Lotto Winner Has to Split the Loot--With Himself

There were two winning tickets in Saturday’s Super Lotto jackpot. Luckily for Garland Whitaker, he had them both.

Whitaker, 54, thought he ordered his two regular sets of numbers this week, but accidentally ended up with a matched pair. So he will split the $17.8 million prize--with himself.

“I always had hopes, but I didn’t think it’d ever come true,” said Whitaker, who has lived his entire life in Southern California and has been playing the same two sets of Lotto numbers twice a week at Rancho Liquors in Westminster for about four years.

“If you don’t play, you can’t win,” Whitaker said Tuesday night, sounding like a commercial for the lottery and promising to keep playing the numbers. “Everybody that plays, I guess, has some kind of hope that they’re going to win. Now I’ve got to help somebody else win. Or maybe I’ll get lucky again.”

Lottery spokesman Bob Taylor said this is the second time one person has claimed two winning tickets. Though in this case it will make no difference--Whitaker was the only winner--the two tickets seem like a double dose of luck.

“It was a mistake,” Taylor said. “A fortunate mistake.”

The winning tickets were Whitaker’s favorite numbers--” his numbers,” Taylor pointed out. Seven and 11, because he loves to shoot craps, Whitaker explained. His date of birth: 12-19-39. And 51, because that’s how old Whitaker was when he began to play. Normally, there’s another sequence based on his wedding anniversary, but not this time.

Whitaker, a self-employed machinist, and Nancy, his wife of 10 years, plan to retire, buy a bigger house, and travel around the United States. His 20-year-old daughter, a college student, already has picked out a new Toyota Celica.

But since they discovered the winning tickets Sunday afternoon, the family hasn’t bought anything.

“It hasn’t really hit, I don’t think, that I can go out and spend money or whatever,” said Nancy Whitaker, a customer service representative at Northrop who planned to quit her job this morning. “I spent more before I had any.”

The Whitakers had to wait until Tuesday to claim their prize because lottery offices were closed Monday for Martin Luther King Day. They stayed up all night Sunday, and were wide awake when the earthquake hit.

“Here we are, we just won the Lotto, and now we’re having an earthquake,” Garland Whitaker remembered thinking. “The house is going to burn down, burn up the tickets and we’ll have been millionaires for just one night.”

To be extra safe, they stuck the tickets in a fireproof box, though the Whitakers’ Westminster home, like the rest of Orange County, was spared major damage.

The Whitakers are the latest in a string of winners who live, work or buy tickets in Westminster, perhaps Orange County’s luckiest city.

Mark Beeks, 37, a Westminster resident who regularly played the Lotto at a local 7-Eleven, won $16.8 million last Thanksgiving. The county’s two biggest winners ever, Carlos Olvera ($25.1 million) and Ronald Smith ($20.6 million) both lived in Westminster. In 1992, a $14.2-million Super Lotto ticket was bought in the city, and in 1988 and 1989, residents won $2.7 million each.

Though he has noticed the trend, Taylor said the Westminster luck is “just one of those random things.”