Jackpot winner was down to $6.00, and more

Jackpot winner was down to $6.00

John Davis, a mechanic from Pawleys Island, S.C., was down to $6 in his checking account and was only days away from foreclosure when his luck turned: Davis won a $200,000 lottery jackpot. Winning “took my breath away,” said Davis, a single father of two daughters, ages 3 and 15. “A few of the people at work came over, and I said, ‘Am I seeing things?’ They said, ‘No, you won the lottery.’” Davis said he will use the money to pay off his mortgage and save for his daughters’ college tuitions.

Identical twins celebrate 100th birthday

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Inez Harries and Venice Shaw, identical twins born Jan. 15, 1911, celebrated their 100th birthday last week. The credit union of Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, Calif., where Harries worked during World War II, threw the twins a party. “The odds of identical twins living to be 100 is one in 700 million,” said the credit union’s Andrea Carpenter. Harries, who has nine granddaughters, 19 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren, said, “I keep active, try to keep active. The minute you stop, you’ve had it.”

Teacher finds 340-year-old bible

Sixth-grade teacher Debra Court of the St. Paul Lutheran School in Bonduel, Wis., was searching an old safe for baptism records to show her students when she came across an aged Bible. No one at the church realized just how old it was until the church pastor sent pictures of it to the Concordia Seminary Library in St. Louis, where a cataloger concluded it had been printed 340 years ago. “To hold something that tells us, in 1670, the same message of God’s grace and Christ that we tell each other today,” said Pastor Timothy Shoup, “that helps me to be even more thankful.”