CLIVE, Iowa — An Iowa farmer has been predicting for years that he would win big in the state’s lottery. Last month, that bold claim finally came through.
Brent Oden, 56, from the southern Iowa city of Cincinnati, won the Lucky for Life game, which guarantees $25,000 annually or a lump sum amount, Iowa Lottery officials said in a news release.
Oden, who runs a farm and owns a sanitation business in the town of 290 residents, matched the first five numbers in the game but missed the Lucky Ball in the June 27 drawing, lottery officials said. That earned him the game’s second prize.
Appanoose County Man Claims Lottery Prize Of $25,000 A Year For Life!https://t.co/0OAFrU3Ozj
— Iowa Lottery (@ialottery) June 29, 2023
The top prize in the $2 game -- when a player matches five numbers from a pool of 48 and one Lucky ball out of 18 possible choices -- is $1,000 a day for life, according to lottery officials.
Oden said he never gave up hope of winning a big prize, even though his wife was becoming skeptical.
“Since we were married, he always played the lottery, and he’s always told me, ‘We’re going to hit the big one. We’re going to win the lottery,’” Julie Oden said in a statement. “And after 25 years of being married and we had never hit the lottery, I thought, ‘Maybe I ought to second-guess this guy, I don’t think we’re ever going to hit this lottery!’”
Brent Oden said he was running late after oversleeping when he bought the winning ticket at the Bratz Oil Corp. gas station in nearby Centerville.
Normally, Oden said he would use the Iowa Lottery’s mobile app to see if he had won, but instead, he handed the ticket to a clerk to scan on a lottery terminal.
“We went in for coffee after we did some chores on the farm,” Oden said in a statement. “I handed my tickets to one of the cashiers, and she ran it. And she looked at me, she looked back at the machine, and she said, ‘I think you just hit something big.’ I said, ‘Surely not.’ And everybody was kind of in shock and awe for a little bit.
“And lo and behold, my stars fell in a row today or something.”
Oden decided to receive a lump-sum payment of $390,000 and collected his cash on June 28, lottery officials said. He said he plans to invest his winnings and perhaps fulfill another promise -- taking his wife back to Hawaii, where they spent their honeymoon a quarter-century ago.
“So I guess I can come through with that promise,” Oden said in a statement.
