Meet ‘Papa Joe,’ the Altadena gas station owner who sold $2-billion winning Powerball ticket
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SAN RAMON, Calif. — This man has a lot of explaining to do.
You see him here: At the gas station at 5:30 in the morning, in his uniform of blue jeans, work boots and a leather jacket, standing on the sidewalk, cradling his giant plastic pimp.
“That was a great call,” Joe Bickham tells me as he stands in Santa Barbara County, California’s Los Padres National Forest. He’s a small-business owner, so he’s been here before.
“Do you know what I did for a living?” he asks. “I was the president of a bank — a small bank.”
He also remembers a time when he sold Powerball tickets.
He sold Powerball tickets. All night.
Bickham sold three tickets in the state of Ohio. He was so confident he’d win big he didn’t even bother to get to the Powerball ticket booth.
It was a Friday night last July when Bickham started selling tickets to a big game called the Ohio Lottery SuperLotto. The last night of the six-draw, night game was the last time he’d have a chance of selling a ticket.
You see him here: At the gas station at 5:30 in the morning, in his uniform of blue jeans, work boots and a leather jacket, standing on the sidewalk, cradling his giant plastic pimp.
He sold three tickets in the state of Ohio. He was so confident he’d win big he didn’t even bother to get to the Powerball ticket booth.
“I had an extra ticket for one of my bank clients, and I was able to sell that,” he says.
So, he drove to the local bank in southern Ohio. He was confident, just as he was at his gas station. And he sold the ticket.
Bickham was about to become a millionaire. He had purchased the ticket at the lottery’s midnight drawing in Ohio — the most expensive Powerball ticket ever
