Luck changes for lottery winner

By Mike Joseph

BELLEFONTE — This time the lottery hit where it helps.

CDT photo/Mike Joseph

This winning $100,000 lottery ticket will be a big help for Kellie Klinefelter, a Bellefonte resident and single mother of three teenagers. “It still hasn’t sunk in and probably won’t for a while — until I see it,” she said.

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• A.M.BRIEFING: Wednesday

Kellie Klinefelter, single mother of three teens, was driving home from work Friday afternoon — from her $22,000-a-year job to her $425-a-month apartment — when she stopped as she often does for a lottery ticket.

And was dealt a winner. “I still can’t sleep; I can’t eat,” Klinefelter, the receptionist at Joel Confer Toyota, said Tuesday. “It still hasn’t sunk in and probably won’t for a while — until I see it.”

The $100,000 windfall coming Klinefelter’s way will help her son, Cody Park, in college. The 18-year-old Bald Eagle Area senior has just been accepted to Mansfield University — he’ll start as a freshman music major in the fall.

And the money might help someday to buy a house.

But first things first: A new car. With her employee discount, Klinefelter hopes to buy a 2009 Toyota Corolla from her company for less than $18,000. It will replace the 1996 Chevrolet Cavalier — 115,000 miles — she drives now.

It will be her first new car since 1989. She paid $7,000 for a new Ford Festiva when she was a year out of Bald Eagle High herself and was in her first job, at what is now Raytheon. She would later work for PNC Bank and then, in 2000, she moved to the Toyota dealership.

Along the way came marriage and three children — daughters Kendra Park, 16, and Kelsey Park, 15 — are now Bellefonte High students. The marriage ended in divorce in 1996 when the kids were very young.

The children’s father has helped raise the children, but it still hasn’t been easy.

“I have to put a roof over my kids’ heads and food on the table,” she said.

“Since the kids were little, I’ve been doing it by myself because I work 47

hours a week and it’s like, ‘Mom, when are you coming home?’ ” Klinefelter said. “They’re used to it now, but it was harder when they were little.”

At work on Tuesday, Klinefelter held a phone between her shoulder and ear. In her hands from moment to moment were a ballpoint pen, various sets of car keys from service customers, invoices to be stapled together and a stapler to do it with.

Here’s what work sounded like Tuesday from Klinefelter’s end of the phone:

“Joel Confer auto outlet.” “No, he isn’t here today.” “No, we don’t have voice mail. I can leave a message.”

“OK, I’ll give him the message.”

And then, over the public address system: “Service, line 4.”

During her nine years at Joel Confer Toyota, Klinefelter said, she’s had to call in sick only a handful of times. Some of those times she came to work but was sent home.

Klinefelter also recalled a recent conversation with her father, Bob Klinefelter, of Bellefonte. It was on Monday, two days after she won the bundle.

“I’m proud of you,” her father told her.

“For what?” she replied. “You went back to work today,” he said.

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.