Dealt double

“Get anything you want dirt cheap – or even free!”

Rob Humphries, two-time Pennsylvania lottery jackpot winner, wasn’t interested in this one. Sitting in a gray sweatsuit and black slippers, his freckled face browned by two weeks of Hawaiian sun, Humphries searched through the mail spread across his coffee table for his favorite pitch.

It wasn’t the promise of “Confidential Secrets Revealed!” or the ”Treasury of Incredible Information,” the “Make Up To $2,000 Or More Per Week Without Leaving Your Home” or any of the other personal offers that began “Dear Friend” and closed with stamped signatures of people with such names as Seppo Rankinen of Park Avenue.

He was looking for the letter from The Royal Society of Liechtenstein, S.A., in Zurich that had found its way to the Northeast rowhouse of this former truck driver whose lottery winnings total $6.7 million.

The “world’s most exclusive investment society” – so exclusive that Humphries was moved to ask, “Who ever heard of this place?” – wanted him as a member, closing its appeal with the assurance that “we don’t intend to accept every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to get rich.”

Humphries read the letter out loud, then leaned back on his cocoa-colored, crushed-velvet sofa and ran his hands through thinning red hair.

“Unbelievable,” he said.

In fact, the last few weeks have had a dreamlike quality for Humphries and his wife, Marie: the news conference, the champagne-soaked limousine ride, the phone call to the boss, saying he would not be in for a while, the Santa Claus role they have played for their family.

Many times, Humphries, 39, has wondered when someone will knock on his door and explain that it has all been a mistake, the $421,000 he won in March 1986 and the $6.3 million he won in May, which after taxes will pay him about $250,000 annually until eight years into the next century.

“When people ask how I feel, all I can say is that I have no feelings of animosity towards anyone. If my worst enemy was to come up to me, I’d say, ‘It’s OK. It’s over.’ “

*

Humphries had pulled in from a day on the road for Marston Industries. It was about 8 p.m. Friday, May 6. After a quick supper and shower, he went to the coffee table, pen in hand, to check his lottery tickets against the winning numbers his wife had taken off the television broadcast an hour before.

He had bought 20 $1 tickets earlier that day. He picked 10 numbers himself with the help of charts he keeps faithfully to show which ones come up most often. The other 10 he let the computer choose.

Every time one of the winning numbers appeared on his ticket, he’d circle it. When he double-checked the 10th ticket, he realized that he’d circled all six numbers.

“My eyeballs were going from the ticket to the list 1,000 times. I said, ‘Honey, come in here! Make sure these numbers are right.’ “

Thirty seconds later, they were sitting on the sofa, saying, “Oh my God, Oh my God.”

Humphries knew he had won a piece of at least $5.5 million. He had to wait until the next morning to give the computer enough time to determine how many people would share the pot. He slept three hours that night.

The next morning, about 6 a.m., he called a place that sells lottery tickets and asked two things: How many people had hit winning tickets and how much was at stake?

The voice on the phone was cool, Humphries recalled. “He said, ‘Just one person hit. Six point three million dollars.’ “

Humphries’ throat closed. He couldn’t even say goodbye. He hung up and called a second place – and got the same answer.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, six point three million dollars and I am sitting here with the only ticket.’ Then I started looking at the ticket again and making sure I still had those numbers.”

He couldn’t validate his ticket for 48 hours. What was he going to do with it until then? Should he leave it in the house or keep it on him? A series of improbable scenarios flashed by. What if the house burned down or burglarized? What if he were mugged?

He safeguarded the ticket in a Lucite jacket he uses to protect baseball cards and tucked it in an eyeglasses case. Then he threw the case worth $6.3 million on an upstairs desk.

That night, he went to his room 25 times to check on it.

First thing Monday morning, he notified the lottery people that he had the winning ticket. Next, he changed his phone to an unpublished number. Later that day, he called his supervisor and told him he was not going to be in that week because he had important personal business.

His boss, who was having a tough time because the company’s business was expanding, said he could not authorize such a leave by himself, Humphries said.

Humphries told him to handle it the best he could and hung up.

Having won the lottery jackpot two years earlier, Humphries was set on not drawing any publicity.

His March 1986 winnings of $421,000 came out to $16,000 a year after taxes. ”I couldn’t go into work and say, ‘I’m done.’ It wasn’t anything,” he said.

His wife had been in a bad accident the year before and could not work. They needed the money for routine expenses. He told his immediate family about his winnings, but he thought that, if he mentioned them to co-workers, they might grow jealous.

So he kept the matter a secret.

When he went to a lottery outlet on Rising Sun Avenue to validate his ticket, he parked his car out of sight, so no one would take note of his license plate number. He wore mirrored sunglasses and drew his jacket tight against his beard. He covered the area on the back of the ticket where he had written his name and address.

“I just want to do this very peacefully and quietly,” he told the business owner, Peg McKeown Zimmerman. He made her promise that she would stamp his ticket and let him leave without telling anyone. The lottery people in Harrisburg agreed not to advertise his name.

His moment of glory came and went with little to tip off acquaintances other than a redone basement and kitchen.

Naturally, when Humphries won again, he decided to go back to the same beer distributorship for validation. “I came back to you again because I did it again,” he told the owner. “This time is going to be a little different.”

This time he was going to throw a party and she was going to cater it.

He let his guard down a little. He told her his first name.

When he talked to the publicity people in Harrisburg, he learned that they, too, wanted to handle it a little differently. He would have to appear in a ceremony because he was the only person to hit the jackpot twice in the 16- year history of the game and was Philadelphia’s biggest winner.

“People want to see that the average guy can do it,” lottery publicist Jane E. Shafer told him.

So Humphries decided to do it in grand style.

For $414, he rented a stretch limousine to take him and his wife to Harrisburg and invited his mother-in-law and his best friend, Bruce Stuhlman, to join them. They bought three bottles of Korbel champagne and three of Great Western. “We even got pink,” he said. “We did it right.”

After meeting the press and the cameras, the Humphries party rolled back to Philadelphia, stopping occasionally to pop another bottle of champagne that had been chilling in the trunk.

They made a special stop on the way, at the store in Jeffersonville where he had bought the winning ticket.

Joe Maggio, owner of the Jeffersonville Beverage Center, ran out to meet the stretch limousine. For 45 minutes, Maggio introduced his famous customer to everyone in sight. Before Humphries left, he gave the man an envelope containing two $100 bills, making good on a promise he had made months before.

*

The week before the press conference, Humphries sat in his living room scanning newspaper ads for houses in places such as Blue Bell and Buckingham, places with some land and no noise coming through common walls. He envisioned beach houses and automobile showrooms.

But when he picked up the $242,000 check, the first of 21 he will receive, he and his wife had more-sober thoughts. They thought of their parents and siblings and how hard they work at the jobs they will be tied to until retirement.

On Tuesday night, Humphries and his wife drove around distributing gifts

from their vacation – little pineapples, T-shirts and blown-glass knickknacks. They also handed out checks – $95,000 in all.

“You think of all the things you could do and you could get greedy and keep it all,” Humphries said. “But I’ve known all these people (since) growing up.”

Marie spoke softly: “It is such a good feeling to see the expressions on their faces.”

As for the rest of their money, Humphries has an uncle who is a vice president at a Center City bank. They will choose the best investmest counselor and lawyer they can find.

The couple, who have no children, have splurged a little. They were supposed to vacation in Hawaii during the first week of June. They decided to stay two weeks.

Humphries was sitting by the pool on his vacation one afternoon watching a truck driver make a delivery. “I turned to my wife and I said to her, ‘I don’t want to do a thing again. I don’t have to get up at four in the morning and get home at eight, all exhausted.”

“So,” he said, “I am going to become the ultimate couch potato.”

And with that, Rob Humphries, who now wakes at 9 a.m. with malice toward none, stretched and talked about what he was going to do with his day.

By Daniel Rubin, Inquirer Staff Writer. Published June 10, 1988