Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, December 24, 1993                   TAG: 9312240080
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

$45 MILLION LEAVES HIM TREMBLING

He will split the $90 million Powerball payoff with the holder of the only other winning ticket - who said he wants to use part of his $45 million to move to a place "with a lot of palm trees and a lot of umbrellas."

Percy Ray Pridgen, 69, could speak only a short time before having to bury his head in his hands and cry. After disclosing his plan to buy a house, he said, "Somebody's going to have to tell me" how to spend the rest - $2.25 million a year minus taxes for 20 years.

C. Gill of Richmond - he told one reporter the C. stands for Chuck - said he, his wife and their 4-year-old daughter, Tiana, will travel immediately to Paris. "It's going to be an early Christmas," he said.

Gill, 35, added: "I'm going to try to give something back to my neighborhood, because my brothers out there, they're killing one another."

He said he has worked as a barber and a government employee but has no job now.

Pridgen and Gill will receive their first checks in about 10 or 15 days, said D.C. Lottery spokeswoman Beverly Hunt. The owners of the Washington liquor stores where the grand-prize tickets were sold each will receive $25,000.

The Powerball game, played in 14 states and the District of Columbia, had not yielded a winning ticket in 16 previous drawings over eight weeks.

The winning numbers were: 1, 3, 13, 15 and 29. The powerball was 12.

Pridgen, a Washington resident who formerly worked for a construction company, said he wasn't certain of his good luck until Thursday even though the drawing was Wednesday night.

He had a friend help him identify his ticket and make sure he had won. "I couldn't trust nobody but him. . . . I was trembling so fast," he said.

Gill, who traveled to Washington to buy 15 $1 tickets, saw his winning numbers on television. He said his wife didn't believe him.

The odds of winning were one in 55 million. But 54 ticket-holders matched every number but the powerball - raking in $100,000 each.

Tickets with a total cost of $47 million were sold since Sunday, said Charles Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Commission, the Iowa-based organization that runs Powerball. They are sold in Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.