years, the 15 members of the Granger Coffee Club would gather in their Senior Community Mobile Home Park Clubhouse to have coffee, solve the world’s problems, and pitch in $2 a piece for Powerball tickets. Until Saturday night, the most they had ever won was $10.
That all changed shortly after coffee this past Tuesday morning when their leader, Gene Pease, stopped in a Jacksons store to check their tickets from last Saturday night. “I had the clerk check the tickets and when she ran this one,” described Pease as he pointed to the winning ticket, “she said I needed to claim it at the Lottery. When I asked how much we’d won, she checked the numbers and said told me $200,000! Holy cow!”
“It’s a good thing he was wearing dark pants Tuesday,” laughed fellow coffee club member Bill Weeks who describes the group “as a bunch of retired old farts who are in it for the recreation of playing the Lottery. Its fun and we’ve won a few bucks along the way.”
Fun has a new meaning for the group now who plans to continue playing. The fifteen players split the $200,000 winning Powerball ticket equally, and after taxes, took home $8,859.34 each.
“We figured it was better for us to pool our money after that group of meat packers in Nebraska won the big one a couple of years ago,” explained Harold Wageman, the tax auditor among the group, referring to the Con-Agra Food employees who won $365 million on February 18, 2006.
“At our age, we don’t ask what we’d do with the money but rather who we can help with it,” reflected Wageman.
“In our pipe dreams, if we won the big one, we’d buy our mobile home park and only charge just enough rent to cover the costs. We’d make a co-op out of it,” added Pease.
The fifteen winners were William H. Weeks, Harold Wageman, Donald G. Pease, Enno Bolhuis, Nathan Blank, Vernon E. Coiner, Atha L. Cecil, Richard M. Kuhlman, Ralph D. Grimmett, Max W. English, Darvell L. Paige, Gary D. Olson, Douglas W. Thimsen, Lee A. Todd, and Wallace E. Turk. All fifteen are retirees from around the country.
The estimated Powerball jackpot for Saturday night is $115,000,000.
