Tinley Park restaurant sells $1M lottery ticket
BY STEVE METSCH smetsch@southtownstar.com November 1, 2012 5:24PM
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Updated: December 3, 2012 6:37AM
Someone who stopped by Boston’s The Gourmet Pizza in Tinley Park is much closer this week to being a big cheese.
The restaurant and bar sold one of four winning tickets worth $1 million in the Illinois Lottery’s Halloween Millionaire Raffle, the lottery said in a news release. The winning number was 137958.
Boston’s, at 7216 W. 191st St., will receive a $10,000 bonus, 1 percent of the jackpot amount, for selling a winning ticket, the lottery said. The other three $1 million-winning tickets were sold in Streamwood, Cary and Petersburg.
The winner who bought the ticket in Tinley Park had not come forward as of late Thursday afternoon, a lottery official said.
When the employees at Boston’s learned a winning ticket had been sold there, “everybody was really excited,” manager Lisa Helwig said. “Everybody was asking each other, ‘Do you have the ticket? Do you?’ They were trying to figure it out. It’s all kind of surreal.”
Selling a big winner “is pretty neat,” she said. “We have no idea who won and we’re told we may not know for a couple of days, according to the lottery. It could be anybody. It could be someone who just stopped in. Or it could be one of our regulars. We hope it’s one of the people who frequent the restaurant.”
There’s a lottery machine at the bar, so one of the bartenders sold the ticket, she said.
“We’ve had $200 and $300 winners before, but we’ve never had anything like $1 million,” she said.
For more information and a complete list of winning raffle numbers, visit www.illinoislottery.com.
