Oak Harbor couple gets $460,000 lottery surprise

Penny and Scott Baldwin of Oak Harbor have plans after winning $460,000 in Washington Lottery’s Hit 5 game.

Penny and Scott Baldwin of Oak Harbor have plans after winning $460,000 in Washington Lottery’s Hit 5 game.

The couple purchased the ticket in late May at the Oak Harbor Haggen Food Grocery Store.

“We’re dumbfounded,” she said.

“We don’t play the Lotto expecting to win big.”

But win big they did.

They like to regularly spend a few dollars on lottery tickets and said they were quite happy to win the occasional few bucks, Penny Baldwin said.

They were visiting Haggen on their routine grocery run earlier this month when Penny Baldwin decided to check her tickets. She left her husband in line and wandered over to the Lotto kiosk.

The first few tickets she fed into the machine weren’t winners. SORRY NOT A WINNER, the machine read … SORRY NOT A WINNER.

Then she fed the scanner the last one.

At 63, she needs reading glasses, and she didn’t have them at the time. She could see what looked like a “four” on the computer.

“I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but I could tell this one said something different,” she said. “I asked the customer service worker to scan the ticket and read me what it said.”

The Haggen cashier’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open.

“Ma’am, you just won $460,000!” the cashier said.

The store employees knew someone had purchased a winning ticket at their store, but they didn’t know who.

Penny Baldwin ran over to her husband, who was next in line at the checkout. She told her husband he needed to come with her NOW. She said she didn’t want to blurt out the good news in public.

At first he didn’t want to leave his place in line. Something about her tone of voice sounded like his mother, so he obeyed. They abandoned the groceries and drove home to call the Lotto office, cradling the winning slip of paper like a golden ticket.

“We were holding onto this thing for dear life,” she said.

The Baldwins are both retired. His last position was with a shipping company where he managed cargo loading and unloading. She worked nearly four decades for JC Penney. Penny Baldwin is an Oak Harbor native. She graduated Oak Harbor High School as Penny Porter in 1972.

They moved back to Oak Harbor four years ago.

After they confirmed the win, he called his mother and she called her brother. They all celebrated with a drive to a regional lottery office in Everett.

The lottery office gave them a check for $345,000 — the state immediately takes taxes.

The couple put aside another $20,000 just in case there are more taxes to pay. They put some in savings and the plan to use the rest to remodel their home, which used to belong to her parents.