Virginia man dreamed about numbers, won $250K in lottery
"It was hard to believe!" retiree Alonzo Coleman told Virginia Lottery officials after winning last month. "It still hasn’t hit me yet!"
A Black Virginia retiree took home a quarter of a million dollars after playing numbers he claimed came to him in a dream.
Local reporting from Fox 29 identified the lucky winner as Alonzo Coleman of Henrico. Last month, he participated in a statewide lotto game called “Bank a Million,” in which the player chooses six numbers between 1 and 40, and prizes of 250,000, 500,000, and $1 million can be awarded after taxes.
According to Coleman, he spent $2 on his regular numbers, which are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18, a set he said came to him in a dream.
“It was hard to believe!” Coleman told Virginia Lottery officials. “It still hasn’t hit me yet!”
Coleman split his lottery share four ways when he bought his $2 ticket and subsequently had four sets of numbers. The game’s “Play Your Way” feature nabbed him $250,000 on one of his number sets.
The Virginia Lottery reportedly generates more than $2 million per day for the state’s public schools.
A 2019 article from The New York Times explains that the lottery in New York was originally a Harlem game known as “The Numbers,” which generated created an underground economy in the historic district that was too big for the state to ignore.
“For 60 years, the numbers reigned supreme as New York City’s pre-eminent daily lottery game — until 1980, when the state decided it wanted in,” the Times piece notes in an article by Bridgett M. Davis, who wrote a book about her mother, Fannie Davis, one of the preeminent numbers runners in Detroit.
Davis noted that the numbers gave her mom the ability to “[provide] us, her children, with a solid middle-class life, including a spacious family home, beautiful clothes, and college educations — and, thanks to our inheritance, generational wealth.”
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