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A Maryland couple turned a $5 lottery ticket into a $4 million windfall after replaying numbers from a previous quick pick.

Silver Spring, MD – A Montgomery County couple is planning to buy a new home after winning a $4 million Mega Millions prize with a ticket purchased in Silver Spring, according to the Maryland Lottery.

The pair, who chose to remain anonymous, matched the first five numbers in the March 10 Mega Millions drawing but missed the Mega Ball, securing a second-tier prize.

Key Points

• Silver Spring couple wins $4 million Mega Millions prize• Winning ticket purchased at Giant grocery store on New Hampshire Avenue• Couple plans to buy a new home with the winnings

The couple said they regularly play Mega Millions and decided to reuse a number combination previously issued to them through a quick pick ticket.

Although those numbers had not won anything the week before, they chose to try them again.

“Something about the numbers the Lottery machine gave us just felt right,” one of the winners said after claiming the prize.

Matching the first five numbers normally earns a $1 million prize in Mega Millions.

However, each $5 ticket includes a built-in multiplier that increases non-jackpot prizes.

In this case, the multiplier was 4X, boosting the couple’s prize to $4 million.

The couple said they were stunned when they realized how much they had won.

“Our hearts were beating so fast when we realized how much we won,” one of them said. “We just looked at each other trying to figure out what to say.”

They plan to use the winnings to purchase a new home, something they said has been on their wish list for years.

The winning ticket was purchased at the Giant grocery store located at 13490 New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring.

The store will receive a $2,500 bonus from the Maryland Lottery for selling the ticket.

Though David Trim is too young to have been a student of Walter Utt, legendary history teacher at Pacific Union College, he has done a great deal to memorialize him, such as editing an impressive festschrift in his honor and helping to envision and then create an Utt archival center in Angwin, California. In this small volume of about one hundred pages, Trim assesses Utt’s scholarly impact in his book (2023).

Now a prolific historian of early modern European history, Trim first encountered Utt and his interpretation of history when, as a boy, he read the historical novel (1996), Utt’s depiction of French King Louis XIV’s persecution of French Protestants, otherwise known as Huguenots, after 1685. Years later, Trim was writing widely on Huguenot subjects, including military history.

Trim’s book has a very specific focus: Utt as historian. Utt’s students and colleagues often describe him as an unforgettable teacher, a wise mentor, and a thoughtful curriculum builder and departmental leader. In his work, Trim takes interest in what Utt contributed as an Adventist researcher and scholar. His students thought “that he was a truly great history teacher,” Trim writes. “But was he a great historian?”

To this question, Trim offers a thoughtful and nuanced answer. Utt never finished his most important academic work, which was only completed after his death by Brian Strayer of Andrews University. Although that book—The Bellicose Dove: Claude Brousson and Protestant Resistance to Louis XIV, 1647-1698—was “well received” as a “worthy contribution,” it did not significantly change the writings on French history.

In a way, Trim writes, Utt was like certain other honored historians who never quite lived up to their potential. The celebrated Oxford Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, for example, was described by a recent biographer in words that might apply to Utt: “No one doubted that he had a brilliant mind; the breadth of his learning was dazzling; he was a superb writer.” Yet Trevor-Roper never wrote the big, discipline-shaking books he had planned, though he did produce many sparkling articles.

Utt could be appropriately compared, as well, to Lord Acton, the eminent 19th-century statesman and scholar “who left too little completed original work to rank among the great historians,” in the language of the magisterial eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We remember Acton for a line in one of his letters: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Or one vivid statement in a lecture: “The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”

If Utt fell short in purely scholarly terms, Trim argues that we need to remember all the demands made upon a teacher in an Adventist college, as he put his role as a teacher and mentor above his scholarship. Utt “did not put his own ego or what seems to have been his personal desires first; instead, he put his students, his church, and his college first.” Trim concludes: “While he did not change historical scholarship, he did something more important; he changed lives.”

One of the most significant contributions that Utt made to Adventist education was his lively explication of denominational history, especially the interpretation of the writings of Ellen G. White. He helped to create an interdisciplinary denominational history course at PUC, a class designed for both future teachers and future ministers. It combined history and theology in a creative way and included teachers from both departments. At one time or another, Utt and his colleagues invited guest lecturers, including Ronald Graybill, Jonathan Butler, and Donald R. McAdams, to take on the difficult issues of the Adventist past.

As early as 1973, Utt was distressed by the defensive attitude of the White Estate, official custodians of the prophet’s literary legacy. “There are no historians on the White estate board,” he complained in a letter to a former student. Arthur White, Ellen White’s grandson, “sees historians as essentially (a) destructive-disloyal, or (b) trying to place a unique movement in a sort of context which makes it a 19th-century American religious phenomenon.” He concluded: “We just don’t see the purpose of history the same way.” Unlike Arthur White, Utt did not believe history’s role was simply “to protect and defend.” He added, in a sentence, not quoted by Trim, “We speak of truth being able to take care of itself but we really don’t believe it, the way we act.”

Some of the time, as Trim recognizes, Utt found himself in the awkward middle, fired on by both sides. Numbers was irked when Utt suggested that the “tone” of Prophetess of Health was injudicious, and that the young scholar might have been a bit more skeptical of certain hostile sources. At the same time, Utt was unimpressed by the denomination’s critique of Numbers, since church leaders had helped to create the crisis by invariably giving the impression that White was infallible and “years ahead of her time.”

In his discussion of Utt’s loyalty to the denomination, Trim could have profitably consulted Utt’s extensive correspondence with McAdams, which is particularly revealing about Utt’s insight into the obligations of a historian who is also a believer. Throughout this correspondence, McAdams was deeply involved in a specific example of contextualizing White’s writings. Beginning in 1971 and continuing until 1978, he conducted painstaking research on White’s sources for Great Controversy, a book with extensive comments on the Reformation—and, even more important, the application of Reformation principles in her own time. He eventually examined White’s rough draft of a section of the book on the Bohemian reformer John Huss, discovering in the process that she had copied much of her information from a particular nineteenth-century Protestant historian, including errors. Indeed, in the final version of the chapter, polished by her literary assistants, there were no details not covered in her source.

Trim could have noted that Utt was persuaded by McAdams’ research, though he was doubtful that the denomination would accept it. “Is there any way you can tell the SDA people ‘Mrs. White was wrong?’” he asked. “I say, in practice, you cannot.” He feared that for most Adventists her authority was liable to collapse if it was qualified in any way. “You can say that she was not writing ‘history’ and made no claim that her details were accurate. She was simply painting a panorama in broad strokes.” But many believers, he predicted, would reject McAdams’ evidence. Utt struggled with McAdams’ conclusion that the historical narrative he had examined was not dependent on visions or dreams. He admitted that if White saw historical scenes in visions or dreams, they could not have been “highly specific,” but hesitated to rule out supernatural influences entirely, though he found the standard Adventist explanations unpersuasive. He later summarized his own “ambiguous position” thus: White was “a prophetic guide in the Old Testament sense,” but like the Hebrew prophets she was “human and fallible and much affected by the concerns of the times.”

To the end of his life, he wrestled with these issues. In his last interview, a few days before his death, he admitted: “I’ve had more and more trouble, particularly since the originality of Mrs. White has become an issue, knowing what to do with some of this and still be honest.” Trim argues that Utt stood out from “some of the revisionist historians of that era,” men who were once enfants terribles among Adventists. No doubt Utt sometimes worried that younger colleagues might be too provocative, but that was a matter of prudent tactics. Although Utt mocked himself as more like Erasmus than Luther, he certainly recognized the very real problems raised by his fellow historians.

Trim’s monograph deals with much more than Utt’s engagement with Adventist history. Walter Utt: Adventist Historian, gives appropriate attention to his deep curiosity, his wide reading, and his pervasive wry humor. Trim is particularly helpful in evaluating Utt’s recreations of Huguenot history, fictional and factual, paying close attention to his research methods, his sparkling style, and his ability to extend sympathetic understanding beyond a few heroes. He quotes one scholar who reviewed his major work (completed and revised by Strayer) as both an admirable academic study and “a ripping good yarn.”

Considering the full range of Utt’s writing, including his history of Pacific Union College as well as his work on early modern France, and not forgetting his popular essays on conspiracy theories, Trim delights in extensive quotes from Utt’s “attractive” writing. What makes it so effective? Though Trim can’t quite put his finger on the answer, he suspects that Utt’s combination of irony and rhetorical skill are central to his charm.

Reading Trim’s tribute to Utt suggests a radical thought. We need more such books, honoring learned, influential Adventist teachers, men and women who changed lives, even if they did not transform their academic disciplines. Is it time for biographies of Harry Leonard at Newbold, Benjamin McArthur at Southern and Southwestern, or Fritz Guy at La Sierra? What about John Waller at Andrews, Ottilie Stafford at AUC, or Roy Branson at the Seminary?

Walter Utt is not, thank God, an isolated example. A reader finishes Trim’s book with a key, unstated question for Adventist education: “What is the future of the Utt-type of teaching?”