$34-Million Lotto Ticket Makes Twin Sisters Equally Wealthy

For years, Cindy Nord and Sandy Richard were middle-class homemakers, content to raise their families in the modest Downey neighborhood they call home.

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On Thursday, the 34-year-old twins found new wealth in a winning lottery ticket worth $34 million that one of them purchased the night before at a neighborhood convenience store.

The Super Lotto payoff: $612,000 a year for each woman--after taxes--for the next 20 years.

You might expect these overnight millionaires to be jumping up and down over the news. After all, the clerks who sold the lucky ticket were all smiles. Neighbors even stopped by to offer congratulatory hugs.

But Nord, Richard and their husbands--who both work as aircraft mechanics at a Northrop-Grumman Corp. plant in Compton--were taking it all in stride, and were even a little apprehensive about their sudden good fortune.

“Just because we have a lot of money, it’s not going to change us,” Nord said. Or, as her husband, Gary, who earns about $40,000 a year, said: “We’ve always been middle-class people and we’re going to remain middle-class people.”

The Nords have plenty of uptown ideas for their money: They want to send their four children to private schools, buy new cars and a larger home, probably in Downey.

The Richard family, which lives down the street from the Nords, plans to buy a new car, but has not decided how to spend the rest of the cash. Sandy Richard plans to continue her life as a homemaker raising the couple’s 15-year-old son. Dan Richard says he has not decided about his future at Northrop-Grumman.

But at the neighborhood Circle K convenience store where Sandy Richard bought the ticket--and whose parent company will receive $170,000 for selling it--employees and customers were abuzz.