Big Winners Almost Got Creamed

For three fortunate souls in Connecticut, the ticket that won them a cool $39.8 million in the Rhode Island lottery was the cream of the crop, or, in other words, the one that didn’t come a cropper after a can of whipped cream exploded, obliterating two other tickets. The ticket was one of three that George H. Brown, 46, Sheila E. Phillips, 44, and George Mages, 63, all close friends and employees of the Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, bought on a weekend motorcycle trip to visit friends in Warwick, R. I. Brown had put the tickets inside a cooler, in which an aerosol can of Redi-Whip exploded on the trip home to Connecticut Sunday night. The cream ate through half of one of the tickets and obliterated part of the second but only ripped the third, which was still legible. That ticket turned out to have the winning combination on it. “The ticket was really mangled,” Brown said. “I was wondering whether they would accept the part that was ripped.” The ticket is worth about $1.5 million annually for the next 20 years after taxes. The combination of 10-19-27-35-40-42 was chosen randomly as a “quick pick.”

--The “Dear Ernie” letter that was the inspiration for a character in a “A Farewell to Arms” has been released by a professor who discovered it and a diary of the nurse who dumped Ernest Hemingway 70 years ago. Agnes von Kurowsky was 26 when she treated 19-year-old Hemingway for wounds suffered in World War I in Italy. In a letter to the love-struck youth, she wrote: “I know that I am still very fond of you but it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. I am now & always will be too old & that’s the truth & I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy--a kid. I somehow feel that some day I’ll have reason to be proud of you but, dear boy, I can’t wait for that day.” The letter and Von Kurowsky’s diary were released by James Nagel, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, at the ninth annual Hemingway Days Festival in Key West, Fla.

--A Georgia woman is thinking of putting a “beware of snake” sign up at her home after her normally “mellow” python scared away a burglar. Gale Gunter-Schultz said that her husband arrived at their Augusta home after a weekend trip to find the window pried open in the bathroom--where the 10 1/2-foot Burmese python Balthazar normally sleeps. “Balthazar was probably pretty testy,” Gale Gunter-Schultz said. “He had just shed, and that makes him hungry. Plus, it was time for his regular feeding.” Police reported that the thief left the house undisturbed. A tire iron, used to pry open the window, was found near the house.