Father’s Day Present Is a Winner

--A retired Baltimore steel worker says he guarantees his grandson will get an education because the 11-year-old gave him a lottery ticket for Father’s Day--and it won $2.9 million. He usually gets his father and grandfather “a box of cigars or some shorts, something like that,” said young Robert Windham. “I just wanted to get something different. I should probably get just about everybody something like that from now on,” he said. He bought two tickets for his father and one for an uncle also, but they didn’t win. When he opened his grandson’s card Sunday and removed the ticket, Edmund C. Mech, 64, said he thought he had only five of the six numbers drawn in the Lotto game the night before. But Mech said his son-in-law looked at it and said: “Dad, I think you got a winner.” Mech reacted with: “I’ll tell you what. That little guy’s gonna get an education. He’s gonna get an education.” Mech will receive the winnings in 20 annual payments. His first check, for $116,000, will arrive Friday, lottery officials said.

--Dexter Gooden said his wife brought him a Burger King lunch, including a soft drink, and he took it into the factory where he worked in Anniston, Ala. When one of his bosses asked him what he was drinking, he said it was a Coke, as his wife had ordered at the fast food diner, but his boss replied that Burger King doesn’t sell Coke. It sells Pepsi, he was told, and Gooden said he was sent home for a three-day layoff. That was his penalty for drinking a Pepsi in the Coca-Cola bottling plant where he works. Gooden said the boss told him he ought to be getting his entire family to drink Coke. Officials at the plant would not say whether Gooden had been laid off. The plant’s general manager, Charles Edwards, said: “It is against our policy for employees to drink competitive products on our property.” Gooden’s wife commented: “It’s funny, but it’s not funny.” As for the loss of three days of work, “It’s $150,” she said.

--Hogs on Bob Lamb’s farm are treated better than most. He put old 14-inch tires in the hog pens at his farm in Delphi, Ind., to discourage his 3,500 porkers from biting one another’s tails--a problem many hog farmers experience. “I put a tire in each pen for the pigs to have something to play with,” he said. “It gives them something to do rather than fiddle around with each other.” Apparently, though, one pig liked the tires so much that he climbed inside one. Lamb doesn’t know how it happened, but there it is, a pig with a tire stuck around its midsection. And Lamb can’t get the thing off. But he doesn’t worry about the animal. “It’s a mud and snow tire,” he explained, “so he’s good for all terrain.”