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Sweepstakes winner Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Jacqueline Powell, of Rogue River, won $150,000 in the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes. She plans to use the money to donate some of the Labradors she raises to help the disabled. Dog breeder will use winnings to help disabled By BUFFY POLLOCK ROGUE RIVER - Jacqueline Powell says she's going to use $150,000 she won in a Reader's Digest Sweepstakes to continue doing what she loves most - but for a different cause. Powell, 65, who breeds Labradors for a living, hopes to start donating some of her dogs for training as helpmates for disabled people. Dogs can help guide blind people, for example, or alert deaf people to important sounds such as the telephone or smoke alarm. "There's a real shortage of companion dogs," Powell says. "There's a waiting list of several thousand." Powell says it's something she has always wanted to do, but until March she was living "month to month" on the money she made on her dogs to pay the bills. That all changed on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, when she received a phone call from the Postal Service about an express package she needed to pick up. "I was cooking potatoes and carrots for a St. Patty's dinner at the VFW. The post office guy said it was from Reader's Digest and I said, 'Oh well, everybody gets those,' but he said, 'I don't think so. It cost them twelve bucks to send it.' "I figured it could wait, but pretty soon" - less than an hour later, she admits - "it had finally gotten the best of me and I had to go down and get it." The last thing she was expecting was an award letter for $150,000, one of four major awards totaling $1.74 million announced by the Reader's Digest Association earlier this month. "It's a good thing I was sitting in my car when I read it. I was just stunned," she remembers. "Reader's Digest sends things in the mail all the time; I always turn around and send em right back ... probably three a month," she says. "I've been doing this for about 20 years. I just always figured, what the heck, it was just 34 cents for a stamp." Although it took only a week to receive her winnings, Powell says she couldn't tell anyone other than close relatives until the company issued a press release a month later. "I just sat around with a silly grin on my face. A month later when I was able to tell people, no one believed me. I called my best friend and she thought it was a joke." Powell, who moved from Delhi, California, to West Evans Creek in 1991, retired from a 40-year career as an office worker and unemployment-benefits adjuster with hopes of fulfilling her life's ambition of breeding dogs at her home. She plans to use her winnings to pay off her debts, remodel her kitchen, install an automatic gate on her property and replace her 10-year-old Subaru. Powell said she wasn't bothered that she has to pay $60,000 in taxes on her winnings. "I like to think of it this way. Whatever is left is something I didn't have before," she says, adding that her only regret is that her husband of 14 years, Gene, was not able to share in her good fortune. He died in 1999. Having raised black, chocolate and yellow Labrador retrievers for 15 years, Powell says she was glad she now has some extra money to contribute toward a cause she admires. "This gives me more leeway to do what I've always wanted to do. These dogs can mean the difference between someone being able to live alone or not." Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.