Sales pitch pays off, for $20 million
Judith Zahn, who has worked as a nurse at the veteran's hospital in Northampton for 33 years, stopped by the Hatfield Market about three weeks ago to pick up a few odds and ends.
She was not there to play the lottery.
But Francis Frew, the owner of the convenience store, persuaded his longtime customer to spend $20 on a ticket for the state's Star Spangled Sweepstakes, even though she had already bought four tickets for the same game at another store.
Both Zahn and Frew are glad she gave in to his sales pitch. Zahn, a 59-year-old Hatfield resident, won the game's top prize of $20 million Wednesday evening. She received an after-tax lump sum of $14 million during a press conference at the Massachusetts State Lottery headquarters in Braintree yesterday, while Frew took home a $200,000 commission for selling the winning ticket.
"It just feels very bizarre," said Zahn, who wore a red, white, and blue T-shirt and was flanked by her husband, Steve, 56, and daughter, Hannah, 27. "It's like this whole new world is going to open up for us."
The Star Spangled Sweepstakes, the state's first sweepstakes game, did not turn out as well for the lottery as it did for Zahn. Lottery officials distributed $40 million in prize money to 51 winners, even though the game only generated about $28 million in revenue. The drawing included 10 prizes of $1 million and 40 prizes of $250,000.
Only 1.35 million tickets out of a total 4 million tickets were sold for the game, said State Treasurer Timothy Cahill, who added that sales for all the state's lottery games increased dramatically in the two months that Star Spangled Sweepstakes tickets were sold.
"We're happy with the way things turned out," Cahill said at the press conference. "We will do this again sometime in the next year. It helped us bring some excitement to the lottery in the last few months."
Some players complained when vendors continued selling tickets after the June 30 deadline, saying that the additional sales decreased their odds of winning. Lottery officials responded this week, saying vendors can legally sell tickets past a sweepstakes game's deadline until the unsold tickets are picked up.
Zahn, who chuckled when she received an oversized cardboard version of the $20 million check yesterday, said she was trying to overcome the shock of scratching off the winning ticket, which she did at work Wednesday after looking up the winning numbers on masslottery.com, the lottery's website.
"It's kind of confusing," said Zahn, who has no immediate plans for the money besides buying a new car to replace her 1994 Volvo. She plans to go back to work Monday, but said she can now seriously consider retiring. "There are a lot of things to think about and a lot of decisions to make," she said.
Her husband, Steve, a retired Amherst police officer who had been working part time as a landscaper and in the Hampshire County sheriff's office, had no trouble expressing what the money means to him. "I had two part-time jobs," he said, "up until about four hours ago."
Ryan Haggerty can be reached at rhaggerty@globe.com. 
