THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 3, 1994 TAG: 9409030480
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL BURKE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
For nine women in the Sleepyheads bowling league, there has never been any need for a formal agreement when buying their twice-weekly Lotto tickets.
The women are part of a pool. The idea is for each to share equally. Just an agreement between nine bowlers, most of them getting up in years. Just a matter of trust and honor.
Elsie Hostman, 67, buys tickets for the group, which bowls every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. at Indian River Lanes in Virginia Beach.
Hostman buys 18 tickets for Wednesday's Lotto drawing and 18 more for Saturday's, all on behalf of the pool. Each woman pays $4 a week for tickets.
In March, she bought a ticket at the Farm Fresh at the Kempsriver Shopping Center. She played the group's regular numbers: 27-29-34-36-39-40.
It was a $1 million winner.
Pool member Tomi Knotts, 69, of Chesapeake, was asleep when she got the call from Hostman late that Wednesday night.
``Elsie called and said we'd won,'' Knotts said Friday. ``I said, `All six numbers?' And she said, `Yeah.' I said, `I'll see you in the morning.' Then I went back to sleep. Elsie and I went bowling the next morning.''
Told Friday that lottery pools may not be legally enforceable in Virginia, and that the person who buys the ticket could probably claim all the money, Knotts said that does not matter to her.
She trusts Hostman, of Virginia Beach, to keep buying the pool's tickets and to share the proceeds if they win again. It's a matter of honor, she said.
``I never thought otherwise except that we would all share equally,'' Knotts said.
For winning the million-dollar jackpot, each of the nine women gets a yearly after-tax check for $3,777.40, she said.
Knotts' life has changed little since she won Lotto.
``The only difference is I took a vacation this year,'' she said. In July she went to Las Vegas, where some of her Lotto winnings went into slot machines and were lost on the blackjack tables.
``We're all gamblers, all nine of us,'' she said.
She has followed the dispute between Walter Cole and his former friends in Elizabeth City over a $9 million jackpot.
Cole said he bought the winning ticket with his money, but his friends claimed the ticket was part of a pool and they should have split the winnings. A Chesapeake judge ruled in Cole's favor Thursday.
Knotts doesn't take the oath of Lotto pooling lightly. She thinks Cole should have shared the prize with his old friends.
``I think that's terrible what that man did,'' she said. ``I couldn't live with myself if I did anything like that. That guy's not going to enjoy that money at all.
``To tell you the truth, money doesn't mean that much to me.''
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA LOTTERY LOTTERY POOL by CNB