Tulsan leaves game show with $250,000

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- A Tulsa man's quest to become a millionaire on one of television's most popular game show's came up $750,000 short Thursday night. But Toby Moore still walked away from

Thursday, November 18th 1999, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- A Tulsa man's quest to become a millionaire on one of television's most popular game show's came up $750,000 short Thursday night. But Toby Moore still walked away from the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" game show with $250,000 in prize money â€“ before taxes.

"I'm still kind of in shock," said Moore, whose appearance on the show was taped Wednesday. "I think it probably sunk in a little more today. And it really will when the check comes in. It feels more like Monopoly money right now."

The 30-year-old statistician could have taken home half a million if he'd been up on the latest Pokemon craze. "I didn't know until then (during Wednesday's taping) what that was, let alone that there were 150 of them," said Moore, a native of Muskogee.

"I used my last lifeline 50:50 (where two answers are eliminated, leaving one right and one wrong) and it was down to Jiggly Puff and Frodo. I knew Frodo was from `Lord of the Rings,' but I wasn't sure about the other one."

He chose to keep the $250,000 in hand and not answer the question -- an answer, he said, that his 11-year-old nephew, Jordan, would have known. "He advised me before the trip not to blow it," said Moore, who works for Tulsa's Corporate Consulting Group and is the father of a 17-month-old son with his wife, Katherine.

Still, winning $250,000 on a hit national television show is nothing to sneeze at. What does Moore plan to do with all that money? Among other things, Moore and his wife can fulfill one of their most dearly held wishes -- to attend baseball spring training camps for his favorite baseball team, the Mets, and her favorite, the Cubs.

For now, Moore said he will "pay a few bills, pay a lot of taxes" and, maybe next year, take his mother, Dorothy, to Washington, D.C. "Maybe we'll try to find the vice president's house on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory," Moore said with a laugh. One of the questions Moore answered correctly was the location of the vice president's official residence. Moore said he plans to sock away $150,000 until tax time next April -- just in case.