Lottery Winners : Newly Rich Continue in Old Ways

What would you do if you had a million dollars?

Almost everyone has daydreamed about it.

The fantasy was turned into a popular television melodrama in the 1950s when each week “The Millionaire” featured an ordinary person receiving a $1-million check from a mysterious benefactor.

Would the million dollars bring good or ill, salvation or ruination?

Sometime this year--a quarter of a century since the television series ended--”The Millionaire” is expected to begin a real-life rerun of sorts in California when the state lottery, now being set up, begins awarding prizes. When that happens, a few big winners--people who beat astronomical odds--will become millionaires, and their lives, as in the TV program, will be forever altered.

Issued in Installments

There will be important differences, however. On “The Millionaire,” the money came in a lump sum and was tax-free. In real life, if California adopts the methods used by other states, the lottery money will be issued in installments over 20 years and will be subject to federal and state income taxes.

In other words, a lottery-created millionaire will receive $50,000 a year for 20 years. After taxes, that comes to about $40,000 a year--affluence, certainly, but by no means opulence. And, of course, there is always inflation.

Such millionaires are considered almost commonplace by the news media in lottery states in the East. Now it takes a multimillion-dollar lottery winner--such as the $40-million Wittkowski family of Chicago--to generate any real media excitement.

Recent Phenomenon

Multimillion-dollar lottery jackpots are a relatively recent phenomenon, so it is too early to tell what lasting effect the money will have on the winners.

But people have been winning the more-modest $1-million prizes in Eastern lotteries for a decade or more. There has been time for the shock and the novelty of the sudden prosperity to wear off. There has been time for patterns to develop, for long-term changes in life styles.

There have been cases of extravagance and even disastrously high living, such as a Michigan million-dollar winner who faces cocaine-selling charges.

Some of the lottery winners, after working hard all their lives, have had difficulty learning to cope with the sudden rush of free money.

But it becomes apparent from interviews with some of the winners and with lottery officials that lottery millionaires for the most part maintain surprisingly moderate life styles. Generally, they do not move to the South Seas, or even to southern Florida. Often, they keep their jobs and they usually stay close to home in their cold-weather states. Their tastes in cars tend to run to Chevies rather than Porsches. Their hobbies are bowling rather than baccarat.

All in all, a convention of lottery millionaires would be more like a get-together of Guindon people than a gathering of Great Gatsbys.

Still, in their own communities they are celebrities. They are the fantasy come true.

Here are some lottery millionaires:

William E. Walker

Bill Walker, 42, looks and talks like Jackie Gleason playing the role of a good ol’ boy. A big, robust man, Walker has always been friendly, gregarious, outgoing. He has never met a stranger.

But after Walker won $1 million in the Illinois lottery nine years ago at the age of 33, he spent months drawn into himself, a brooding recluse.

Walker was reared in a large, poor family in the tiny central Illinois town of Bible Grove, less than 50 miles from the hamlet of Strasburg where he has lived for the last 15 years.

Walker has been a truck driver all his adult life and in 1975 was making payments on his own rig, supporting a wife and two children and living from one paycheck to the next. Wherever he parked his truck on his runs through the flat rich cornfields of Central Illinois or through the rolling hardscrabble red clay country to the south, Walker would buy a couple of dollars worth of lottery tickets. If he won a few dollars, he would put the money into more tickets. He was sure he was going to win big someday.

And then in early December, 1975, his wife, Jean, was notified by phone that one of Walker’s tickets was among the final 40 in a $1-million jackpot drawing to be held in Chicago.

Recalled his wife: “He said, ‘Well, we’re going to go up there in two weeks and we’re going to bring it home.’ For two weeks, he kept telling everybody.”

Not Interested in $1,500

The 40 finalists were guaranteed $1,500 each, but Walker wasn’t interested in that.

“I just knew I was going to win.” he said. “I mean, it was there. That’s all there was to it. It was flat there.”

On Dec. 18, 1975, at the WGN television studio in Chicago, a lottery drawing was held and it was indeed “flat there” for Walker. He was given a check for $50,000, the first of 20 annual installments. (The government did not start withholding taxes until the next year.)

In Strasburg, Ill., population 488, when residents do something exceptional--say the school basketball team does well in a tournament--the townsfolk meet the local heroes at “The Junction” outside town and escort them in.

When the Walkers arrived from Chicago at The Junction at 2 a.m. after winning the lottery, 50 people, including the mayor, along with a couple of fire trucks, were waiting to escort the couple to the community center for coffee and cookies.

For Walker, things did not begin to settle down for years.

“I wanted him to wait a whole year before he spent any of it,” his wife said. “Of course, he came from a family of eight that didn’t ever have anything, and of course he wanted to buy this car and he wanted to buy that and he wanted to take a trip. It didn’t take him long to blow the first check.”

Convention in Bahamas

Walker bought a Lincoln Continental, a new pickup truck, paid off his bills, including his rig, and took wife to a truckers convention in the Bahamas.

And then things turned sour.

As a trucker, Walker was used to lending other drivers money when their rigs broke down. And they always paid him back.

“All the time I was out there on the road,” he said, “I never lost a dime. But then after I won the lottery, everybody and his dog wanted some. . . .

“I couldn’t say ‘no’ if somebody wanted $100 for this or $100 for that. ‘I’ll pay you right back.’ And I’d give it to them and they didn’t have no intention of paying it back.”

Walker blew $26,000 on those kinds of loans in two years.

Later, he decided to sell his truck and take life easy. But he got bored, looked for work and found that prospective employers practically laughed in his face:

“ ‘What do I want to hire you for?’ ” Walker recalled them saying. “ ‘You’ve got all kinds of money.’ ”

Bored and Confused

People borrowed but didn’t repay. People said he had it made but he couldn’t get a job. He was bored and confused.

“So he just more or less went into a hermit stage,” Jean Walker recalled.

“I just sat back and thought . . . if I got it made, I ought to act like I got it made,” Walker said. “If that’s the case, why should I bust my butt to do anything? I ought to just back off into the corner and stay there. So that’s what I did.”

It took Walker about nine months of brooding and thinking to sort things out.

Since then, he has gone back into trucking and is buying another rig.

“Once a trucker always a trucker,” he said.

And he has learned to say “no” to borrowers.

Two Children Are Grown

His two children are grown. The son is in the Navy and the daughter works as a cashier at a gasoline station.

Jean Walker has a factory job making paper cups. She and her husband have moved into a big old brick house that they bought and refurbished just a few blocks from their old smaller home in Strasburg.

Their idea of celebrating New Year’s is to play dominoes until 3 a.m.

They are saving money, investing conservatively and hope to be able to retire and travel when they get their last lottery check in 1994.

Was winning the lottery a good thing?

Walker thought it over and said: “Overall, it’s been an experience.”

Later he added: “I worked hard all my life and if the good Lord wanted to bless me with this, he done it on purpose.”

“Or the devil had it for a curse,” his wife said with a laugh.

Blessing or curse, Bill is convinced that his first million dollars has been only a dress rehearsal:

“Oh, I’m going to win again,” he said with wide eyes and a straight face. “That’s all there is to it. I’m going to win again.”

Leo Puralewski Sr.

In 1975, Leo Puralewski and his wife, Ruth, were paying $90, plus heating costs, for an apartment in a four-story building in a deteriorating neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side. The rent would have been $80, but the landlord charged an extra $10 for the Puralewskis’ dog.

The apartment was located in the same tough, working-class neighborhood where Leo Puralewski grew up. At 55, Leo had spent virtually his whole life in the same neighborhood. He was raised there, went to two years of high school near there, worked much of his life there and raised his own family there. Leo had been outside Chicago no more than two or three times in his life--and then on trips to Wisconsin with an uncle.

Puralewski was earning about $300 a week running a machine in a factory that makes screws.

Leo and Ruth had reared three children to adulthood and had one child, 14-year-old Helen, at home.

The children had been raised on a bare-bones budget. There was no family car. A big excursion was a trip across town to the zoo on a city bus.

Leo, a small man with thinning black hair, liked to bowl and to stop in the neighborhood bar with his friends.

Paint by Numbers

Ruth Puralewski, a big, pleasant, open-faced woman, liked to paint by the numbers and crochet.

In the fall of 1975, Leo bought a $1 ticket in the Illinois State Lottery and was subsequently notified that he was among 325 ticket holders chosen for a chance at a jackpot prize of $1,000 a week for life, with a minimum payoff of $1 million. (Under the lottery rules for this type of prize, if a winner dies before collecting $1 million, the heirs are awarded the remainder.)

On Oct. 11, 1975, at a fancy restaurant in the suburbs of Chicago, a drawing was held, and the little man from the old neighborhood was set for life.

After the drawing, the new millionaire stopped for champagne at the home of his son and then headed for the neighborhood tavern.

“I just won the big one,” said Leo as he walked into the Happy Land bar.

Leo’s cronies didn’t believe him at first, but after he showed them an official lottery document and bought a round, they were convinced and glad that he had won. As Chicagoans, they were also impressed that the drawing wasn’t rigged.

‘It’s on the Legit’

“They said: ‘At least it’s somebody from the neighborhood. And it’s on the legit,’ ” Puralewski recalled.

For the next year or so, Puralewski continued to work at the screw factory and the couple remained in the $90-a-month apartment.

But then Puralewski decided:

“It’s time to get out and get the fresh air now.”

So he quit his job and moved for the first time in his life from his old neighborhood.

It was a modest move: 20 blocks north and 20 blocks west to a pleasant residential neighborhood of solid little brick homes.

Leo bought the first house he was shown by a realtor, and it was priced less than $100,000.

“He saw the basement,” Ruth Puralewski said, “and he said, ‘This is it.’ ”

“There’s a bar in it,” Puralewski said with a grin.

He bought a new car, a strait-laced Mercury Zephyr. Neither he nor his wife knows how to drive, so the children chauffeur the couple.

And the Puralewskis took a few trips: Hawaii, Las Vegas, Disneyland.

$40-$50 a Week on Tickets

Puralewski took up golf. And he spends $40 or $50 a week on lottery tickets.

Other than that, the Puralewskis’ life style has not changed much.

Puralewski, now 64, bowls with his old factory team and he likes to have a few beers with his friends.

Ruth Puralewski crochets.

The new house is comfortable. There is a picture of the Pope on a windowsill. Photographs of family members are placed here and there in the living room and, flanking the doorway, are pictures of “Pinky” and “Blue Boy” that Ruth Puralewski painted by the numbers years ago.

Do the Puralewskis feel like millionaires?

“Yes,” said Leo, “because if I want to go out and get myself a suit, I’m not going to say, ‘How much is it?’ I want this suit, that’s it. To my wife, I say: ‘You want to go buy something, go buy something. It don’t bother me.’ ”

Said Ruth: “Now I can go to the grocery store and get what I want. I don’t have to worry about when the bills come in. . . . I don’t have to worry about anybody coming to the door and saying, ‘Hey, you missed your payment.’ ”

But then she added: “I’m still me. I’m still a penny-pincher. If I can buy it on sale I’ll buy it on sale.”

Robert J. Taylor

Nineteen years ago, when Bob Taylor married Ruth, a pretty registered nurse, he built a big stone-front house across the ball field from the home in Winchester, Mass., in which he was raised.

“I grew up . . . in left field,” he said. “Now I’m in right field.”

Twelve years ago, in the winter of 1973, the Taylors had two little girls and Ruth Taylor was pregnant with another child. Taylor was delivering milk on a route in Cambridge and his wife was working part time at a hospital. Between them, they were making about $15,000 a year. It was enough to get by. Taylor had filled out papers at the dairy credit union to buy a new Chevrolet to replace the failing ’59 station wagon he was driving.

The family’s tastes were simple: bowling, fishing; they owned a half-interest in a rudimentary summer house near the seashore. Taylor often bought three 50-cent tickets a week in the Massachusetts State Lottery.

Then, in February, 1973, he was notified that he was among 100 finalists in a drawing for a $1-million prize to be held later that month in nearby Boston. All the finalists would receive at least $1,000.

So on Feb. 20, the Taylors and a couple of guests went to the drawing at the Sheraton Hotel, not because they expected to win the grand prize, but because they planned to spend part of the $1,000 on a dinner afterward.

Stunned by Announcement

But at the drawing, Taylor was stunned when his name was announced as the grand-prize winner and he was called forward to receive the first installment, a check for $50,000.

“I couldn’t get up from the table,” he recalled. “I was stumbling. . . . On my way up (to get the check) a guy handed me a shot of whisky. . . . I was shaking. He handed it to me and I think it burned my insides out.”

Between the whisky and the shock, Taylor could not speak.

After the drawing, the couple took their guests to dinner, a finer one than they had originally planned.

“I didn’t have enough money to pay for the meal,” Taylor said. “I had to borrow off my mother-in-law. . . . I had the check (for $50,000), but nobody could cash it.”

When the Taylors got back to Winchester, their house was full of townsfolk who celebrated for 24 hours.

Taylor called his bowling teammates who were having a few drinks at the Knights of Columbus lodge after a game, but he couldn’t convince them that he had won the $1 million.

Set Up a Bar

“So I had to call the police station and they confirmed it and went over and told them. So they set up the bar at my expense . . . $150 or something.”

In the meantime, Taylor, shocked, was unable to talk or go to work. At the same time, the introspective Ruth, the pessimist of the family, brooded and worried that God had sent the money to help them because her pregnancy would go awry.

After three days, Taylor snapped out of it and went back to work. At first, it took 10 hours to do the five-hour route because people would stop him on the street and sometimes give him money, insisting that he buy lottery tickets for them to bring them luck.

But Taylor enjoyed it, and at 54 he gets up five days a week before dawn to deliver milk.

“I have to work,” he said. “I’m up no matter what. If I’m home, I’m still up at three or four in the morning, wandering.”

Paid Cash for Car

The Taylors went ahead with their plans to buy a new car, but they bought a little better model than they had originally planned, and they paid cash.

Ruth’s pregnancy went fine, and a third healthy girl was born to the Taylors.

Ruth Taylor has not returned to her part-time nursing job. The Taylors added a family room and a new kitchen to their home. They built a more substantial vacation house at the seashore and the three girls are assured of college.

Other than that, life goes on for the Taylors pretty much the way it always has.

Looking back, Taylor remembers thinking when he won the lottery: “It’s the greatest thing in the world.”

But during his subsequent three days of silence when he stayed off his milk route he had come to the realization: “It didn’t mean that much.”

Laurene Browne

All her life, if Laurene Browne wanted something, she found the money to get it.

“I always did spend money foolishly,” she said in an interview in her Washington, D.C., home. “If I decided I wanted something, it didn’t make no difference how much it cost, I’d go get it.”

She was able to do that by working two demanding jobs:

In the daytime, she counseled children in an elementary school in Washington’s poor Southeast black ghetto where she lives in a neat row house. At night, she taught at a continuation high school in the same area.

Browne was buying her own home, she traveled to foreign countries, she drove a Cadillac and she always dressed nicely. And every bit of it came the hard way.

But when Browne suddenly got a lot of money the easy way, she was not at all surprised. On July 21, 1978, Browne won $1 million--payable at $50,000 a year--in a Maryland State Lottery drawing held at a Baltimore television studio.

“They started throwing champagne on me,” she recalled. “They were pulling on me and yanking on me and I said, ‘Oh, quit yanking on me.’ They put one of those leis on me like they put on you when you go to Hawaii and gave me some champagne and they raved and went on. . . .

“(But) I didn’t feel any different. . . . I felt like I was going to win before I got there. Therefore it wasn’t any shock to me.”

“I’m a true believer in God,” Browne explained. “I always prayed for better luck because it looked like the more money I made, the more it took.”

Bought a Cadillac Seville

After she won the lottery, Browne gave her Cadillac El Dorado to her son and bought herself a Seville.

She put her middle-aged son through college and helped her five grandchildren through school.

And she kept her counseling and teaching jobs although fellow workers couldn’t understand why she didn’t retire.

“They worried me to death,” she recalled. “‘Why don’t you retire?’ I started telling them toward the end, ‘Why don’t you go down there and ask Ronald Reagan why he doesn’t retire. He’s older than I am.’ And that shut ‘em up. . . . That finally put a damper on their mouths.”

Finally, though, Browne turned 70, and last June she was forced to retire after 49 years of teaching and counseling.

“It hurt me worse than anything else,” she said, “to have to come home.”

Now she plans to buy a a new brick house with a split foyer in Maryland, one that nobody else has ever lived in.

“I don’t like to live in a house that somebody’s lived in,” she said.

And she plans to use the lottery money to help her in retirement to do the things she has always done by working.

“It’s no big thing,” she said. “I keep on keeping on.”