Lois Olsen, who has lived in a small farming village in Alberta for about 50 years, planned to buy a new car with money she said would have been useful years ago

It wasn’t until the late 1960s – when Lois Olsen moved into a newly built house in her small farming village in Alberta, Canada – that she got her first taste of life with indoor plumbing. “I thought I was in heaven, I had running water and I had a telephone,” she recalled.



So when the 80-year-old found out earlier this month that she had won C$50m in the lottery, she was stumped for ideas on what she might do with all the money. “For my family, it’s going to help them out a lot,” she said. “For me, I’m too old for this. I would have liked to have won this 20 or 30 years ago.”

Olsen, who is a great-grandmother, learned of the windfall during a grocery run at her local supermarket. A brief stop to check her lottery ticket in the self-checking machines suggested she had won $15. “I pulled it out, put it back in. It looked like $500,” Olsen told reporters this week as she accepted her big cheque. “I said to the girl, ‘There’s something wrong with this machine.’”

An employee came over to help. “She says, ‘No you just won $50m.’” Speechless, Olsen started shaking. “I just grabbed my groceries and left.”

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The news travelled fast in her central Alberta village of Irma, home to about 450 people. “I dodged the media once there,” she said, laughing as she described watching an out-of-town TV crew ask locals at an event about the big lottery winner. “They didn’t say anything, so I was able to escape home without anything.”

She has few plans for the money, save for helping out her three children, nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. For her, the money comes too late to make a big difference, she said.

“I milked cows for I don’t know how many years by hand, then we finally got a milking machine,” she said. “We milked cows for about 25 years. We had a bunch of pigs, we had range cattle, I raised chickens, turkeys; I had everything. A lot of hard work.”

When pressed by reporters, she said she might replace her 11-year-old car. “I think I’ll buy an SUV, something a little higher for me to get in and out of,” she said. “That will be the big purchase.”

Beyond that, she said little else would change. “Money doesn’t mean a whole bunch to me. I had hard times,” she said. With a laugh, she added, “Maybe not now.”