Garrettsville – Well, the Queen of Hearts finally made her royal appearance on Sunday, September 25, 2016. The winning ticket, with the #5 on it, when turned over, revealed the queenly cutie. Terri Vechery of Mantua, who entered the ticket was not in attendance—per last week’s rule change—but was contacted by phone and seemed pretty calm about it all. She’ll probably get more excited when all of her new relatives and best friends start turning up with requests.
The total jackpot this week—week 52—came to $3,426,290, surely enough to entice the fair-sized crowd at Sky Lanes Bowling; the 50/50 wasn’t too shabby either, $156,016, the other half is going to the Portage County District Library (Was there dancing at the Garrettsville Branch?) and the Garrettsville Chamber of Commerce (There’s been plenty of commerce in town since this all started…which had both upsides and downsides). Close to $500K has gone to charities, organizations and causes over the course of the royal progression to this point. Way to go!
It was a good-sized group there to watch the ticket draw, not as big as the week before, but plenty large, plenty of motorcycles, a new band (“Wanted”—a Bon Jovi tribute band), same big red drum, on loan from Nannicola.com, more news cameras (The festivity was on the 11:00 News), a larger CRS list (CRS stands for “Can’t Read Stuff”—or words to that effect), screw-ups who didn’t follow directions and got their tickets tossed, the school bus shuttles were doing a brisk business, ticket sales for the week leading up to this drawing were at or about $1 million (The lines at the ticket sales points were lengthy, running 15 to 30 minutes, never mind how I know that), and the cherry on top was the brief fireworks display from the front facade of the roof of Sky Lanes.
There were thanks to go around to all of the varied contributors—Bonner Farms, Mikulski Properties, Tents for Rent Carlson, Jason Adkins, DJ par excellence, bus drivers, Garrettsville, Hiram and Windham police departments, AND Curtis the clean-up man. Get your new T-shirt that says “Sky Lanes World Record Queen of Hearts, Sky Lanes Bowling, Garrettsville Ohio; our fifteen minutes of fame…give or take….
A little vacation time is coming up, then it’s likely to start all over again with a jackpot of somewhere around $300K, a new board of cards and some rule changes. Get your lucky charms all warmed up.
