Susan Dugary, of King of Prussia, Pa., kisses her lottery tickets at a store in Wilmington, Del. (AP)

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 20, 1998; Page A01

Altruism lives. If the winning ticket of the nation's biggest lottery jackpot is sold in the District, charities will be flush, parents will be pampered, strangers rewarded and long-lost relatives greeted with an open checkbook.

Really.

That's what potential winners lining up to buy Powerball tickets in anticipation of tonight's drawing told The Washington Post. Remember when that $175 million jackpot check is signed over to charity that you read it here first.

"I would do something to help society," insisted John King, 26, a file clerk fingering the five sets of numbers he bought yesterday. "I would help my mother out. And go back to school. And buy a house and a car for everyone I know."

"I'd go back to college and invest some for my grandchildren," insisted security guard Michael Mills Sr., 49. Oh, and move to the Bahamas.

Powerball dreams floated in the capital yesterday with the summer breezes, wafted by news that the payout has grown to the largest of any publicly run U.S. lottery.

Agents in the District were kept busy with long lines of bettors throughout the day, many of them clutching slips of paper scribbled with birth dates and street addresses and the jersey numbers of little league uniforms.

"We have had at least 3,000 people come through here today," said Yong Sim, owner of Metro Center News in the 600 block of 12th Street NW. A gaggle of customers lined up in his tiny store, crowded by the bare temptations of Playboy's "Girls of Summer" and ignoring the potential guidance of the astrology magazines to get to the churning lottery register.

Darlene Kennedy, left, of Mitchellville and Natalia Thornton of Springfield bought tickets at Metro Center News in the District.(By Susan Biddle – The Washington Post)

"We haven't even had time to eat lunch. I haven't seen anything like this for three years, when there was another big jackpot," Sim said. He is gambling along with his customers: A winning ticket sold at the store would fetch him a $25,000 bonus.

Powerball is a gambling game offered by the District and 20 states. The pot has grown without a grand-prize winner since March 21, and the prize -- $175 million spread over 25 years or a lump sum of $94 million now -- surpasses a 1991 California lottery prize record of $118.8 million. The drawing will be in Iowa today at 10:59 p.m. Eastern time.

In Delaware, lines of bettors were reported to have waited as long as an hour to buy tickets. Athena Ware, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Lottery, said that the wait in the District has not been that great but that "there is a lot of excitement. The response has been tremendous."

Maryland and Virginia do not offer the game, and many suburban commuters who work downtown used their lunch hour or coffee break to sneak off to buy a ticket.

"My wife called me from where she works in Virginia with a list of numbers for people she works with," said Bob Moran, director of government affairs for an energy trade association in the city. He had already bought his ticket. And if he won?

"I'd pay off all my bills. Maybe I'd have enough for a big pizza after that," he said.

To be the jackpot winner, the numbers on a ticket must match all six numbers drawn in the lottery. The odds of that are beyond the realm of lightning striking: about one in 80,000,000. But that did not dissuade the calculations of riches to be had.

"The potential return on the investment is worth it," said lawyer Christian Hansen, 29, who lives in Pentagon City. If he won, he said as he lined up at the ticket machine in Capitol Chicken in the 900 block of 14th Street NW, "I have an agreement with my friends from law school that we'd all pay off each other's school loans. Then I'd treat my parents to something nice."

With stalwart optimism, bettors insisted that they could avoid the woes that some big winners say have beset their lives with the arrival of huge sums of money. And many of them swore their intentions on winning a prize would be only noble.

"Well, my husband and I have always talked about donating to charity, and maybe opening a school for children," said Darlene Kennedy, 36, a paralegal from Mitchellville.

She had wagered all of $5 on five chances, the first time she had played in about a year, she reckoned. That is the kind of player the lottery wants, Ware said.

"We do have players coming from Maryland and Virginia. But we encourage them to play responsibly," she said. "This should be a fun investment, not a financial investment."