Aging Gaston veteran battling cancer needs more than lottery luck after losing tickets
| The Gaston Gazette
The odds may seem about equal to winning a big North Carolina Education Lottery jackpot, but Gastonia resident Billy Rooks hopes that if someone has found approximately 150 lottery tickets in a Ziplock bag that they’ll come forward and return them to him.
The 77-year-old retired Navy veteran has been buying lottery tickets for more than 20 years, specifically the Powerball and Carolina Cash 5 games. Suffering from terminal cancer, he hopes to to win a jackpot to build a nest egg for Veronica Rooks, his wife of 52 years.
He secures his tickets in a plastic bag, but recently lost the unchecked tickets that he had accumulated over the past three months.
“It’s probably been over a week since I’ve lost them,” Rooks said Feb. 27.
Rooks placed a classified ad in The Gaston Gazette, hoping that if someone found his tickets they would return them. He believes he lost the tickets near his home in the Titman and South New Hope road area.
Rooks does not know whether the tickets he lost includes winners or not. He had not checked the numbers before losing them. He admits to going on a bit of a spending spree with the tickets when the jackpots in some games reached the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Rooks doesn’t feel he has much time left to live.
He hopes for a little divine intervention in both winning the lottery and getting his lost tickets back.
“Maybe the good Lord will feel sorry for me,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s anybody who is from the working class, and I am, that couldn’t use extra money to leave to their family,” Rooks said. “I think that your wife should get half of your retirement when you pass away because they put in as much time as you do.”
Rooks suffers from multiple myeloma, a form of cancer of the white blood cells that accumulates in the bone marrow. Pain from his illness often forces him to accumulate tickets until he feels well enough to check at a store to see if they have won a prize.
“Half the time my computer is not working to check them so I take the tickets up to the mini mart and run them about every 30 days,” he said.
Rooks believes he may have left the bag of lottery tickets on the roof of his 2005 Mercury Sable station wagon and forgot about them before driving off.
Rooks started playing the lottery after getting injured at work almost 20 years ago.
“I had to have knee surgery and I had a rotator cuff that had been dislocated. I was home all the time so I thought that I would start buying tickets and it became a habit,” Rooks said.
After serving in aviation through the Navy for 24 years, Rooks continued doing work as an aviation mechanic and instructor until retiring almost eight years ago.
Rooks has tried almost every theory he could research in his commitment to winning the lottery.
“You can go on the computer and go month by month, or highlight a specific week, and sites will show you the winning number from the past five or six years,” Rooks said.
Rooks attributes his stubbornness for his commitment to buying lottery tickets, but he doesn’t recommend the hobby to anyone else.
“Don’t buy them,” Rooks laughs. “Invest your money somewhere else. It’s not a good pay off.”
If you find Rooks’s tickets, he can be best reached at 704-824-3965.
Reach Janiya Winchester at (704)-869-1842 or jwinchester@gannett.com
Published at Wed, 03 Mar 2021 13:41:15 +0000