48 weeks later, the ace finally appears
The announcer was holding the ticket above his head, smiling out at the packed rink on Saturday night. He read the numbers, sending thousands of people riffling through their tickets. The winner had 25 minutes to come forward. In the meantime, it was worth reminding everyone about the missing white purse.
“The person is very concerned. She’s been looking for it all afternoon,” the announcer said.
The woman had set the purse down for just a minute, to rest on a bar stool near the tables where volunteers were selling beer. She was drinking and talking to a couple in the visitors’ end of the arena. She looked down and the purse was gone.
The woman, who gave her name as Paulette, was in Inverness from Sydney, N.S., two hours away. Her cellphone was in that cream-coloured purse, along with all her money and, crucially, her tickets.
Inverness was not a good place to be looking for a purse. People were streaming in from hundreds of kilometres away to play Chase the Ace, a tweaked version of the humble 50-50 fundraising draw that had spiralled into a milliondollar jackpot.
Each Saturday, the winner of the draw got a chance to win the jackpot by pulling the ace of spades from a deck of cards. But for 47 weeks, the ace did not turn up, so the jackpot got bigger and people around Cape Breton started to notice.
By then, five cards were left in the deck.
But enough was enough for the beleaguered village that has been playing host to much of the Maritimes all summer. So organizers decided that on Saturday, they were going to keep drawing tickets until someone pulled the ace.
There was a line snaking around the old barn-sized rink, past the barbecue pits and buses, around the adjacent racetrack, all the way to the horse barns. Inside the arena, a fiddle band was playing on the stage set up at centre ice. Packs of people in lawn chairs were parked on the concrete floor. People were crammed on to the bleachers, and along the wooden staircases at the back. By 5 p.m., there was nowhere to move, except one thin lane through the crowd, just wide enough to let a single-file line wiggle their way to the bar in the far end.
Once the arena hit capacity, people filled the overflow areas at the racetrack, the Legion, a local
Once the arena hit capacity, people filled the overflow areas at the racetrack, the Legion, a local high school and a nearby concert grounds.
high school and a nearby concert grounds. In total, there were than 22,000 around this town of about 1,500, organizers said.
Since it began, half of the ticket proceeds have gone to the local Royal Canadian Legion branch and a centre for people with developmental disabilities. Instead of the other half going to the winner, the ticket holder only gets 20 per cent of the day’s take — more than $350,000 on Saturday. The rest goes into the jackpot, and the winner gets a chance to pull the ace.
To make sure it ended Saturday, the first winner would get the regular 20 per cent cut. But if there had to be a second or third draw, those winners would get a $25,000 consolation prize if they didn’t pull the ace.
After ticket sales stopped around 5 p.m., volunteers carted garbage bins filled with the multi-coloured tickets onto the stage and dumped them into a wooden box. A blindfolded man from the Nova Scotia alcohol and gaming department had the task of pulling the ticket, or tickets.
Donelda MacAskill, owner of Donelda’s Puffin Boat Tours in the village of Englishtown, more than 100 kilometres east, knew what she was doing. She’d been coming since August and knew about the devastating traffic as thousands of cars inched out of Inverness. She was waiting at her car on the side of the road, ready to make a dash for home once it was over.
But after the holders of two winning tickets had failed to find the ace, Donelda’s number was called and she found herself on stage in her purple fleece vest, shaking. She picked the card in the middle, looked at it, and let it drop. She stumbled back, hands on her mouth. From the stage, despite all the screaming, she managed to call her husband, John — at home recovering from cancer treatment — to tell him they had just won $1.7 million.
The rink was empty in minutes and a troop of volunteers started sweeping up beer cans and ripped tickets.