Man's pizza craving wins him $1M - KCTV5

A closed hospital cafeteria, a craving for pizza and sporadic lottery playing has made an Iowa man a millionaire.

Adair resident Steve Petty had rushed to the hospital to be by the bedside of his ailing 95-year-old mother. Petty, 58, and his siblings stayed by their mother's side after she slipped and suffered a bad fall.

And then he became hungry.

He tried to stop for some lunch before heading back to the Guthrie County Hospital on Saturday. But he was unsuccessful in that.

But he then won a lot more.

"After all the restaurants I went to were closed, I told my sister-in-law, 'I'll just run up to Casey's to get a pizza.' I waited and waited and said, 'Give me three quick picks,'" said Petty in an Iowa Lottery news release. "I went home, started working on tax clients and said to myself, 'Let's see what happened with the lotto.'"

Of those three Powerball tickets from Casey's, he struck it big on his second play.

"I saw those numbers so quick, it was unbelievable. I usually have to check my numbers 20 times just to make sure I didn't win anything," Petty said with a laugh as he claimed his prize Monday afternoon at the Iowa Lottery's headquarters in Des Moines.

Petty then called his sister, trying to figure out how much he had won.

"They called me and said, 'Steven, you are a millionaire,'" he said. "And I said, 'Are you sure?'"

The organist and tax preparer plans to spend his money wisely by planning for retirement and possibly purchase a new car.

"I invested maybe $22 on lottery tickets in 2011," he said in a news release.

And to add to his good fortune, Petty would have originally only won $200,000, but since the $2 Powerball debuted on Jan. 15, his ticket matched the first five numbers, missing the Powerball to win the $1 million prize. 

There was no jackpot winner for the drawing.

"I wasn't aware of that," he said. "That makes this fortuitous."

Indeed, he is a lucky man.

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