Ticket to Ride : State lottery: El Monte couple, richer by $24 million, arrive in style to claim their winnings.

An El Monte couple traded in their winning Super Lotto ticket Monday afternoon for T-shirts, coffee mugs, baseball caps and a guarantee of $24 million.

Flushed from excitement and champagne, Kenny and Marylou Smith jumped out of their rented black-and-white stretch limousine wearing matching shirts from the Azusa restaurant where they bought the jackpot ticket.

Cupping her face in her hands, Marylou, 48, said, “Oh golly, oh golly, I don’t even know what to say.” And then, as if to replace the words she couldn’t find, tears rolled down her cheeks.

The Smiths, who own and work with their daughter at an automotive repair shop in Azusa, really needed the lottery money, said Marylou’s father, Robert Fennell.

“In the last five years, they’ve had a lot of hard times,” he said. “They owe everybody in town.”

But the Smiths can put their financial worries behind them with an annual check for $883,217 for the next 20 years.

They will receive their first payment in a few weeks, said John Garner, the state’s lottery office manager in Whittier. When the Smiths turned in their ticket in Whittier, they were loaded down with the T-shirts and other goods.

As news of a lottery winner hit the airwaves, the couple at first thought they had lost out because they heard that the winning ticket was bought n Azusa.

“I thought Callahan’s, where we got the ticket, was in Irwindale,” Kenny, 46, said. “Then a customer told me it was in Azusa, and I had my wife call the restaurant. I had her check the numbers once, twice, three times before I believed it.”

The couple purchased the semiweekly lotto ticket last Friday at Callahan’s Food and Beverage restaurant.

Andi and Cal Risen, who own the restaurant and are longtime friends of the Smiths, will receive $110,000 from the state for selling the winning ticket.