The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor October 27 began like any other autumn Saturday for Shayne Brown. His children munched on cereal. His son looked forward to hockey practice. And on the fridge sat a lotto ticket, his millions-to-one shot at financial freedom. Brown, a proud Flin Flonner and pipefitter at Hudbay, had no idea that his life was in for a serious shakeup. He grabbed the ticket, a Lotto Max, and sat down at his computer to check the numbers online. Working his way through the list of numbers drawn the previous night, suddenly one set started to match up: 11, 13, 16, 17, 18, 23 and 45. Unless his eyes were playing tricks on him, the piece of paper in his hands was worth a cool $1 million. 'I started yelling,' says Brown. For several years, whenever the jackpots got particularly high, Brown and his best friend, fellow Flin Flonner Travis Rideout, had gone halfers on lotto tickets. Brown had purchased this week's ticket from Lloydy's Corner Store, plunking down $20 the previous afternoon. He let the Quick Pick program automatically choose the numbers. Now he was in disbelief, a feeling shared by his wife when he quickly called her at work. Brown took his son to hockey practice, where his wife met him to see for herself photos of the winning numbers and the winning ticket. Then it was time to share the incredible news with Rideout. 'I asked him to come meet me outside,' Brown, 35, says with a laugh. 'Of course he was wondering what was going on.' When Brown told Rideout what had happened, the men walked to a nearby convenience store to verify the ticket on the self-checker. 'When it said 'appears to be a $1 million winner,' all I saw was a one with a bunch of zeroes,' Rideout says. 'It was surreal.' Within several days, the men were off to Winnipeg to claim their prize, which they have split 50/50. Both Brown and Rideout, 33, plan to pay off debt and put some money away for their children's education. 'And a new truck,' Rideout, a ventilation technologist at Hudbay, blurts out with a smile. Rideout says he and Brown have received a great reaction from the community. People were pleased to see two young families _ Rideout has two kids and Brown has three _ take home the prize. Though the friends are now each $500,000 richer, their lives will remain more or less the same. 'I'll have nicer shoes,' Rideout jokes, 'but I'm not going to change personally.'
