This American Life - 113: Windfall

Broadcast on: 16 Oct 1998

From W.B. E.C. Chicago, the public radio international, it's this American life, and I require a glass. Every morning when I wake up at some point in time through the morning, those numbers are the first things that pop in my head, and it's been over two and a half years, but I still think of those numbers every day. There are not any significant numbers for the fact of, I didn't even pick the numbers, I'll let the computer pick them, but they're etched in my mind, 3, 8, 9, 37, 38, 48. Not that long ago, Todd Powell won $27 million from the Florida State Lottery. Up until that point, he made his living working long hours in the ice and snow on the Alaska pipeline. He sat on the bed the morning he won, watching them draw the numbers on television, his bags packed to head north to Alaska. I tried to wake my wife up to tell her that I'd hit the lottery and when I woke her up she thought I was fibbing to her. She grabbed the comforter and threw it over her head and just didn't want to hear it. And I told her, I said, "Well, if you will look at my heart, you can tell that I'm not fibbing to you and you can actually see it in my neck beating." And I felt like it was just fixing a bounce clean out of my chest. Money changes things and a lot of money changes a lot of things. People Todd had known his whole life were nervous talking with him, strangers rode asking for money, sometimes real lot of money, they were family troubles. Right after the lottery, the woman that I was married to just, I started seeing changes, dramatic changes in the fact that she kind of looked at it a little different than I. We had only been married seven months and she just looked at it as well there was this big pile of money there that I can just do whatever I want to with it. He couldn't sleep at night, couldn't eat, lost 26 pounds, he only weighed 154 when he won the lottery. There were fights every money with his wife that got divorced. He lent friends money who not only never paid a bag, they avoided him, they got indignant when he asked for the money, saying he couldn't possibly miss a few thousand bucks, he changes your all that. I may have gotten a little harder, I don't know because a lot of times now when people start with the bleeding heart stuff, you know what's fixing to follow and it kind of just makes you where your brick wall goes up in your own mind, you know, how this brick wall starts to form, well today in our program, Wind Falls and the power of money for good and bad over our own lives, act one, reservations, a story of an entire community that is turning its back on a fortune, and why that might not last, back two, but baby it's cold outside, better dance savage on how a windfall check he got in the mail is hurting his family life. Act three, money is good, how one woman learned to stop worrying and start spending spending spending, act four, pot of gold, Scott Carrier tells the story of someone's life that improved with a huge insurance settlement, even though the money never arrived, stayless. Act one, reservations, nine years ago a Native American tribe in Minnesota, the Milax band of Ojibwe built a casino, the reservation had been poor for a century, soon they were the second biggest tourist attraction in the state, second only to the Mall of America, then they had hundreds of millions of dollars, and it's unclear what to do with all that cash, or we speak or visited. It's eight o'clock on a Monday morning and there are a thousand people on the floor of the grand casino. A thousand people have showered, brushed their hair and teeth, put on clothing and traveled some of them significant distances to the grand, where they're now pouring money into

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