Good Fortune Overwhelms Winner of Lottery Prize
Salvador J. Gonzalez tossed and turned in a tangle of bed sheets as his wife lay asleep. He was keeping it all inside.
Only his brother-in-law knew how Gonzalez’s humble life in this three-bedroom house would soon, and very suddenly, be rearranged into something far more complicated.
“I have a problem,” he said into the dark.
“What is wrong?” his wife, Socorro, asked.
He paused to measure his words.
“I won the lottery.”
The California Lottery had announced the winning numbers of an $80-million-plus jackpot last Wednesday night. Now, more than 24 hours later, Gonzalez had yet to tell his wife: He was the only one with a winning ticket and had elected to take the lump sum payout of about half the total.
They were rich.
It would take until Monday for Gonzalez, a 40-year-old machine company supervisor, to come forward and tell his story to lottery officials and explain why he had waited through the eternity of the weekend to claim the third-largest lottery jackpot ever in California.
Gonzalez is still not talking. But here’s the story lottery officials told Tuesday:
Last Thursday, when he first bothered to look at the three slips of paper--his three tickets--he panicked. Even on Monday, he still went to work at his job at a heavy-machinery firm that makes batteries.
But just before the Santa Ana office of the California Lottery closed Monday night, he showed up with his brother-in-law and approached the office manager. Gonzalez finally made his wavering voice say it all aloud: “I am the winner.” He said he bought the ticket, one of three he purchased, choosing the numerals entirely at random, at Kelly’s Mini Mart, a convenience store in Anaheim, near the pool hall where he drank beer and played billiards.
Gonzalez remained secluded Tuesday. Lottery officials said they tried desperately to convince him to say a few words to the world--”to enjoy his happiness,” said Herman Dustman, lottery sales manager for SuperLotto in the Los Angeles and Orange county areas--but Gonzalez said he had none.
Dustman said Gonzalez is going through great pains to remain private: When he arrived at the Santa Ana office, he had not called a lawyer, or some publicist, or even an accountant, and he had scarcely even thought of what he would do with his new money.
Business as Usual
There were no ribbons or flowers or a new fancy car in the driveway to replace his old American-made pickup truck. When asked by lottery officials what he would do next, he said the same kinds of things lottery folks are accustomed to hearing: buy a new house, buy a motor home, send the kids to college.
More than anything, they said, Gonzalez was quiet, afraid and seemed sweetly naive about it all. Lottery officials gave him a polo-style shirt with the SuperLotto logo on it, and suggested that he could wear it perhaps in his travels across the country and to faraway lands.
“Do I have to tell them I won the lottery?” he asked, his face wrinkling with worry that it might be some unfortunate requirement.
He said he felt harried, beset by a whole new set of problems he never imagined: Who would be his friends, how would he know who his friends were, and, perhaps most of all, who would try to take his money? Lottery officials, familiar with the fact that winning a big jackpot can sometimes be an emotional disaster for a family unprepared to deal with new wealth, offered a pamphlet, a how-to guide of sorts on how to be rich.
Gonzalez apparently did not buy lottery tickets on a regular basis--with the occasional exception of an office pool--and certainly not at Kelly’s Mini Mart, he told lottery officials. He told them he mostly used the store for milk and cheese and other staples. He told lottery officials that on Wednesday he bought the tickets while he was on his way to a nearby Wal-Mart store with one of his sons, but that he couldn’t remember what he’d planned to purchase there.
Neighbors described Gonzalez Tuesday as a quiet and private man, whose wife takes their boys, ages 9 and 5, to school each day and picks them up afterward. “We don’t have a lot of communication with that family,” one neighbor said.
According to other neighbors, Salvador, whose nickname is “Chava,” plays soccer on the weekends, and also likes to hunt deer, elk and doves.
“He’s a hell of nice fellow and is the friendliest guy in the neighborhood,” said one neighbor, a chiropractor in Fullerton, who said he had known Gonzalez since 1992. “There’s nothing he won’t do for you if you need his help. . . . I also dove hunt and I ask him every year to go with me, but our schedules always conflict. We haven’t gotten out there yet.”
Ducking the Media
Carlos Landeros, a barber at ABC Hair and Nail Shop, in the Anaheim strip mall where Gonzalez purchased his ticket, was outside the El Ojo de Agua Bar--Gonzalez’s favorite pool hall--Thursday afternoon, the day after the SuperLotto drawing. The phone rang inside and the barmaid answered, then called out to Carlos, “Can you talk to this guy on the phone? He wants to talk about reporters.”
Landeros went inside and picked up the phone. “The guy on the phone told me that he had won the Lotto, but he didn’t want anybody to know who he was,” Landeros said. “He asked me, ‘Are there a lot of reporters there?’ And I told him, ‘There’s nobody out here. Who are you? What’s your name?’ The guy said, ‘I can’t tell you yet. I don’t want the reporters to know who I am. I gotta go.”
In claiming his prize, Gonzalez chose to take it in a lump-sum payment. That is, rather than take the $80-million-plus over 26 years--which is an annuity the lottery buys that pays out annually--he opted to settle for about half the total up front. Federal income taxes must be paid on the winnings.
