Sen. Judd Gregg wins $853,492 in Powerball

Friday, Oct. 21, 2005 | 7:28 a.m.

"She was a very pleasant young woman; she might have kept it and for all I know it might have been the winning ticket," he said in a telephone news conference.

Gregg collected a check for $853,492 from the Powerball Lottery on Thursday.

According to his latest financial disclosure form, Gregg has between $1.5 million and $6.2 million in stocks and other major investments.

What will he do with the lottery money?

"Whatever my wife tells me to do with it?" he joked, saying he would turn a portion of the winnings over to the Hugh Gregg Foundation, which supports New Hampshire charities and is named after Gregg's late father, a former governor of New Hampshire.

Gregg said he didn't play any particular numbers and allowed the lottery ticket machine to select them at random. He said he checked the tickets Thursday and told his wife, Kathy, that he had won some money.

"She said, 'Are you sure you read the numbers correctly?' because I tend to be a little dyslexic, I tend to transpose numbers," he said.

He said he doesn't buy lottery tickets often but was intrigued by the publicity of the jackpot rising to about $350 million.

"Every American believes in good fortune and good luck and I'm no different than anyone else," he said.

A Powerball ticket worth $340 million was sold in Jacksonville, Ore. No one has stepped forward yet to claim the largest jackpot in the game's history and the second-biggest in U.S. history.

The 58-year-old Republican's ticket was one of 47 regular tickets and two with the Power Play option that matched the first five numbers but not the Powerball. The winning numbers drawn Wednesday evening were 7, 21, 43, 44, 49 and 29. The lump sum option would be worth $110 million after taxes.