Sterling Plumpp, poet and professor, is sitting in a room halfway up the not-quite-ivory tower of University Hall on the campus of UIC, a million-dollar grin playing across his face. After 30 years in the departments of English and African-American studies, Plumpp, 61, will retire at the end of this semester. But that’s not why he’s grinning.
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He usually plays the Lotto or the Big Game, putting all his money on a single number, but that day he bought $20 worth of Vegas Instant Game tickets. When he got home he scratched the tickets and won $15. He went back a second time and won $25 more. Feeling lucky, he walked to the liquor store a third time, bought two more tickets, and returned home. He scratched the prize square under “Beat the Dealer” first: $1,000,000. Then he scratched the dealer’s square.
At first, he says, he didn’t believe it. He went back and read the fine print, then read it again. “You feel that you have to harness your enthusiasm so that the joy you have might not be false joy,” he says. “You just can’t win a million dollars this easy.” Not until August 26, when he heard from the lottery’s claims office in Springfield that a check had been vouchered and would arrive at his bank no later than September 10, did he allow himself to believe that he’d really won.
Plumpp grew up on a cotton plantation just outside of Clinton, Mississippi, working in the fields with his sharecropper grandparents until he was 15. He read a lot as a kid, but had no formal education until he moved to Jackson with his grandmother after his grandfather died in 1955. He spent two years at Saint Benedict’s College in Atchison, Kansas, then came to Chicago in 1962 to study psychology at Roosevelt University, working part-time at the central post office, at Canal and Van Buren.
