He plays the lottery sporadically, maybe once a month, but on Friday, June 28, Paul Hutchen had a gut feeling.
So the newly arrived Lumby resident stopped at the Vernon Shell on 32nd Street and bought a Lotto 649 ticket using the combined numbers of his birthday and those of his two daughters.
On Sunday, Hutchen, 70, went to check his ticket at a self-serve outlet and saw that he matched the guaranteed prize draw of $1 million.
“I didn’t believe what I was looking at,” said Hutchen, a widower who moved to the village in April after living on a boat on the West Coast for a couple of years. “I went to a clerk and got him to verify that I’d won. My hand was shaking, my heart was pounding. I thought, ‘Oh please don’t let me have a massive heart attack now.'”
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The retired power engineer had to wait for Tuesday to drive to the Kamloops outlet of the B.C. Lottery Corporation to claim his prize as the office was closed for Canada Day Monday.
“It was a pretty slow drive to Kamloops. I was probably doing well under the speed limit,” joked Hutchen, who said he had no real plans for his winnings other than to help his daughters out.
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