"Whenever anyone else won, we'd say, 'Praise the Lord, at least he's taking care of somebody,' and this time, He took care of us," said Jurewick, who retired five years ago from his job as a stock man at General Motors in Linden, where he worked for 44 years.
Jurewick told a crowd of reporters at the Statehouse yesterday that he probably would buy a Cadillac, make a few repairs to his house, help out his two children, donate some money to charity and travel a little with his wife, a retired secretary.
"We never really had a good vacation," said Jurewick. "I guess we're just going to take things as they come (and) let the good Lord guide us."
Jurewick might have had a feeling things were going to go his way. He said he had been spending as much as $50 a week on lottery tickets in recent weeks - a fact he had kept hidden from his wife.
He said he had picked the winning number at random and had been playing it for several weeks. It was one of 11 tickets Jurewick purchased at a record store near his home for Thursday's Pick 6 Lotto drawing.
The couple, lifelong Bayonne residents, discovered they had won Thursday night while watching the winning number being selected on television. Jurewick's wife didn't believe him at first.
"I thought he was kidding, because he's a great kidder," she said. "But when I saw the expression on his face, I thought it must be true. His color changed, he stopped smiling and he kept saying, 'We won! We won!' "
What happened then? "We didn't really shout or get that excited," she said. "We just started laughing to think that this would happen to us."
Added her husband: "We laughed, we cried, and then we slowly came to believe that we had won, and that's about it."
Gertrude Jurewick hid the ticket in an envelope in a dresser drawer, and the couple, giddy from excitment, stayed awake all night before calling lottery officials yesterday morning.
