Winning Powerball ticket claimed

Saturday, April 22, 2006 posted 08:27 PM EDT

LINCOLN - R. George Keegan made a wry joke of it, at first.

The 53-year-old businessman was at lunch with friends at about 11:30 a.m. Thursday at the Wing Wah on Main Street when he saw on the TV news that an $800,000 winning Powerball ticket had been purchased at Rideout's Market in Millinocket sometime Wednesday.

"I said to a couple of people, 'Gee, I bought one there on Wednesday. I'll check my ticket. Maybe I won,'" Keegan said Friday. "I never thought much more about it again."

Then Clark Schorey of Lincoln, a friend and employee at Keegan's trucking company, telephoned at about 5 p.m. Thursday to relay the winning numbers and urge Keegan to check his ticket. Only then did Keegan go out to his Ford F-150 pickup truck and pull out the winning ticket, he said.

That's when Keegan's world became about 800,000 times brighter, and a mystery that had hung over the Millinocket region since Thursday morning was solved.

"If he hadn't called, I wouldn't have checked it until, oh, I have no idea," Keegan said wryly, "but I would have checked eventually. I actually collect up to 10 tickets and then cash them in all at once, and I was sure I put it on my visor."

Powerball winners have up to a year to collect, said Pam Coutts, deputy director of the Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages and Lottery Operations. Keegan and his family came to the state lottery offices in Augusta on Friday and he will collect his winnings - about $560,000 after taxes - on Monday, she said.

Maine is among 27 states that participate in Powerball. Wednesday's winning numbers were 5, 28, 32, 34 and 53, and the Powerball number was 10. The Power Play multiplier was 4. Wednesday's winning ticket matched five numbers, and by choosing the Power Play option, Keegan quadrupled the $200,000 prize.

As the owner of Thompson Trucking & Forest Products of Lincoln, which employs 21 people, Keegan isn't exactly poor, but people who know him said they were pleased he won.

"He's a very nice guy," Lincoln Town Clerk Lisa Goodwin said. "He and his wife are very good people."

Gail Rideout, whose husband, Gary, owns the Somerset Street convenience store, said having a local Powerball winner has "given the town and the surrounding area a lift."

"We have needed it," Rideout said Friday. "We've had a very slow winter in the area, with the lack of snow and snowmobiling. Every business in town has suffered."

The Katahdin region, which Millinocket anchors, is big snowmobiling country. It typically has an unemployment rate about twice the state average, and the town of about 5,200 residents has been hit hard by mill layoffs over the last several years.

Keegan was thrilled with his good fortune and planned, he said, to share it with his wife, Mary. The money will likely help pay tuition for his 20-year-old daughter, Ali, who is studying at Bangor Community College to become an X-ray technician.

Keegan's son Zachary, 23, will be getting married soon, and the winnings will probably help pay for the ceremony, he said.

"The greatest part of this was the thought of being able to take care of the family and get everybody together to take a day off," Keegan said. "We got together as a family and took the time to all go down together today to Augusta. It was nice."

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