Editor Makes News by Winning $3 Million

As a local newspaper editor, Burton Swope starts each day by reading the morning papers.

Sunday’s editions carried some breathtaking news: Checking the state lottery numbers, Swope, 52, learned he had won $3 million.

“It can’t be true, right?” he said, describing his sudden turn of fortune in a radio interview Monday.

Swope bought the winning Quick-Pick ticket Saturday at Carriage Square Wines and Spirits, a few blocks from his home in the northwest corner of Oxnard.

In claiming his prize, the county editor for the Ventura County Star was “extremely thrilled,” lottery spokeswoman Norma Minas said.

“Mostly he said, ‘I can’t believe it,’ ” Minas said. “He said he’s always been a proponent of the lottery and supported the initiative when it was being discussed.”

Swope told Minas his first purchase would be a new Saturn.

The journeyman journalist took Monday off, but dropped by the Star’s Ventura offices to share the news of his booty.

“We’re delighted for him,” said Timothy J. Gallagher, the newspaper’s editor. “Burt is a magnetic person and his wife, Joanie, is one of the sweetest, funniest people you’d ever want to know . . . This couldn’t have happened to nicer people. There was a lot of genuine joy.”

Swope told radio station KVEN he is not sure what’s next. He said he might use the money to travel and write, but for now, he’s overwhelmed.

“You get paranoid, right? . . . I called my mother at 5:30 in the morning. I told her, get the Fresno Bee and I’ll read the numbers off to you. . . . Oh, my god!”

After taxes, Swope is to receive $108,000 a year for the next 20 years, lottery officials said.

Swope’s neighbors described him as a low-key relative newcomer to their middle-class neighborhood.

“He’s the one, that guy over there?” said an incredulous 86-year-old man who lives across the street.

Swope’s lengthy career has included stints at daily newspapers in Reno and the Central California city of Visalia. He went to the Star in 1993.

Lenita Powers, a columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal and Swope’s co-worker in the late 1970s, said many employees at her newspaper cross the state line to play the California Lottery. Like Swope, she was checking the numbers this weekend. “My darn, he won my Lotto!” Powers said.

“Knowing Burt, I think he’ll stay in the business a while,” Powers added. “But he always was a wayward spirit. He’d love to travel.”

Times staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this story.