It appears in the Richmond sky Thursday like money from heaven.  Fingers pointed.  Necks craned.  Everyone wanted to see the sign.  Especially the dollar sign.  There it was:  "$56 MILLION." And nearly as suddenly, there it wasn't.  The mid-day breezes first pushed it sideways, as if a left-hander had been writing it.  Then they blew it away.  You know money.  Easy come, easy go.

The message may have seemed heaven sent, but it was part of a statewide campaign by the Virginia Lottery to promote its $56 million Big Game jackpot.  The writing was over four cities.

So were the Butler's.  "I'm over Norfolk now," Jim Butler said in early afternoon when he called back.

He had completed the Richmond job and would do Norfolk and Newport News.  His son, Jim Butler Jr., was writing over Roanoke.

"It takes about 15 minutes to write each message," he said.  "There are complex letters in there with the dollar sign and the '5' and the '6.'"

But it was going fine.

"Pepsi-Cola, for 27 years they had 25 planes skywriting all over the country," Butler said.  That was the heyday.  You saw skywriters practically as often as Burma Shave signs.  The planes trailed out white lettering, which lingered briefly before giving way to the breezes.  Now you see them as often as Burma Shave signs.

"There are only seven active skywriters in the world now," Butler said.  "I'm in the process of training a couple others."

Butler said his company, Aerial Sign Co. of Hollywood, Fla., is the nation's only commercial skywriter.  A restaurant in Orlando and a casino in Kansas City have their own writers.  That's it.

"There's a whole generation that hasn't seen skywriting in 25 years," Butler said, "but it may come back."

Cost is why.  It costs less than one-sixth of a cent per person to advertise by air," Butler said.  That's why the lottery went with skywriting.  "They just wanted to remind the people (of the jackpot) for a very little amount of dollars," Butler said.

It flies in 24 states on the East and West coasts.  "Those are mostly the airplanes with the signs," he said.  "That's the mainstay of the business."

So when you're lying on the beach and see a small plane dragging a sign saying something like "YOU LOOK HOT!  COOL OFF AT WATER-SLIDE MANIA," that may well be Butler's company.

If you see skywriting, it surely is.

Skywriters use "air show perfume," the same stuff the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds flying teams use, Butler said.  "It's a very lightweight oil, a non-polluting oil."

There is but one problem.

"Sometimes we put letters up there and they last 20 minutes," Butler said, "and sometimes they start to dissipate after (only) the sixth letter."

So it would be Thursday.

The "$56 million," alas, came and went as quickly as our chance of winning it.