(MONEY Magazine) – The trim young woman with the mop of curly brown hair walked across the front lawn toward her front door. Her name was Sandy, and she'd lived her whole life in Parkridge, a neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. She had been raising her own three kids and watching two nephews and a niece for pocket money, supplementing the wages of her husband John, a machinist. They were typical residents of Parkridge, where houses were tidy but tiny, where modest lives were measured out in eight-hour shifts.

Then in the twinkling of an eye, everything changed. Their prospects, once about the size of Parkridge, suddenly seemed as big as the whole wide world. Their feeling of freedom, once limited to the times when they would tear along on John's Harley-Davidson, was now total. On this day in July, in an act of unmitigated joy, Sandy abruptly sprang high into the air and clicked her heels. It was as if she were testing whether the laws of gravity still applied to her--for the laws of economics surely no longer did. She and John had just become millionaires.

The life-altering force was Powerball, a megalottery with mega-odds staged by 20 states and the District of Columbia. It was an 80-million-to-1 shot that a player could plunk down a buck and get a ticket whose six numbers matched those on balls drawn twice weekly in West Des Moines, Iowa. Powerball's administrators had changed the rules to lengthen the odds in late 1997. They bet that the slim chance of correctly picking five numbers between one and 49--plus a sixth, the Powerball, from one to 42--would create a big lure. Few winners would mean big jackpots and big interest.

It worked, big-time. In late July, Powerball fever gripped America like the midsummer heat. The jackpot built toward $300 million, and people stood in line for hours in order to buy tickets. By the night of the July 29 drawing, 45,000 outlets had churned out 210 million tickets. Only one would be a winner.

It was held by a group of Columbus-area factory workers, who would collect a lump-sum payout of $161.5 million. This is the story of one couple in that group--which came to be called the Lucky 13--and the mixed blessings Powerball has brought them. That the blessings would be mixed is something Sandy began to sense almost before her heels returned to the ground.

"I WAS SO CLOSE TO QUITTING, SO CLOSE"

"It's weird," says Sandy. "I always wondered how people feel when they hit [the lottery], and I didn't expect it to feel like this."

She and John are in a conference room at MONEY's offices, where they agreed to talk about how they've managed their fortune and their lives. The only conditions: that we not print their last names or photograph their faces. They've had their 15 minutes of fame, thank you, and that was quite enough.

Sandy is draped in a black leather jacket on this winter morning; John's burly figure fills his jeans and black T-shirt. They put on no airs. On their first visit to New York, they are most keenly interested in shopping at Harley-Davidson's midtown store.

And yet, while so much about them remains the same, they've found that their windfall has brought powerful changes and puzzling dichotomies. Old worries have been replaced by new ones. Their net worth has exploded, but some of their friendships have eroded. They have learned to value new things in their lives, like tax-free munis, but they have also learned anew the value of the oldest thing in their lives, their family. And they have learned the wisdom of being careful about what you wish for.

In their wish for fortune, John and Sandy were not alone. In the nation's $650 billion legal gaming business, lotteries are second only to casinos as a betting attraction. Sandy, 32, played bingo weekly. John, 34, had long played weekend poker. They had taken two flights in their lives: one to Atlantic City to play the casinos and one to Kansas City, Mo., where Sandy won a radio-station contest to see a George Strait concert but where the real highlight was a riverboat outing (she won $1,200 at a slot machine).

John played the Ohio state lottery with a group of machinists at Automation Tooling Systems, the factory in suburban Westerville where he had worked for 12 years. He and a dozen co-workers kicked $5 or $6 apiece into a weekly ticket-purchasing pool. In addition, they'd often make a side bet among themselves.

Over the five years that they had been playing, they'd seen little return on their investment. But John enjoyed the diversion from his mill machine, where he made parts for factory automation systems. And he enjoyed the weekly ritual with his friends. Still, last July, he nearly dropped out. He worked hard to provide for his family, which included a 15-year-old girl and seven- and nine-year-old boys. He often put in 60-hour weeks and had a portion of his pay direct-deposited into his savings account.

He watched expenses closely. There was, for example, a bathing suit in a catalogue that Sandy had coveted, but he wouldn't let her buy it. And in a summer that been hard--a friend killed in a car accident, Sandy's aunt felled by a stroke--making ends meet had seemed harder too. John had told Sandy to quit playing bingo, and he was about to drop out of the lottery pool. "I was so close to quitting," he says now, "so close."

He was particularly skeptical about the gang's plan to play Powerball, which was a separate deal from their usual lottery. Because Ohio wasn't a Powerball state, one of them would have to make a 100-mile run to Indiana to buy tickets. But unlike John, most of these dedicated players were dying to get in on the biggest jackpot of all time. They decided to collect $10 a man and buy 130 tickets.

When the collector came around, John balked. This was twice the usual ante, the odds were astronomical and he was feeling strapped. He remembers grumbling: "Why am I playing the Indiana lottery when I can't even hit the Ohio lottery?"

"If you don't want to get in," the collector responded, "don't get in."

John paused, mused, then dug deep for a ten-spot.

"I'll be damned if you get rich without me," he said.

GET THAT BATHING SUIT

But John gave little more thought to hitting the lottery and lots more to making ends meet. Two nights after the group bought its Powerball tickets, he told Sandy that she should put off buying the boys' school clothes. He had to make a mortgage payment.

By the time the drawing was held later that evening, John had gone to bed. But Sandy was watching TV. As the numbered balls came out of a hopper in West Des Moines at 10:59 p.m., she jotted down the digits. Then she began comparing them with the group's photocopied tickets. She started with the last number drawn--the Powerball--and found a ticket that matched that 13. Then she began comparing the other numbers.

She burst into their bedroom, shouting, "Turn on the light! Turn on the light!"

She told John to read the numbers she'd jotted down, while she recited the photocopied numbers.

"Are those the numbers?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"We hit it!"

John didn't believe it. Close, maybe, but one of those numbers had to be off. Sandy's father didn't believe it either when she called on the phone, screaming. Her father lived just down the street in Parkridge, and he sent over another daughter with the numbers he'd written down. "Dad," she reported back, "they got it."

John and Sandy started calling the others with the incredible news, and the whooping began. "This guy's wife said to me," recalls John, "'You better not be lying; I got to work in the morning.' And I said, 'No, you don't. You retired.'"

In the wee hours, there was only one way to go on a celebratory spending spree--by phone. John gave Sandy his Visa card and told her to order that bathing suit she had wanted. By dawn, they were in as much a state of shock as ecstasy as they drove to Automation Tooling Systems to meet the others. "Tell me," Sandy asked John, "are we on the way to your work because we hit the lottery last night?"

"Yeah, I think so," he said.

The morning was a blur: the embracing and laughing and yelling; the sobering meeting with lawyer Larry Sturtz, who lectured the group on what they'd need to do to protect their newfound fortunes. There was also a disturbing message for Sandy to call home.

"Sandy," her sister said, "[Channels] 4, 6 and 10 are at your front door."

"I'VE NEVER BEEN SO DEPRESSED"

The Lucky 13 had hoped to remain anonymous, but someone outed John and Sandy. They came home to a gaggle of reporters and cameramen; John promised them a quick interview if they'd promise a quick exit. They kept their word, but for days the rest of the media world beat a path to Parkridge. In response, John and Sandy packed off the kids with family members, holed up inside as much as they could, developed a phone code to screen calls and shut down their innate midwestern friendliness.

They even blew off Tom Brokaw--twice. The NBC anchor called once and John hung up. Brokaw called right back and Sandy answered. When he asked for John, Sandy said he wasn't there. Yes he is, the anchor insisted. "I was sitting on the couch, and I turned around and looked," Sandy recalls. "I thought, 'Maybe he's outside the window and can see through.' It freaked me out."

Celebrity did have its moments. When John and Sandy escaped on the Harley, they drew approving honks and thumbs-up from other motorists. After they walked into an auto dealership at the very moment their images appeared on a showroom TV, they got highly attentive service. "Some of the guys had problems getting vehicles," says John. "We had no problem at all. It was like, 'Here, please, take these cars.'" He got a Chevy Tahoe pickup as a loaner until the one with all his options was ready.

More often, the attention was disconcerting. Letters from supplicants poured into Automation Tooling Systems: the woman who wanted $56,000 to escape her abusive husband, the parents who wanted their kids put through college, the inventors who wanted money to fund their gizmos. It was at once funny and scary. All these losers in the lottery seemed to feel they were owed a consolation prize by the winners. When the Columbus Dispatch printed John and Sandy's home address, they felt as if a big bull's-eye had been placed on their bungalow: Here, creeps, help yourself.

The fears intensified at night. John had long kept guns in a cabinet in the basement, plus a favorite pistol, unloaded, in a bedroom closet. Now he moved the pistol to a bedside table and kept it loaded. The Great Dane moved from his nighttime cage to the bedside too. He was more pussycat than attack dog, in truth, but he was a great barker. And still they slept poorly. "It was scary," says Sandy. "Every little sound, you were up."

Within days, they were house hunting. Without benefit of much looking--six, eight properties max--they settled on a place in the country. On Aug. 17, they plunked down $300,000-plus in cash and took leave of Parkridge, where they'd lived all their lives. It seemed as much a retreat as a move up. Much more than John, Sandy has come to feel distanced from the world she knew. "I've never been so depressed in my life as after we hit the Powerball," she says. "Things were just so much easier when we had the little house, and I was babysitting my niece and nephews. You've just got to worry about so much now."

"HE'S ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT THE STOCK, THE STOCK"

Over the next month, the mind-boggling act of winning the jackpot gave way to the mind-bending challenges of managing it. Initially, the $161.5 million payoff sounded like all the money in the world. But it would be sliced and diced and reduced to a sum that required attention. Splitting it 13 ways meant $12.4 million apiece. Paying taxes brought the free-and-clear total to about $6.5 million. Not inconsiderable, but that kind of money had been squandered by plenty of lottery winners on bum deals and bum relatives.

John and Sandy were determined not to go down that path, but their footing was unsure. They certainly hadn't had any training or experience that would prepare them for handling this kind of money. John was close to another Lucky 13 member who'd found a broker to manage his winnings, and at first, John and Sandy thought they might use the same one. But before long both winners began to consider other options. John turned for advice to the lawyer he'd hired for another bewildering new concern, estate planning.

The lawyer, William A. Morse, suggested that John satisfy himself with some comparison shopping. Morse invited six candidates to his office. One was a bank trust officer; two were stockbrokers (including the original choice) and three were certified financial planners. Over two afternoons in late August, John and Sandy heard one pitch after another--investment philosophies, practices, fees and outlooks. They chose one of the planners, Robert D. Hamilton, whose central proposition was simple: Divide your nest egg into equal parts. Put 50% in municipal bonds, which he calculated would yield $150,000 a year tax-free, and 50% into a stock-oriented portfolio. "[They] could generate enough income to sustain a certain lifestyle and put the rest toward lifetime investment growth," says Hamilton.

Other candidates offered similar ideas, but it was the 57-year-old Hamilton who clicked with John and Sandy. Hamilton had a crisp directness that went with having been a successful college basketball coach, both at Ohio's Wittenburg University and at the U.S. Naval Academy. He'd left that profession for this one in 1980, and now his PDS Planning firm managed about $120 million. "He was honest and straightforward," says John, who also liked PDS' modest size.

And now, in biweekly meetings at PDS' offices, John began his education in the markets. Though Sandy was often there too, it was generally John who took the lead. Both Hamilton, who has two other Lucky 13 clients, and Morse, who has three, found themselves impressed. "John goes against type," says Morse. "He's soft-spoken, he takes notes, he reflects on matters, and he gets back to me quickly with decisions."

While John and Hamilton agreed that they'd defer most major investment decisions until 1999, John wanted to get started right away with a few stocks of personal interest. He and Hamilton quickly put in buy orders for Anheuser-Busch (he's a Bud man), Hershey (Sandy's interest) and Harley-Davidson. John was employing the Peter Lynch buy-what-you-know strategy, and Hamilton was thrilled. "I encouraged that," he says. "It gets people interested, watching, and from that experience people learn how to make an investment."

Sandy was less thrilled, as her husband began turning to the newspaper's business section ahead of the sports section and offering running commentaries. "He's always talking about the stock, the stock, the stock," she complains. "I say, 'I'm so tired of hearing about those stocks.' We don't want to touch any of that money from our stocks until the year 2000, and we won't even have to then, so I'm not even going to look at it till then. It doesn't matter what it's doing now."

"I'm having fun with it," says John with a smile.

"LIKE THAT'S GOING TO HURT YOUR BANK ACCOUNT"

The truth is that while the sums of money in this couple's lives have changed, their attitudes about it have not. John hates wasting money just as much as when he was living paycheck to paycheck, and his battles with Sandy are sometimes hand to hand. She wanted to buy a new Dodge Viper; he decried a two-seater as impractical (she settled for a Grand Am). On a celebratory trip to Las Vegas, Sandy would have been a willing high roller, but John set a strict limit of $5,000 each, sticking to it even after Sandy made an auspicious winning bet at the roulette table--on No. 13.

It's this way, says Sandy: "If I would go spend money before we hit the lottery, he would get really mad and yell at me. Now that we hit the lottery and I go spend money, he gets really mad and yells at me. So it's the same."

John has even continued to work at Automation Tooling Systems along with several of the other Lucky 13. While Sandy rejected John's suggestion that she get a part-time job--"Not in this lifetime," she says--John feels that work has helped him bridge the chasm between their old life and their new one. He puts in only about half the number of hours he once did, and he's gone from machinist to supervisor. But he's stayed with it to maintain a routine, avoid a radical retooling of his life and contribute to a company he likes. Each morning he raises the flag in front of the plant.

"I get a lot of satisfaction out of keeping things moving smoothly, and I like the camaraderie with the other guys," he says--particularly the other Lucky 13ers who remain on the job. "The guys I still work with have different financial people," says John. "So I come back to work and say, 'My guy said this and this and this.' And they're like, 'Well, my guy said this and this.' So we take it back [to the advisers] and say, 'Why aren't we doing this?' I'm not sure our advisers like that too much, but I think it works."

The truncated factory hours leave him more time to spend with his kids, and that's what this father who spent so many Saturdays at work most wants to give them. As for buying them lots of new things, he told them early on to forget it. He was still going to squeeze a nickel until it screamed, and he demonstrated that by handling the move to the new house himself.

The house isn't a mansion, but at 3,000 feet-plus, it is more than double the size of the old place. And it does have a pond, which the kids can traverse on two paddleboats, and five acres of elbow room. John sometimes wanders it in wonder. "I go out and just look at our property," he says. "I love it."

For Sandy, however, the place underscores a gnawing sense of isolation. They're still in a hideout mentality, preferring not to disclose the new home's location. They're a half-hour from Parkridge and the rest of the family. And their 15-year-old daughter has had a tough time adjusting to the loss of old friends. Sandy also feels she's lost or been distanced from friends, some of whom seemed to become uneasy with her new circumstances. "It's not us that did any changing," she says. "It's the people around us."

She cringes when she hears the envy in the voices of those friends, which tends to happen when they go shopping together. "Let's say we see a $100 pair of pants," she says. "My normal reaction before we hit the lottery would be, 'Wow, that's a lot of money for a pair of pants.' And my normal reaction after we hit the lottery would be, 'Wow, that's a lot of money for a pair of pants.' But my friend will say, 'Like that's going to hurt your bank account.' I really hate those comments."

John sensed the same scrutiny when he played poker with buddies over Thanksgiving. And he felt the same way when he took a group of family members to lunch and left a 20% tip. "The word got back that I was a cheapskate," he says. "I am a cheapskate. I'm not denying that. But I'm not a bad tipper. I'll leave 15% even if service is bad. In this case, I tried to leave a fair amount. I don't know if people expect you to have a wad of $100 bills, and you just throw them at everybody or what."

As a result, John and Sandy watch what they say and spend constantly, sometimes feeling they can only let down their hair with fellow members of the Lucky 13. Even then, it's not as if they're all the same, like some parts stamped out at Automation Tooling. There are Powerballers who are playing a lot faster and looser with their money than John and Sandy. "Some of the guys make me nervous," he says. "I hope they end up okay." But only the other winners can truly understand the reality of what's happened. Only they won't scoff in disbelief if the unmentionable is ever mentioned. That's just what Sandy did at a party once, when she told one of the 13 that she'd sometimes wished that this had never happened.

"Have you ever felt that way?" she recalls asking.

"Yep," he responded, "I've said that more than once."

FOR RICHER OR POORER

She's not at such a low ebb now. These days, Sandy is looking forward to a big event. She and John are going to renew their vows this summer, and they're going to do it up big: 200-plus guests for a ceremony at the house and a hell of a party afterward.

It's something that will underscore a central truth that John and Sandy have discovered. The new money is dandy, all right, if you can get your arms around its management and keep your equilibrium. But it's some of the old things, whose value they never fully appreciated, that have seen them through.

Who knew how great their family would be? From the beginning, their relatives gave them nonstop support; they didn't hit them up for loans; they cleaved to John and Sandy when others pulled away. And the couple, in gratitude for that and a lifetime of other things, bestowed hundreds of thousands of dollars on their parents and seven siblings.

John expressed their gratitude once again when he and Sandy invited everyone--all 34 immediate family members--to the country for a Christmas party. After Sandy fed everybody honey ham and after they handed out gifts, John gave a little speech. "If our investments go good and I can control Sandy's spending," he said, pausing for laughs, "we'll keep sharing our good fortune with everybody."

Then John handed Sandy a present too. She opened it and there was...a diamond necklace and diamond earrings. She cried; John demurred. "It was rough, believe me," he says. "The guy had to twist my arm to get me to get the matching earrings."

Who could have known their marriage would stand up so well way back in 1983, when the boy and girl who'd grown up across the street from each other exchanged their vows and married for richer or poorer? On the day of their wedding, John was 18, Sandy 16. They had no tux, no wedding gown, no honeymoon, except for a wedding night spent at Howard Johnson's. Four months later, they were parents. It probably didn't occur to them at the time, but the odds against their living happily ever after must have been pretty much on the same order as hitting the lottery.