A TEXAS DELIVERANCE

At the precise center of Roby, Texas, on one of the town’s more expensive pieces of real estate, is a crudely made sign: good used clothes 10 cents to $1. It sits in front of a faded little store and tells you everything you need to know about the economics of this dying cotton-and-cattle town. The average house here costs $30,000. The average income is barely $20,000. Everywhere buildings are boarded up, abandoned, sinking in the rust-red dirt. The population is 616 and dwindling.

The town needed a miracle. And over Thanksgiving weekend it got one. With a mixture of shock and gratitude, Roby residents learned that 39 of their own had won more than $1 million each in the Texas state lottery. They belonged to a pool of 43 people organized by Peggy Dickson, 48, a bookkeeper at the town’s cotton gin. Each wagered $10, enabling the pool to buy 430 tickets. The one that won paid $46.7 million–that’s $54,255.81 a person each year for the next 20 years, or roughly $40,000 after taxes. Dickson had never before organized such a lottery syndicate, and many of its participants had never bought a lottery ticket. “It still doesn’t feel exactly real,” says Kathy Terry, one of 21 Terry kinfolk who won (they all are descendants of the town’s founders).

Roby residents have reason to be suspicious of their good luck, which has been unfamiliar lately. Misfortunes have descended with biblical force: a three-year drought, a continuing plague of boll weevils and crashing cattle prices. Twenty-eight winners were farmers or ranchers, and three-fourths of them were in deep financial trouble. “In June they were fixing to come get our stuff,” says Kathy Terry of the bankers who hold the notes on their farm. “We’ve kept it going only because we got a loan from my dad. My husband was already looking around for other work.” Manuel Valdez, 43, and his wife Susie, 37, were close to losing Susie’s Fish & Grill, which the couple sank their life savings into only five months before. Manuel, who had stopped by the cotton gin (owned by the Terrys, of course) for a cup of coffee and joined the lottery pool on a lark, says they could not have held out much longer. “This month I really didn’t even want to come to work,” he says. “I opened the checkbook, and we were down to our last $136.” Another winner, Gene Terry, 61, says he had got so far into debt that he had to put up his two small farms as security. “A lot of these farmers just could not have kept farming another year if they had not won,” says Mayor Cecil King.

To the question, “What are you going to do with the money?,” the winners say, “Well, buy our freedom, of course.” But freedom in Roby does not mean traveling in Europe, buying a new car or moving away from the dusty prairie. “I’ll tell you what $40,000 means to us,” says Kathy Terry. “It means we can pay off the interest we owe.” Years of financial insecurity have made people like Lance Green, 30, hang on tightly to the things he can count on, like his $9-an-hour job. He doesn’t plan to quit at the gin even after he pays off the debts he ran up in his construction business. “Yeah, I could go out right now and buy a new pickup,” says Mike Terry, 37, who makes $30,000 a year at the Terry cotton gin and whose wife makes $10,000 at the bank. “But I say, What a waste of a whole year’s lottery payment. We’re thinking about things like a college education for our three kids.” The Valdezes plan to hang on to their restaurant and re-enroll their 21-year-old son in college; he dropped out for financial reasons this year.

Even though the dreams of Roby’s millionaires fit their struggles, that has not kept outsiders from as far away as Germany from calling in with investment tips. One financial adviser who contacted several winners billed himself as a “lottery economist.” Green says he has received a phone call from his ex-wife, with whom he has a daughter, expressing interest in the disposition of the money. If there’s any bad feelings from people who missed out on the now famous pool, the tight-knit Robyites are not saying. Two men who were invited to join the pool and turned it down, however, were said by everyone to be “sick about it.”

For now, at least, there seems to be a tacit consensus in Roby that the best outcome of the lottery would be a life that continues unchanged. Winner Thurman Terry, 82, patriarch of the Terry clan, vows to do just that, which means running a few head of cattle. “The problem with retirement,” he says with a wry smile, “is that when you retire you are liable to die, and I have no such plans.”