Greener Pastures : Lottery Millions Gave O.C. Winner Freedom to Help Her Family--and Have One Herself

Seven years ago, Christene Lentz was a working-class, 20-year-old community college student hoping to become a teacher.

Now she feels she’s made it into the middle class, and all it took was hitting a $19.58-million lottery jackpot.

If that seems a modest step up compared with the promises of lottery commercials, it’s all the uplift Lentz wants.

“I don’t think how much money you have decides what class you’re in but how you spend the money,” she says. What the money does for you is not as important as what it does to you.

As have other big winners, Lentz has learned both the limitations instant wealth imposes and the possibilities it affords.

In August 1988, when all her six randomly selected numbers in the California Lottery were drawn, “I think it scared her more than anything,” says her mother, Joyce Lentz of Capistrano Beach. “She had to grow up real fast. She’s handled more money in a few years than most people handle in a lifetime.”

Three weeks after winning, the first of 20 yearly checks for $783,200 arrived.

Now looking back seven years, Christene Lentz says the money put some surprising spins on her life.

“It came at a really good time, because I never had to go through that worry about where the rent was coming from,” Lentz says.

“Maybe if I had gone through that, I’d be a different person now. I don’t know. But I’m pretty happy with the person I am.”

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She wants to meet you at her doll-and-teddy-bear store, because her house is messy, she says. “I have a housekeeper and it’s still messy. It’s my fault. Clutter. I have so much stuff.”

And it has to be later in the day, because the baby is sick. She’s taking her to the Kaiser Permanente clinic, and you usually have to wait a while.

At the appointed hour, you park at the shopping center and enter Dolls and Other Bear Necessities, Lentz’s lushly stocked shop. Part of her personal collection of about 2,000 dolls is stored here.

Plainly dressed in a bulky sweater, dark jeans and Reeboks, Lentz shakes with the hand that isn’t holding 8-month-old Delaney. Darian, 2 1/2, is at preschool; otherwise she’d be here too.

Let’s talk in the restaurant next door, Lentz suggests. It will be no problem. We’ll just close down the shop and put a note on the door. Lentz’s sister, Collene Ortiz, who works at the shop full time, and Ortiz’s 2 1/2-year-old son Josh, who plays in the shop full time, come along.

Led by her lifetime love of dolls, Lentz opened the shop two years ago, she says. Her accountants told her she really didn’t need to make any more money, which is nice, because it’s running at a loss. If or when it turns profitable, the profits will go to charity, she says.

“I decided I wanted to do something. I had my daughter and I wanted to show some kind of an example to her of doing something. I don’t want her to feel like since I won the lottery, things are just given to you all the time.”

Besides, it provides her sister with a full-time job where she can work and tend to her child. And they can close down whenever they feel like it--to take care of family affairs, to go to doll conventions, whatever.

This is not what Lentz had planned when she was 20, living with her mother in Capistrano Beach and studying to be a teacher.

“I wanted to have a family. I really didn’t want a career, but I figured to have the things I wanted in life I’d have to have a career.

“I would have rather just been a mom. The wife part’s OK”--she and her sister laugh--”but the mom part was what I really, really wanted to do.”

Oddly, winning the money did not free her when it came to “the wife part,” she says. It propelled her into a marriage she did not really want.

An old high-school beau whom she had dated off and on for years had been proposing marriage for a long time, she says. A nice guy, but no magic, and she would periodically break up with him.

But winning the lottery cast a new light on the relationship.

“Because, well, I knew I wasn’t in love with him, but it was kind of a security thing for me. I knew he had been in love with me for who I was, not just after I’d won the lottery. I was young; I didn’t know what to expect. So I figured, as long as he loves me, I can live with that, whether I loved him or not. And I couldn’t.”

“It was sad, really,” says Lentz’s mother. “He had plans for his life also, but then he probably figured, ‘What good is it?’ In his mind, nothing [he] would do in his life would measure up to that.”

“I think he just didn’t know what to do with himself,” says Lentz. “He didn’t have to work. He was just out of high school, and I didn’t really want him to work, because I wanted to be able to go places and do things. You can’t really travel and enjoy the money if you’re working.

“So he started up a band. He grew his hair long. He started hanging around with totally different people. And I think it was all because he wasn’t totally sure of just who he was or what he was doing with his life.”

The marriage lasted 18 months. “If I hadn’t won the lottery, we would never have gotten married,” Lentz says.

And it she hadn’t won the lottery, the next idea would not have occurred to her either, she says.

“I said, ‘I’m never getting married again, but I’m going to have kids. I don’t have to be married to have children. There’s no reason why I have to. I can support them. I can take care of them. I don’t have to work, so I can be with them all the time. It’s not like most single mothers who are scraping by and don’t have the time to spend with the kids.

“If I hadn’t won the lottery, I would never choose to do what I did.”

Lentz approached a man she’d known since high school and explained what she wanted. He agreed to father Lentz’s child, then step out of the picture.

“He’s married and has a family now,” Lentz says. “He hasn’t really had any contact with her. If she decides when she gets older that she wants to know more about him, I will be totally open with her about everything.”

Lentz has been generous in providing for family members, her mother says.

“She opened a trust fund for her sister and puts money in every year. When Collene got married, they were able to buy a home, and that’s pretty unusual for someone married at 19.

“She’s provided for all of us. She bought a house for my sister. My mother lived in a bad neighborhood. Without Christene, we couldn’t have taken her out of there. My husband and I had just bought our home, and she gave us enough money to pay it off, which makes our future retirement pretty nice.”

And she set up a limousine business for her second husband, to whom her wealth came as something of a shock.

He was the manager of the fitness center near her doll shop, and he was six years her senior. He struck up her acquaintance and spent time with her daughter.

“We had been dating for a little while, and I tried to tell him: ‘Like, aren’t you curious how I have the money to have this shop?’ And he’d say, ‘No, I don’t care.’ He wouldn’t listen. He just figured my mom gave me the money.”

Then someone at his fitness center remarked that Lentz was “the girl that won the lottery.”

“He just said excuse me and went into the bathroom and was, like, whoa! He came over here and said, ‘OK, now tell me where your money comes from. I want to know.’

“I told him I’d won the lottery, and he said, ‘Well, how much?’ And I told him, and he went into shock.”

But once he recovered, “it didn’t really change things,” Lentz says. “Things seemed pretty much the same.”

They married in September of 1994.

“He is older and more mature,” says Lentz’s mother. “The money doesn’t seem to affect him one way or the other. I mean, I don’t know down deep how it affects him, but from what we’ve seen it doesn’t seem to matter. He never talks about Christene’s money.”

Looking back over seven years, Lentz concedes that, of course, winning the lottery has changed her life.

She has advisors who manage a portfolio of investments. She has a 43-foot vintage Chriscraft moored in Dana Point Harbor, which mainly others use; “I just fall asleep.” She still has the BMW convertible she bought the day after she won.

But she continues to shop garage sales and goes immediately to the sale rack when she goes shopping.

“She still is very thrifty,” says her mother. “She gets very excited about a bargain. That has to stem from her experiences growing up.”

A single mother when she was raising Lentz, she remembers tough times when they had to visit Grandma in order to eat. “One time after I paid the bills, I had a dollar left for two weeks,” said Lentz’s mother. “She knew what it was like to be helped financially. She remembers that.

“I think more than anything, winning the money matured her very fast. She’s very, very self-reliant. She’s done really, really well, and I’m proud of her.”

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The biggest benefit of the money, says Lentz, is that it buys time.

“Next week we’re going to Disney World and we’re going to visit my husband’s family. We can do it because we have the time. A lot of people have the money, but they don’t have the time. They have to go to work to keep their jobs.”

And most important, it buys time to be a full-time mother.

“I don’t want to get on a soapbox or anything, but I think a lot of the problems in the world and this society are because there isn’t a parent at home. Mother, father, that doesn’t matter, but a parent who genuinely cares what this child is doing, where they’re at, that kind of thing.

“It’s not parents’ fault. They’d love to be at home with their kids. But you can’t make it on one income.

“The best thing in the world is being a mom. That is the best, most wonderful thing in the whole world,” says Lentz, leaning toward the highchair and talking to Delaney. “Even better than winning the lottery or anything, huh?”

Lentz turns back with a smile. “Whether there’s money or no money, I think I’m a worthwhile person.”