A North Carolina man used a $20 bill he found on the ground to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket that won him a top prize of $1 million, officials said.

The discovery was made Oct. 22 outside a Speedway gas station and convenience store in Boone, North Carolina, the NC Education Lottery said in a statement Friday.

The winner ripped the ticket off the ground and used it to fund most of his purchase of a $25 Extreme Cash ticket, which touts instant prizes of $40 and that top prize, he said .

Winner Jerry Hicks is from Banner Elk, a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains between two ski resorts and also in an area, Avery County, hit hard by last month’s crisis. post-hurricane Helene flooding.

Hicks had no intention of playing Extreme Cash.

“They actually didn’t have the ticket I was looking for, so I bought that one instead,” he said in the release.

The master carpenter visited lottery headquarters Friday to claim his prize, opting for an upfront payment of $600,000, or more than $50,000 a year for 20 years, which will net him $429,007 after federal taxes and state, the lottery said.

Hicks did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He told lottery officials he would use the money to help his children and retire after more than five decades as a carpenter, according to the NC Education Lottery release.

He also plans to eat. A lot.

“We’re going to head straight to Golden Corral and eat everything they have,” he said of the North Carolina-based buffet chain, according to the release.

On Monday, NC Education Lottery officials said Cynthia Moore of Smithfield was the first $1 million winner for its Cashword scratch-off game, introduced in August, after purchasing a $10 ticket at a market in Wilson . There are three other $1 million prizes remaining at Cashword, they said in a separate statement.

For two consecutive years, lottery officials said In August, NC Education Lottery games brought in more than $1 billion to public schools and other education programs, contributing to the state’s more than $15 billion in annual education spending. State.