Lotto win ends bad luck spell

Although I’d never laid eyes on Carl Parks, I figured he’d be easy enough to spot.

Just look for the guy with the biggest grin on his face.

Winning a bundle from a lottery will do that.

Bingo! Parks didn’t disappoint me. Stepping inside the Longhorn Barbecue for our breakfast interview, the stocky 42-year-old greeted me with a flash of pearly whites that could hawk kitchenware on a TV infomercial.

“A blessing,” he said of his windfall.

And wait’ll you hear what crazy things he’s already blown most of his winnings on.

You may have seen Parks on local TV news segments last week. The West Plains man clipped the Mega Millions Lottery for $175,000 – an impressive chunk of change by anyone’s standards.

I’ve always had a fundamental loathing for the lottery. First off, the odds of winning any real money are so astronomically egregious that it makes playing casino blackjack look like an investment strategy.

But even worse than being a sucker bet supreme is how the wrong people (read: not me) are always winning.

Take that 94-year-old Massachusetts woman who hit a $5.6 million jackpot, for example. Who cares whether she gets her money in a lump sum or doled out in yearly increments? She’s too damned old to have any fun with that kind of loot.

Her greedy relatives will just kill each other over it.

Parks, however, strikes me as a pretty deserving winner (read: still not me, but I can deal with it).

“I’m not a gambler. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t have any bad habits, but I spend a dollar on the lottery,” he said. “My theory is that it’s worth a dollar a week to dream.”

Blowing a buck a week on a lottery ticket is hardly cause to join Gamblers Anonymous.

And the way Park tells it, he was due for a dream to come true. In the span of a few weeks that began in early December:

His wife’s kidneys began to fail from a diabetes-related condition. He said he lost his job as a postal worker. He suffered a serious concussion in a traffic accident. Parks said he was stopped at an intersection on Sprague when a driver crossed into the center lane and totaled his 2002 Ford Focus.

“One of those bad luck spells,” he said.

Carl and Noreen Parks went into survival mode. They began itemizing possessions they could sell or liquidate to stay afloat. It wasn’t the first time the couple had encountered an economic rough patch. They declared bankruptcy in 2002, listing debts of more than $400,000 when their tour bus company went under.

Their lives took a significant upswing last Saturday.

Parks stopped for gas at the Airway Heights Speedi Shoppe. He asked the clerk to check the numbers on the lottery ticket he bought there the day before.

“This is the winning ticket,” he joked.

He said the clerk stared bug-eyed as the machine considered the numbers: 2, 8, 14, 15 and 51.

It took awhile for the reality to sink in.

The correct five numbers gave Parks $175,000. He missed the sixth “Mega” number, alas, which he said would have paid him $80 million.

Oh, well. Parks expressed no bitterness about not being a multi-millionaire. The money he got – $131,250 after taxes – is more than enough to give his family what he said it needed most: A lucky break.

“I still have to work. I still have a mortgage,” he said. “But it’s like a ton of bricks (removed). I can definitely breathe.”

With the newfound wealth deposited, Carl and Noreen went hog wild. They stayed up until 2 a.m. Tuesday …

Paying bills.

One by one, they wrote checks to zero out their accounts.

“It was tough. Who wouldn’t want to go out and buy a Hummer,” said Parks, who showed me the subtractions in his checkbook. “But I have $20,000 left and we’re debt free.”