LUCKY OR NOT?

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 301, 15 August 1932, Page 7

LUCKY OR NOT?

WINNING AN ART UNION NOT A BED OF ROSES. Everyhody wonders whathappens to., the lucky winners of fortunes in big j sweepstakes says the Sunday Chro- ( nicle. j There has heen revealed an amazing ■ sweepstalce drama of a poor man who I won one of the big prizes, surround- I ed himself with luxury, and has now, i after a series of unparalleled twists j of fortune, been plunged into poverty. He is Arthur Court, who has just arrived in London from the United States. In 1929, when Arthur Court, an Indianopolis caretaker, won more than £17,000 as the holder of a Trigo ticket in a big overseas sweepstakes I on the Derby, he eonsidered himself the luckiest man alive. He gave up his job, where he was earning £4 5s a week, and set out to realise some of his dreams of opulence. Court's good fortune however, had i heen given wide publicity, and the United States revenue authorities stepped in and took away a ch'eque for about £2500. Soon afterwards a plumber, who alleged that he had loaned Court the dollar with which be bought the lucky ticket, bobbed up with a claim for £2000. For a time Court launched out as a man of wealth. He paid £1000 for a motor car and took his wife on a tour of the country. Then he bought a £4000 farm, surrounded hy 58 acres of shrubbery and garden, where he and his family lived life to the full. Hundreds a pounds went for valuable furniture and carpets. Court-, who attributed his luck to an old I rusty horseshoe which had heen nailed to the front door of his former house, then invested in a beautiful dressingtable with a horseshoe-shaped mirror, Perhaps it was inevitable, hut the news eame as a sho.ck when Court reported that the last of his cash- — £75— had vanished when thieves stole his wife's pqrse. : The Courts sold most of their pro- | perty, packed a few" helongings, in[cluding the horseshoe-shaped mirror, > in a motor trailer and set off to start I afresh. A sudden storm arose, the