Lotto Winners Share Dream--and the Wealth

For Josef Strauss of Anaheim, who is $200,000 in debt, winning a piece of America’s richest lottery prize was indeed sweet. And on Thursday he described beating 1-in-23-million odds simply but eloquently.

“It is the dream,” said the Austrian-born investor. “The dream came true.”

Strauss’ one-tenth share of the jackpot is $11.9 million, or $475,400 annually for 20 years, after federal taxes.

Sporting a natty blue bow tie during a news conference for lottery winners at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Strauss said he intends to pay off creditors and then invest wisely.

“I want to make this money grow, and help people,” he said.

For some holders of the 10 winning lottery tickets, the 12 or so hours after the drawing was like striking gold without knowing how rich the vein. Each knew he or she had a winning ticket, but none knew how many others would share the $118.8 million.

Lottery officials said Thursday that four of the tickets were bought by individuals, one was purchased by a father and daughter, and another was shared by 31 regulars at a Red Bluff bowling alley, each of whom contributed $10 to a pool. The other winners had not come forward to claim their bonanza.

For the Strauss household, the gloomy shadow of financial woe has already vanished.

Strauss was calm when he realized that he held one of the 10 winning tickets.

“I thought that there were maybe 20 winners, but inside I hoped for maybe only five,” said Strauss, an investment consultant who said he had lost $200,000 of his own money to business deals that went sour since he came to the United States from Austria. “When I found out it was 10, I thought that was fine.”

His wife, Lori Strauss, was less reserved.

“I was screaming and jumping and saying, ‘We won! We won!’ ” recalled the 32-year-old regional sales manager for a food company. She said her husband’s financial losses had put her under “the most amount of pressure I’ve ever been under in my life.”

The couple met soon after Josef Strauss arrived in the United States. They were married in January of 1990. She has two children from a previous marriage, Jason, 13, and Kyle, who had his ninth birthday Thursday.

She said that her husband’s business problems bothered her a lot: “Because I love him, I knew he had it in him. But he had this cloud over him.”

Now the cloud has lifted.

To celebrate, the first thing the couple plans to do is take a long vacation to Europe.

But Josef Strauss promised that the money will not be squandered. Lottery winners, he said, “have to be in charge of this money, take care of it, and make something good out of it.”

Having just landed a job in the Chicago office of an Austria-based bank, he said he will now be an employee of the bank and an investor in it.

After climbing out of debt, of course. Then, he said, he will “invest the money very smart, and the next thing is to give the kids a good education and a better home than they have now.”

How much? How to spend it? These were questions that winners throughout the state had to postpone for several hours after Wednesday night’s winning numbers were announced.

The 31 regulars at a Red Bluff bowling alley who shared a winning ticket in the nation’s wealthiest lottery prize went to bed dreaming about their millions after a raucous party at the Lariat Bowl.

They woke up Thursday to find each would have to settle for only $15,329 a year after taxes--not bad for a day’s work but hardly the princely sum they had hoped for. Still, most were philosophical about having watched their millions shrink to an amount that meant each would have to continue working for a living.

Deanna Divine, a waitress who was back at work at the 16-lane establishment Thursday, acknowledged some disappointment. But, she said, “it’s nice to be able to win with other people.”

The other winning tickets were purchased in Century City, Culver City, Fontana, Hawthorne, Lancaster, Santa Cruz, Stockton and Victorville. The winning numbers were 1, 7, 16, 19, 26 and 53.

The other winners who claimed their prizes Thursday included Norman Cottman, administrator of a Los Angeles community mental health clinic; Rebecca Montoya, a Sun Valley payroll clerk for a tire company; Robert Salazar, 62, and his daughter, Charlene Chavez, 32, both of Fontana; and Raquel Dimas, a 22-year-old dispatcher who lives in Stockton.

An unidentified winner bought his ticket at the Bluebird Liquor store in Hawthorne, which lottery officials said was one of the busiest outlets in the state. Store representatives said the man, a regular player who lives in the neighborhood, did not want his name revealed.

The winners at the Lariat Bowl--many of whom lunch daily at the 16-lane bowling alley--began partying soon after the drawing, unaware of how much their ticket might be worth, and stayed up into the morning too excited to sleep.

Betty Channel, a secretary at the Tehama County Office of Education and one of the winners, said she wasn’t disappointed when she learned the pool’s prize had shrunk by 90%.

“Last night, it was jubilee time,” she said. “We didn’t want to think about it too much, and we decided we wouldn’t talk about how much we had won. It was much more fun winning with all these people than if you had won by yourself. These were a lot of good, middle-American people, hard-working people who deserve it and got it.”

Lottery officials said that “Lottomania,” a phenomenon triggered by the snowballing jackpot that resulted from eight drawings without a winner, caused sales to hit a new one-day record on Wednesday. Gamblers bought $54 million worth of tickets, breaking the previous one-day sales record of $50.9 million.

The largest previous jackpot in the United States was a $115.58-million prize in the Pennsylvania lottery that was split last April by 14 winners. The largest previous California jackpot was won Feb. 21 when 11 winners split $68.56 million four ways.

There were reports throughout the week that people were spending thousands of dollars on tickets, including one man in Orange County who spent more than $40,000, a sum that did little to better the odds of winning.

Perhaps the luckiest of the millions of people hoping for the longest of long shots was Cottman, the director of administrative services at the Kedren Community Mental Health Center on Avalon Boulevard in South-Central Los Angeles.

He said he bought 156 tickets at a grocery store in Culver City using various combinations of a set of random numbers and the dates of important birthdays. Cottman not only won a share of the top prize but also had six tickets with five of six correct numbers. Each ticket was worth $4,494 apiece. “My attitude about the lottery is, sure, it’s a long shot, but you can’t afford not to try it,” he said.

Cottman, 63, said he paced the floor for hours after realizing that he had won, wondering how many others also held winning tickets. Asked what the money had done to his own mental health, Cottman said he was sure it would be salutary “when I come down. I’m still up here some place.”

He and his wife, Ann, an assistant principal at Portola Junior High School in Tarzana, live in Ladera Heights. Both said they planned to continue working despite their sudden riches.

Ann Cottman, 53, said that when she returns to work today she will urge her students “to dream, but not to let dreams get in the way of your goals.”

She said her goals include seeing a few students graduate, achieving success for a new improvement program at the school and helping provide richer opportunities for students who are bused to Portola.

Raquel (Rocki) Dimas’ father rented a limousine Thursday to take her, several family members and friends from Stockton to Sacramento to claim her share of the winnings. A regular player, she said she planned to help her family financially and buy a Mercedes and “a house in the mountains. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time.”

She also told lottery officials that she planned to quit her job.

Also planning to quit her job was Rebecca Montoya. Her husband, Ricardo, who works for Federal Express, chose the numbers and bought 20 tickets, including the one with all six numbers, at a Lancaster liquor store. But she said he was too nervous and excited to attend a news conference organized by lottery officials.

Montoya said that she plans to buy a Corvette but that her husband has bigger plans: He wants to buy a Ferrari.

Times correspondent George Thurlow contributed to this report.