MADAWASKA, Maine — When Ronald “Cy” Cyr stepped through the door at Bob’s Neighborhood Store, it wasn’t uncommon for him to joke with cashier Danielle DeVoe and tell her he’d “hit it big” with a lottery ticket, DeVoe said Thursday.
“I would always laugh, because the scratch ticket or lottery ticket would be like a $2 winner,” she said Thursday while at work. “But then on Wednesday, a half-hour after I sold him a scratch ticket, he came in and he had this look on his face, and he told me that he had really hit it big. I just said, ‘no’ and then scanned it. And sure enough, it was true.”
This time, he wasn’t joking. The retired Fraser Paper Co. employee had won $100,000.
“I am very happy,” he said Thursday afternoon. “I have filled out all the claim forms, so I should see the winnings pretty soon.”
Cyr said Thursday he has been playing the lottery since the 1970s and won $50 on Wednesday on a $10 ticket from a Kmart store. He took that ticket to Bob’s Neighborhood Store to purchase fuel and more lottery tickets, including the winning “20 Times” scratch ticket.
Besides Cyr’s $100,000 winner, the store twice before has sold a winning Megabucks ticket.
In 1989, a resident purchased a winning $1.3 million ticket there, and a winning $3 million Tri-State Megabucks lottery ticket was bought there in February 2014.
“I think it is because of good employees and a good store,” DeVoe said of the store’s winning luck.
Cyr said he has no big plans to spend the money.
“The government will get their chunk of it,” he said. “I retired in August 2012 and started to make a budget for myself, so I’m a little bit relieved that I’ll have some more money to put into that budget.”
He added he was going to give some of the money to family members.
“I’m going to spend the money wisely,” Cyr said Thursday.
Asked whether he was going to continue to buy scratch tickets, Cyr was quick to reply: “Of course.”