The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The Contester

The ordinarily sleepy town of Defiance, Ohio, emitted an industrious hum on hot days, a subtle pulse of activity—like the buzzing of distant bees. It was late Indian summer, a little too warm for an October day, in 1953. Most of the rust-red and golden leaves still held fast in the towering maple trees that lined our block on Latty Street. You could feel the moisture in the air seeping up from the muddy, slow-moving Auglaize River a few blocks away.

My mother, Evelyn Ryan, had sent six of her nine children outside to play while she and my sixteen-year-old sister, Lea Anne, made lunch. As usual, all the school-age kids in the family came home at noontime, and we crammed as much recreation into the hour as we could.

As a seven-year-old, I sat on the porch steps reading comic books with my brothers Mike, five, and Bruce, who had just turned nine. My oldest brother Dick, fourteen, his arm still in a cast from a bicycle accident, played one-armed catch with my thirteen-year-old brother, Bub, on the sidewalk in the sun. Rog, two years younger than Bub, roller-skated in the street, hoping to get a free ride by grabbing on to the bumper of a passing car. My baby sisters, three-year-old Barb and one-year-old Betsy, were somewhere inside the house with Lea Anne and Mom, who was pregnant with my brother Dave at the time.

Just as Rog decided that little or no traffic would pass the house on the quiet little street and clumped up the steps to remove his skates, a sleek jet-black Pontiac Chieftain pulled up to the curb in front. It was so new we could see ourselves reflected in the side panels. The chrome grille glistened expensively in the sun. Even the aerodynamic hood ornament—a small amber-colored bust of Chief Pontiac—looked valuable, more like a misplaced jewel than an auto accessory.

So few visitors ever stopped at our house that we all turned to stare. When three men wearing dark pinstripe suits got out of the car and started up the walk, Bruce and I raced into the house to tell Mom that some very well-dressed strangers were about to knock on the door. Because of the suits, we thought that someone must have died.

Our middle-America town of Defiance was big enough to be the county seat and small enough to need only three traffic lights on Clinton, the main street. Visitors arriving in a quasi limousine were unheard of. Not that we weren’t getting used to surprises. In the late 1940s my mother had begun to enter the many contests of skill that had sprung to life in the post–World War II economic boom. Poems, limericks, and statements of the 25 words or less variety had been pouring out of her for the past five years. She was now winning small prizes with some frequency—the Benrus ladies’ watch she wore everywhere, even to bed; the Bulova watch she saved for special occasions, like Sunday Mass; $95 in cash (from multiple contests); an automatic coffeemaker; frying pans, a Westinghouse blender, basketballs, footballs, Rog’s roller skates, and—by my reckoning, the best prize of all—an entire case of Almond Joy candy bars.

Contesting was a relatively new outlet for Mom, though she had been writing her whole life. The poems she submitted to magazines or poetry contests tended to be short, pithy, and unexpectedly humorous. The dollar she received for But Excuse Us went a long way in 1953:

Folks endowed with

Luck, or virtue,

Get the tissue

To the kerchoo.

She began her contesting career simply enough, with Burma-Shave roadside rhymes. In the 1950s you couldn’t drive down a highway without passing a Burma-Shave roadside billboard campaign, six signs spaced at hundred-yard intervals down the road, one line to a sign, the last always Burma-Shave. The verses were clever and meant to amuse, their content ranging from shaving to safe driving and current culture. My mother’s submissions added to those topics an occasional touch of irony:

Race little roadster,

Fairly fly.

You’ll be

Used parts

By and by.

Burma-Shave.

Successful Burma-Shave jingles inserted a not-so-hidden advertisement into the mix, and in one entry Mom went for broke—if you don’t shave close enough, you could kill yourself:

Hairpin turn,

Hotrod ditched.

Lost control,

His whiskers

Itched.

Burma-Shave.

Our family was often surprised at Mom’s uncanny knack for working complex political issues into something as simple as a Burma-Shave jingle. I doubt anyone would have accepted the premise of a Korean War veteran who survived combat only to be killed because he foolishly passed another car on a hill. But the poem she sent in was quick-witted and timely enough to hit just the right note:

Passed on a hill,

Lived through

Korea.

Met a guy

With the same idea.

Burma-Shave.

By the age of five, I had grown used to seeing Mom, pencil behind her right ear, spend hours each day at the ironing board. She often said that she did her best work while ironing, her hands working on one chore, her head on another. On the squared end of the board, where the iron stood upright, Mom kept an open notebook of current contest jingles and entries in various stages of completion. A basket of pre-sprinkled clothes rested at her feet. The iron hissed on the board as she scribbled. Even Steven won a poetry contest in the Toledo Blade, earning her at least $25, a veritable windfall in our family.

Who’d trade

Peace of mind

(To most rich men

Denied)

For all of their

Worrisome money?

I’d.

Each evening after the last supper dish had been washed and put away—never an easy task since we used every plate in the house—Mom would grab her notebook and sit down at the end of the couch to produce more entries. Inevitably she fell asleep after a few minutes, notebook on her lap, postage stamps and other effluvia of contesting slipping out of the pages and onto the floor. Each new year, Mom started a new notebook to fill with entries that might go nowhere or all the way to the top.

She used her writing skills to win some of the necessities our large family couldn’t afford to buy. Ours was one of the poorest families in Defiance. Mom was far too busy with the family and housework to take on an outside job, and Dad’s take-home pay from Serrick’s Screw Machine Shop—where he made nuts, bolts, screws, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, and an occasional pair of tweezers for home use—was about $90 a week, barely enough to pay for food and rent. His nightly liquor consumption—a fifth of Kessler’s whiskey and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer—came to $30 a week, sapping his paycheck of any real buying power.

In the days before credit cards, few people in Defiance had a checking account. Bills were paid in cash and in person. Our family finances worked like this: Dad cashed his weekly paychecks at the bank, and at the end of the month, he drove all over town to pay the mortgage and bills at the gas and electric, telephone, and doctor’s offices. Whatever was left by the time he got home usually remained in his wallet, getting distributed bit by bit for groceries, clothes, and incidentals (newspapers, the milkman).

Medical bills were paid in erratic installments, if ever. We relied on the Lions Club to pay for eyeglasses for Lea Anne, Rog, Bruce, me, Mike, Barb, and Betsy. We got much of our clothing from more well-to-do relatives as they outgrew them. Most of the food we ate was bought by our generous aunt Lucy.

So Mom, like a surprisingly large number of housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, turned to contesting for a living. Of course, thousands of contestants competing for a small pool of prizes made for long odds. But Mom won a great deal of the time, and any prize she received (with the possible exception of the free accordion lessons she won for Mike in 1958, Barb in 1961, and Betsy in 1963) usually filled a pressing household need.

The contests Mom entered required word skills, wit, and originality. Luck, she always said, has nothing to do with it. An average contest might ask for a rhymed jingle, the last line of a five-line limerick, or 25 words or less on a specific product. In 1955, for example, she won $10 for this submission to Dial soap:

I’m glad I use Dial

Though my reign’s in the kitchen

I needn’t pour perfume

To keep quite bewitchin’.

The same year, she won an RCA Victor AM/shortwave radio with this jingle:

Kraft’s Parkay won’t tear fresh bread.

Even ice-cold, it will smoothly spread.

It tastes as delicious as can be—

No seasonable facsimile.

Mom worked on her entries day and night, honing them until the rhyme or the sentiment, in her mind, perfectly fit the sponsor’s expectations. She never submitted just one entry when she had enough ideas for ten or eleven. She learned to use every variation on her own name (Mrs. Evelyn Ryan, Mrs. Evalyn Ryan, Mrs. Evalynn Ryan, Mrs. Evelyn L. Ryan, Mrs. Evelyn Lenore Ryan, Mrs. E. L. Ryan, Miss Evelyn Ryan, Mrs. Leo J. Ryan, Mrs. L. J. Ryan, Mrs. Kelly Ryan, Mrs. Kelly J. Ryan, Mrs. K. J. Ryan); used fictitious middle initials (Mrs. Evelyn A., B., C., D., E., F., G., H., I., J., K., M., N., O., P., R., S., T., U., V., W., X., Y., and Z. Ryan); made up names (Eva Ryan, Donna Bea Ryan, Bud Ryan); used relatives’ names (Dad’s, Aunt Lucy’s, Aunt Enie’s, Lea Anne’s, Dick’s, Bub’s, Rog’s, Bruce’s, mine, Mike’s, Barb’s, Betsy’s, Dave’s). When she ran out of names, she changed the address (adding a letter to the house number, changing Avenue to Street). All these variations allowed her to submit numerous entries for any contest, and also let her know which entry won when one did win.

Companies sponsored contests for two reasons: to acquire new advertising ideas from the public, and to sell more products. Most contest entry blanks had to be accompanied by a proof of purchase (labels on cans and jars, box tops, freshness seals, bottle caps, candy and cigarette wrappers). Fifty thousand contest entries represented fifty thousand purchases that might not have occurred otherwise. Contesting was big business, for both sponsors and winners. Entrants felt almost patriotic to be a part of it.

Our kitchen cabinets were crammed with shoeboxes full of entry blanks and labels that Mom was saving for future use—one for cereals and other boxed foods (Kellogg’s, Wheaties, Cheerios, Jell-O), one for canned and bottled foods (Spam, Del Monte, Heinz), one for candies (Peter Paul, Tootsie Roll, Pom Poms), one for soaps (Duz, Lux, SweetHeart), one for soft drinks (Dr Pepper, Coca-Cola, Hires), and one for any product not fitting those categories (Alcoa Wrap, Motorola, General Electric). No empty can or jar was tossed in the garbage until the label had been soaked off in the sink, a process that sometimes took days.

It didn’t matter if the product manufacturer had never sponsored a contest. Mom saved the proofs of purchase just in case. If Tang doesn’t offer a contest one of these days, she said one morning, I’m going to have to move you kids out of the bedroom to make room for the labels.

My mother had so many box tops, labels, and wrappers put aside that finding the right one could take an entire day. As a last resort, she’d remove a label from an unopened package or can and put the unmarked container back in the cupboard. The process inspired this poem:

Hmn! Wonder What This Is

A Contester’s life is full of woe!

She parts with her box tops, then doesn’t know

If she’s washing with Surf or with Oxydol;

Might be Fab. Might be Duz. It could even be All,

Once her soap’s poured in cans.

(Isn’t yours, Contest fans?)

But the food she prepares is exciting, gay fare!

There’s always an aura of mystery there,

For labels are long gone from fruit, fowl and fish,

So whatever she cooks is a real surprise dish.

Whoever happened to be passing the ironing board at the moment of Mom’s inspiration was pressed into service. We loved to listen and collaborate with her, but sometimes—unless the entry rhymed or was funny in a conventional way—we would just stare at her, slack-jawed. We wondered how in the world she ever won a single contest with entries that sounded so indecipherable. Some of them seemed closer to Greek than English—underlined, italicized, polysyllabic verbal tangles studded with clusters of capital letters. This submission won a brand new Schwinn bicycle from a Champion spark plugs contest:

Champion KNOWHOW puts MOST in SPARK PLUG to get the MOST (power, mileage) out of a CAR—a powerFULL plug for a spark plug!

Mom had a reason for producing such deliberate gobbledygook. Contesting, as she always said, required more than collecting box tops and being clever. There was form to consider (some contests required the use of specific words, or gave points for the use of product-related words in an entry), product focus (was it aimed at families, at young men, at children?), and judges. The advertising agency hired by the sponsoring company to judge the contest was always a more important consideration for entrants than the sponsor or the product. Each agency had its preference for rhyme or prose, for humorous or straight material.

So did the Ryan family. We considered some of Mom’s entries just plain boring, or complete exaggerations. In a contest sponsored by the Plough pharmaceutical company, contestants wrote 25 words or less in praise of the local drugstore, in our case Kuntz’s Drugs in Defiance.

Kuntz’s compounds hand-to-the-‘Plough’ dedication,

what-you-don’t-see,-ask-for informality, what-we-don’t-have,-we’ll-get-you accommodation.

This cheery, welcoming scenario was so unlike the real drugstore, whose owner—some people thought—treated many of his customers like potential shoplifters, that when my sister Barb read the entry, she blurted out, "This glorified place is Kuntz’s?" The toaster Mom won for her entry arrived just two days after the previous toaster expired. Truth was always secondary when a new appliance was needed.

For every entry we couldn’t understand or appreciate, there were far more that we could. A Real-Kill pesticide contest required the entrant to think up a name for the company’s new bug spray and write a rhymed description of it. Mom submitted at least thirteen entries, using her usual aliases and alternate addresses. To those of us passing the ironing board, four of them seemed promising:

One, Two—

Today’s bug’s dead, tomorrow’s too!

Inning—

A game life’s bugs won’t be winning!

Blend—

As bug sprays go, the LIVING end!

Blight ’em—

From bugs you’re free ad finitum!

Even Mom wasn’t sure which entry won, but one of them did. As with the toaster, her timing seemed almost divinely inspired. The prize was a top-of-the-line RCA color television set, which arrived just days after our old TV stopped working for good. Mom had won the old General Electric TV from The Ed Sullivan Show for this jingle on Mercury automobiles:

With power-endowed wizardry,

Nice going M-phatically!

We didn’t understand this entry either, or why it was good enough to win such a big prize. The judges must have liked Mom’s double entendre (nice going) and M-phatically (with the M signifying Mercury).

Whenever she won a major prize (to us, anything worth over $25), Mom wrote a personal thank-you note to the sponsoring company. Her intentions were sincere, but she believed as well that a letter of thanks just might give her an edge the next time around. Evelyn C. Ryan wrote the following letter to Ed Sullivan after receiving the TV:

A thousand pardons. I hope you’ll forgive me for being so tardy to acknowledge receipt of the beautiful G.E. portable TV awarded me in the recent Mercury contest. We are all overjoyed.

I was aiming, I’ll admit, for a brand new Mercury to replace our decrepit ’46 Chevy, which runs nowadays only when it chooses, and seldom does.

You may be interested to know that the new portable entertains a family of twelve—Pop, Mom, twenty-, eighteen-, sixteen-, fourteen-, twelve-, ten-, eight-, six-, four-, and three-year-olds, so the superiority of the G.E. line will doubtless be broadcast far and wide.

We are very grateful, and are biding our time until next year, so please do have another Mercury contest! Huh?

Happily and hopefully yours, (Mrs.) Evelyn C. Ryan

Mom didn’t win a prize in every contest she entered, of course. (And though she tried, she never won a sweepstakes contest, where winners were picked at random.) In the 1950s, Pepsodent, one of the more popular brands of toothpaste, saturated radio and TV airwaves for at least a decade with its familiar singsong jingle, You’ll wonder where the yellow went / When you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. When Pepsodent sponsored a contest asking where the yellow went, Mom’s entries, all four of them, went nowhere, though we thought they showed her typical humor and range:

The yellow escaped

By the skin of its teeth

When Pepsodent unveiled

The white underneath.

The yellow battled

As it went

(But it didn’t make

A PepsoDENT).

Down the drain and

Over the dam

Pursued by the paste

with the whammy what-am!

It took to the bottle—

Wasn’t Pepsodent-fond,

And what came out?

Peroxide-blonde!

Occasionally, months would go by without a single prize, and these were dark times indeed. We’d come home from school and spot Mom lingering at the front windows, watching Pokey, as she called our slow-moving mailman, make his lumbering way up one side of Latty Street and back down the other to our house, endlessly chatting with milkmen and garbage collectors on the way. Big events in our house, even the little kids knew, had occurred because of Mom’s contesting before. And most of them had begun with a simple envelope hand-carried by Pokey, like this January 1953 letter from NBC’s Bob Hope Show in Hollywood:

Dear Mrs. Ryan:

Your contribution to the Truth Is Funnier than Fiction portion of the Bob Hope daytime radio show has been accepted for broadcast. It will be heard on the broadcast of Friday, February 6, 1953.

You may expect to receive your Bulova American Girl watch in the near future.

Yours very truly,

Marian H. Kate,

Assistant to the Producer

Enclosed in the envelope was a copy of the winning story Mom sent in:

Four-year-old Mike objected to getting his cowboy hat off the back porch after supper, explaining that he was afraid of the dark. Mike, his father said, God is out there, too. Thus emboldened, Mike opened the back door a crack and called out, God, will you please hand me my hat?

Mom hit a dry spell starting late in the summer of 1953, but that, it turned out, was the least of her worries. The tiny two-bedroom house we had rented for six years, we learned, would soon be the home of someone else. Granted, the house was far too small and cramped for a family of eleven. We had no bathtub and only two bedrooms. Mom and Dad had one; the kids slept in the other—nine of us in two double beds and three single cots.

As children we hardly noticed the crowded conditions. What kid wouldn’t like waking up in a room with eight other boys and girls? It was life as we knew it, and it was grand. What the house lacked in size was more than mitigated by the enormous backyard, a large expanse of lawn we used as a baseball diamond, with built-in snacks as well: a fifty-foot grape arbor, twin peach trees, a cherry tree, and a giant old apple tree.

But now it seemed our life on Latty Street was over. The landlord told Mom that he wanted the house for his daughter, who was getting married in a few months. In short, we were being evicted. Dad didn’t give this news much thought, assuming that a solution would appear in time. Mom had worried ever since about where we would relocate and how we’d get the money to do it.

Then Dick was hit by a car while delivering newspapers on his bicycle. Although he came through the accident with only a broken arm, the bike was destroyed. Just a month before, he had pitched a no-hitter, almost unheard of in Little League. The coach told Mom he had high hopes for Dick’s future as a professional baseball player. When the police called from the hospital about the accident, they put Dick on the phone first, so my mother would know immediately that he wasn’t seriously injured.

Hi, Mom, it’s me. Dick spoke so softly Mom could hardly hear him. I got hit by a car on the northside bridge, but I’m okay.

What? Mom sat down before her knees could buckle. Where are you? Are you hurt?

I’m at the hospital. I bounced off the guy’s hood and broke my arm.

"You what? wailed Mom. Did they take X rays?"

They did, Mom, and I’m okay. The only thing broken is my arm.

As she began to understand that he had indeed survived the accident, Mom paused to smile. "It’s not your pitching arm, is it?"

No. He laughed. It’s my left arm. The bike’s smashed, though. The car drove right over it.

Without a bike, Dick lost his newspaper route to another boy who had a functioning bicycle. A few weeks later on a visit to the hardware store, Mom noticed an ad for a bicycle contest sponsored by Western Auto: Kids! Complete this sentence in 25 words or less (Mom and Dad’s help is encouraged): I like the all-new ‘X-53 Super’ Western Flyer Bicycle because . . .

Mom took home an entry blank, determined for the first time to win a contest for a specific need. Her goal was to win Dick one of the 101 new bikes that would be awarded to the grand prize winner and the hundred runner-ups. The entry she finally submitted seemed, to her kids, another of the slack-jawed variety, but we didn’t say this out loud. There would be other contests, we thought, other bicycles:

I like the all-new X-53 Super Western Flyer Bicycle because brand new ideas about safety, service, sleekness, combined with Western Flyer’s old reliable construction make X-53 Super a stand-out in ANY bike rack!

Nothing had come of the Western Flyer entry Mom had sent in during her dry spell, and we could tell she was becoming increasingly worried about that and our eviction notice by the time the three men in business suits pulled up in their gleaming Pontiac. They must have stifled laughter when they saw the scrappy Ryan kids staring at them open mouthed, until two of us broke ranks and ran in to announce their approach. As the men stepped up to the door and knocked, the remaining kids traipsed through ahead of them, leaving them alone on the porch.

Publicity photo taken after Mom (in Dick’s name) won the Western Auto bicycle contest, including $5,000, in the nick of time. Back row, standing: Dad, Rog, and Bub. Others, from left: Lea Anne, Bruce, Barb (holding her favorite toy, an empty Vaseline jar), Dick, Mom, Betsy (sitting on Mom’s lap), me, Mike (with toy gun). Brother Dave was born eight months later.

Assuming the men were lost, Mom opened the screen door prepared to direct them elsewhere. Her sturdy five-foot six-inch frame came up to the knot in the tallest man’s necktie, but she probably could have beaten him in arm wrestling. Years of hauling kids around had given her a body as solid as stone, her able shoulders visible at the edges of the square-cut top of her yellow sundress. She had high cheekbones and olive skin, remnants of the smattering of Indian blood rumored to have circulated in her mostly German ancestors. Her black eyes stared directly into the blue eyes of the tallest visitor