Skip to footer

Powerball winner? Mystery woman picks up tab for 180 diners.

Powerball winner may have been the woman who picked up the tab for 180 patrons at a Florida restaurant. The woman denied she was the winner of a $590 Powerball jackpot earlier this month. 

|
Steve Cannon/AP/File
Powerball winner Gloria C. Mackenzie, leaves the lottery office escorted by her son Scott Mackenzie, right, after claiming a single lump-sum payment of about $370.9 million earlier this month in Tallahassee, Fla. A woman who picked up the tab for diners at a Florida restaurant Sunday afternoon denied being the Powerball winner, but the restaurant's manager said she bore a striking resemblance to Mackenzie.
  • By Associated Press

| Plant City, Fla.

A mystery woman who many said resembled the Florida woman who recently won the $590 million Powerball jackpot picked up the tab for 180 diners at a Plant City restaurant on Sunday afternoon.

Stephanie Reaves, manager of BuddyFreddy's restaurant, said a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Gloria C. MacKenzie — the 84-year-old Zephyrhills woman who took a lump-sum payment of about $370.9 million on June 5 — paid about $2,600 to cover the cost of meal. She even left $50 tips for each of the five servers on duty.

"Everybody got up and applauded and started hugging her," said Reaves told the Tampa Bay Times (http://bit.ly/11yyp7o ). "In my 35 years in the restaurant industry, I've never seen anything like it."

Reaves said the woman was accompanied by another woman and a man. When asked, the donor said she was not the Powerball winner.

"It sure looked like her," Reaves added. "She looked like the woman on TV."

MacKenzie bought a ticket for May 18 Powerball drawing at a Publix supermarket in Zephyrhills, which is north of Plant City. It was the largest undivided jackpot in U.S. history. She took her prize in a lump-sum payment of just over $370 million. After federal taxes, she received about $278 million.

The retiree from Maine, who has four children, did not speak to the media when she claimed the prize in Tallahassee.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Powerball winner? Mystery woman picks up tab for 180 diners.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0614/Powerball-winner-Mystery-woman-picks-up-tab-for-180-diners
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe