At first, 58-year-old Roy Cockrum, a former priest who had taken a vow of poverty, though he’d won $500, and he was pretty excited about that. It wasn’t till he scratched off the last number that he realized he’d actually won a new Tennessee record: nearly 260 million dollars. However, Cockrum is a man of his word, and he intends to donate the majority of his winnings to charities, and he wants to start a performing arts foundation. He plans on keeping a little for retirement.
“Life goes on,” he told reporters. “I picked myself up, put the winning ticket in my wallet and went to pick up my mother. I walked around University of Tennessee Medical Center all that morning with a $259.8 million winner in my pocket … I have received great counsel, and I will continue working very hard to make sure every single penny of this prize is a blessing to anyone it touches” …