Headline News

$1 million win for Highland Grove residents

May 9, 2018

Kevin Blair and Cheryl Ellis show off their $1 million cheque. / SUBMITTED

By Jenn Watt

Cheryl Ellis found out she won $1 million in Lotto 6/49 while she was in Toronto, responding to what she thought was an emergency.

Her partner and fellow lottery winner, Kevin Blair, was in the city getting medical treatment when he called her and asked her to come to Toronto.

“I got my friend and we went down to Toronto on the Monday for the emergency and the emergency was he needed me to go to the OLG [Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation] with him to cash in the ticket,” said Ellis in a phone interview on Wednesday, May 9.

Even once she was told she’d won, Ellis said she couldn’t believe it.

“Of course I didn’t believe it, right? How can you believe you’ve just won $1 million? It was just utter disbelief,” she said. “It was disbelief right up until the time that OLG actually confirmed and showed us on a piece of paper how much we’d actually won.”

Blair and Ellis live in Highland Grove and regularly buy lottery tickets from the South Algonquin Country Store in Harcourt, where the winning ticket was purchased. Blair is a retired GM worker and Ellis worked as a flag person with the Haliburton County roads department.

She retired from that job today.

“Most people in Haliburton County, I’m pretty sure they’ve seen that pink hard hat and known it was me out on the road,” she said.

Now that she’s no longer working for the county, Ellis wants to run for council in Highlands East.

The couple intends to use the money to make improvements on their home, Ellis said.

And they’re going to continue playing the lottery.

“I bought a ticket this morning,” she said.