Tennessee Powerball winners plan to keep working

“Well, I think the American public wants to hear from them, and even though they want to be private after this is over, they want the public to know they’re the winners”, Townsend explained.

The couple, who have two children, told Today they planned to take the ticket to Tennessee lottery officials after appearing on the show.

The couple said that they would drive back to Tennessee to cash in their ticket immediately after the interview. “I really didn’t feel like stopping that night, but I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll stop and get them'”.

At home, he laid out the four tickets, one representing each family member, and took a nap.

“My first thought was, I’ve always wanted a horse”, she said.

“All these years, I’ve wondered what it would be like to call my mom and tell her I won the lottery”, he said.

“I went running down the hallway, ‘John, John, you’ve got to check these numbers!'” she told NBC’s Today show.

The Robinsons said they played the lottery only when the jackpot was particularly high in hopes of getting “a little piece of the pie“.

When co-host Carson Daily asked whether he was nervous about carrying a ticket worth more than $100 million in his front pocket, Robinson admitted that, “Now I’m nervous because everybody knows”.

Lisa, who works in a dermatologist’s office, said there had been no time to plan how to spend the money but does not intend to quit her job. She stayed up to watch the Wednesday night drawing, carefully writing down the numbers.

The potential ticket has not been verified by lottery officials, according to the national show. There were three winning tickets in Wednesday’s record-breaking drawing, sold in California, Tennessee and Florida.

The jackpot drawing Wednesday night marked a record-setting day for the Tennessee Lottery, with $18.9 million in tickets sold, said Rebecca Hargrove, CEO of the Tennessee Lottery.

The jackpot winners overcame odds of one in 292 million.

“When we bought the tickets, our first priority was to pay her student loans”, John said.

The couple has a son, Adam, who works as an electrician, and a daughter, Tiffany, who lives nearby in her late grandparents’ home. It was the largest lottery prize offered in North America and no other lottery in the world had ever featured a jackpot of that size that could be won on a single ticket.

He said they have no plans to move from their small, one-story house, or splurge on big purchases.

The Jewish owner of a California chain of nursing homes bought 15,000 Powerball lottery tickets for his employees and residents.