Monday's Internet Edition, October 13, 2008.
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| Two inches of snow blanketed Copperas Cove overnight Friday, and Covites took advantage of the rare snowfall. Kids (and a few aduts) pelted each other with snowballs, and snowmen could be found far and wide – Photo by LARRY HAUK |
Editor - It started out as a routine Tuesday evening for Debra Faye Clayton of Copperas Cove.
She stopped by the RaceTrac convenient store on Hwy. 190 to get her Texas Two Step lottery numbers, just like she had since the game’s inception in May of 2001.
And, like she had many times before, she handed over the tickets from the previous game to see if she had won a few dollars.
“I go in there quite often,” said Clayton. “We chit chat, and they were very excited. They told me someone from Copperas Cove had won the $400,000 jackpot.”
That’s when routine left the building.
The clerk ran the numbers, and for the first time, a new message popped up.
“When she ran the numbers, it said we had to go to the claim center (to pick up our winnings,” said Clayton in a phone interview from Texas Lottery headquarters in Austin Friday afternoon.
You see, it was Clayton who had won the jackpot.
“She checked the little ticket they print out with the winning numbers, and she said, ‘You won.’ I started checking the numbers, and my ticket had every single one,” said Clayton.
“I looked at it and said those are all my numbers. I couldn’t even drive home. I called my husband to come get me.”
Clayton’s winning numbers were 3, 4, 7 and 30, with a bonus ball of 2. The numbers are a combination of family birthdays, said Clayton. “Those numbers are near and dear to me because those people are near and dear to me,” she said.
Clayton has lived in the area after moving to Texas in 1981 with the military, and she and her husband Sonny have lived in Cove since 1999.
She said she’s going to pay off some bills with her winnings and “do some home repairs that we’ve wanted to do.
“We’re also going to set up retirement funds so when we want to retire we can do that without any worry.”
Even though the odds are against her, Clayton said she’ll not only keep playing Texas Two Step, but she’ll keep playing the same numbers. “I’m in Austin, but I’m going to stop and play in case the weather gets bad,” she said Friday.
And as for playing the same numbers? “Those are just some special numbers,” she said.