Reversal of Fortune
Forty-two residents of the struggling cotton-farming town of Roby band together to enter the lottery. They buy 430 tickets. Then—on the eve of Thanksgiving, no less—they hit the jackpot, winning $46 million. You might expect a happy ending. Not even close.
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By the nineties most of Roby's third- and fourth-generation cotton farmers who had managed to hold on to their family farms were working fourteen-hour days, six or seven days a week, and were deep in debt, having mortgaged their land more than once avert foreclosure. The rules had changed since their families plowed hundred-acre tracts with a pair of mules. The price of cotton plummeted because of global competition, and the cost of overhead soared; a tractor alone now costs upward of $85,000, and the expense of fixing it once it breaks down can run a farmer more than his yearly income. Roby farmers must now cultivate larger parcels of land for smaller and smaller profits and might spend as much as $300,000 a year to plant cotton on 1,500 acres. Until harvest time, they have no assurances that any money will come back in. The waiting game, which starts during planting season in June and ends in November, puts the whole town on edge. A hard wind or hail or one day too many without rain can ruin a crop. "If there's a dry spell, we hold a prayer meeting for rain," said Violet Upshaw, the widow of a longtime cotton farmer. "When it's dry and dusty and the wind is blowing hard and your cotton won't grow more than a few inches high and it's 113 degrees on your back porch, there's nothing you can do but pray."
Roby hit the jackpot during a drought, when prayers seemed like they were falling on deaf ears. "That was the year we were fixing to go broke," said Vernon "Bunny" Terry, Gene and Bob's youngest brother. Several farmers were on the verge of bankruptcy, and one had already begun to file the paperwork. During a good harvest, cotton burrs skitter across town and the air is so thick with lint that it looks foggy at night through a car's headlights. But that November 1996, the air was clear and Terry's Gin was quieter than usual. When the gin's bookkeeper, Peggy Dickson, suggested one morning that everyone go in on lottery tickets for the $46 million jackpot, it seemed as good an idea as any for salvation.
"IT WAS THE DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving, and Peggy said to me, 'Lance, we're going to play the lottery. Give me ten dollars,'" Lance explained to me one afternoon. "I did whatever Peggy told me to, so I said, 'Yes, ma'am,' and I handed her ten dollars. Farmers came in all that morning to check cotton prices and drink coffee. And Peggy would say to them, 'Now, I know playing the lottery is gambling, but we're going to start a pool. If you'd like to go in on it with us, we'll need ten dollars apiece.' The ones that were okay with it got in, and the ones who weren't stayed out.
"Bunny Terry told Peggy to go to Longhorn Liquor, in Sweetwater, to buy tickets. Bunny said he had a feeling it was going to hit. That was the first time Peggy ever went into a liquor store. She had never had a drink in her life. If her father had been alive, there wouldn't have been no lottery. He was Church of Christ, very strict. Whatever he said was the law. But she went to Longhorn Liquor that afternoon with $420. The owner threw $10 in for himself and she bought 430 Quick Picks.
"I forgot all about the lottery that night. I was having an argument with my ex-wife. We were less than two weeks away from having our divorce finalized. We had some words with each other on the phone and hung up. The phone rang again, and when I picked it up, I was fixing to start yelling. I heard someone bawling on the other end of the line. It was Peggy. I said, 'Peggy, what's wrong?'
"She said, 'We won.'
"I asked her, 'Won what?'
"'Won the lottery.'
"Jimmy Carreon was over at my house, and he fell off the couch when he heard the news. I guess I didn't know what to think; I was dumbfounded. For about an hour, the phone wouldn't quit. I drove to the gin hands' houses that night and told them we'd won. I woke half of them up, and the other half were still cooking for Thanksgiving dinner.
"We had a meeting at the gin the next morning with a lady from the lottery commission. By seven o'clock, there were satellite trucks from all the major networks in town. All the newspapers were here. There were reporters everywhere. They wanted to know if we were going to Paris or if we were going to buy big ranches or quit our jobs. One guy asked me, 'You gonna buy a Cadillac?' We were all sitting back, eyeballing the lady from the lottery commission and all these reporters and wondering, 'What's going to happen now?' I didn't get any rest for a week. I had to go to Abilene four days later to see a movie just so I could take a nap."
THE ROBY STAR-RECORD RAN just one article about the $46 million windfall: a reprint from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which it placed below the fold, at the very bottom of its front page, beneath a story whose headline read "Letters to Santa Due on December 17th." In Roby, it was a delicate news story; the fact that so many citizens had been caught gambling—and had brought international attention to the town by playing the numbers, no less—carried a whiff of impropriety in a community where nearly everyone's church affiliation is either Baptist or Church of Christ. When it came to light that more than half the deacons at the Roby Church of Christ were lottery winners, three families left the church in protest and parishioners debated whether the gamblers in their midst should be required to tithe their winnings. "That was the only uproar we had," said church member Foy Mitchell. "Our preacher told us that Sunday that the Good Book says not to judge, and that's the last he spoke of it."
By far the biggest prize fell to the Terrys; 21 of the lottery winners were descendants, or spouses of descendants, of the original Terry family, who came to Roby in 1903 and have grown cotton ever since. If there was bitterness among people who had chosen not to buy in or who had simply missed the opportunity (like high school football coach Harold Scott, who had left town to get a haircut) they kept their resentment—and continue to keep it—to themselves. For a town accustomed to the capriciousness of the weather, which can ruin one farmer's crop with a torrent of hail and spare another's, the lottery was just another unpredictable variable. Even small-business owner Kenneth Terry wore a stiff upper lip the following week when he was forced to close his hardware store because he couldn't pay his bills. "Everyone who won was needful, and no one flaunted what they had," said Violet Upshaw. "We were happy for them and for how it might help our town."
The jackpot, which came out to $1,085,162 per winner, seemed dazzling at first, and hopes ran high that Roby might be headed for an economic recovery. The actual math was less encouraging; paid in twenty annual installments, the winners took home, after taxes, around $39,000 a year. Any money was a blessing, of course, but for farmers who were sometimes half a million dollars in debt, having leveraged their land to plant cotton that yielded little in return, the lottery did not exactly afford them the extravagant lifestyles of millionaires. Except for Shad Rasco—a farmer's son whose splurge on a $48,000 Mitsubishi 3000 GT Spyder convertible still raises eyebrows among the Breakfast Club—winners were as practical as they had been during dry spells. They started college funds, fixed leaky roofs, paid off car loans, set aside money for retirement, and traded in old pickups for new ones. The national media, which hung around Roby to see if the winners would throw away their fortunes on flashy Christmas presents, had little to write about, except that the town's farmers could finally breathe a sigh of relief. "The banks had been working on a bunch of us, and the lottery saved our butts," Bunny Terry remembered. "We were as happy as we could be. But that money didn't go into our pockets; it went straight back to the banker. I always said, 'I'll win the lottery before I get out of debt farming,' and I proved that to be true."
The bad luck began before Christmas. Six days after receiving his first lottery check, a gin employee named Albert Barrera fell asleep at the wheel and hit a guardrail, totaling his brand-new Ford pickup with 812 miles on it. Then Gene Terry's house burned to the ground in an electrical fire. ("Living in the country's nice, but it takes the fire department a little while to get there," he explained.) Most of the winners made the mistake of cutting quick deals with lottery buyout brokers, who offered them cash up front in exchange for their future annual payments; in the end, they were left with about a third of their total winnings. Some sunk all their money into ill-fated business ventures. Richard Spencer, the county's former agricultural extension agent, lost $250,000 trying to start a cottonseed processing plant in Roby that never turned a profit. But the worst hand fell to Peggy Dickson. A year to the day that the Roby 43 won the lottery, Peggy was diagnosed with brain cancer. "Peggy had terrible headaches that kept getting worse," Lance said. "We all had a feeling she wasn't going to make it." She died a few weeks after her diagnosis, at the age of 49, leaving behind dozens of farmers who owed their livelihoods to her, children who would attend college because of her, and an entire town consumed by mourning.
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