Derek Neary
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jun 11/99) - Last Tuesday, Hilda Gerlock lived every bingo player's dream.

Sitting at home playing along with TV bingo, she hit the jackpot with the letter "I." Her winnings: $24,085, the highest single bingo prize ever awarded through a local TV bingo in Fort Simpson.

Gerlock's card wasn't filling up particularly quickly and she said she never really believed she was going to win. By the time she was set for O 75, the excitement level began to escalate. Soon after, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw the winning ball drop from the machine, she recalled.

"Mark (her husband) was the one who actually spotted it and I flipped. I was screaming at the top of my lungs. I couldn't believe it at all," said Gerlock, who plays bingo "once in a while" and had only won a couple of hundred dollars before Tuesday.

"Having to sit there and wait while they double checked it (over the phone), I was going, 'Oh wow, all the numbers are covered. I can't believe this.'"

Gerlock didn't even make it out the door before her phone started ringing off the hook.

"There must have been a million phone calls that evening," she said, laughing.

She was in a bit of a hurry to get there and pick up her cheque, seeing as there's a 15-minute deadline to claim a prize, she said. Even if her truck wouldn't have started, she was going to get there in time.

"I would have found a way. I have a snowmachine," she joked.

As for her plans for the money: well, most of it's already gone, she said.

"Well, you know, bills," she explained, adding that she set aside some of the money for her 14-year-old daughter Vanessa's education.

The growing jackpot was the talk of the town for quite a while, acknowledged "Big Mama" Marguerite Brown, a cook at the Nahanni Inn.

"A lot of people don't have cable so what they do, they come here and they play at the coffee shop," she said. "For the last two months now the coffee shop has been full on Tuesday and Thursday nights, the Boardroom's been filled and the bar has been filled. Everybody's been playing bingo in every spot we have."

The reality of the game is that there are far more losers than winners, however. That became clear by Thursday as Gerlock answered the phone this way: "Hello, non bingo winner."