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Late on the night before the race Sidney Freeman discovered that a carpenter named Peter Dolan held a ticket on Wychwood Abbot. Prepared to pay $15,000 for it, Bookmaker Freeman rang Peter Dolan's telephone again & again, sent an assistant around to pound the door of his three-room apartment at No. 31-19 35th St. in Astoria. Queens. There was no answer. At 6:30 next morning Peter Dolan set out as usual to walk two miles to his job on Welfare Island. "Win or lose," said he to his stepdaughters, "I'll be starting off to work this time tomorrow."
A squat, little Irishman from County Cavan, Peter Dolan was in the mud on Welfare Island, driving piles for a new city home for the aged, when word came that he had won $150,000. He had been buying sweepstakes tickets for years without any luck. This time he had signed his ticket "King MacNesson," after a lucky Irish ruler, he said. Maybe that was it. He thought of going back to Ireland, but not to stay. His prime concern was to get back on the job the next morning, and every morning for a long time yet. Humbly he asked his foreman if he might stop work a minute to pose for some pictures. After that, Peter Dolan, rich for the first time in his life, went back to driving piles.
"Oh God! Oh, my God! Now Conrad can retire!" In the parlor of her own one-story brick house at No. 68-09 59th St. in Maspeth, Queens, Mrs. Emelia Lenz, 51, sat down hard and began to cry. Since she and husband Conrad came over from Germany 32 years ago they had paid for their home, kept out of debt. But Conrad was 66 now and getting tired. His $30-a-week job at New York Quinine and Chemical Co. in Brooklyn had not been enough to put their two strapping daughters through business school. Mrs. Lenz had worked as a charwoman until Louise, the younger, had finished and got a job operating a Comptometer. Then, with their elder daughter married, the Lenzes began buying sweepstakes tickets, hoping for a break. When their ticket was drawn on Wychwood Abbot they felt sure the break had come. Not a word would they hear from Sidney Freeman who offered $15,000 for the ticket.
After the race Mrs. Lenz refused to telephone Conrad, fearful lest the good news prove too great a shock. While she waited all kinds of plans ran through her head. They would sell their home, buy a nicer one. "I expect we will travel a little," she told her awestruck friends. "Always I have wanted to see the Catskills."