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The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less Posters
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List Price: $13.00Price: $4.52 You Save: $8.48 (65%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 977.114043092
Graphics Memory Size: Bargain Price
Maximum Color Depth: Simon & Schuster
Metal Type: Simon & Schuster
Publisher: 1
Region Code: 352
Total External Bays Free: August 30, 2005
Total Firewire Ports: Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s.
Stepping back into a time when fledgling advertising agencies were active partners with consumers, and everyday people saw possibility in every coupon, Terry Ryan tells how her mother kept the family afloat by writing jingles and contest entries. Mom's winning ways defied the Church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of housewives. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay when it came to securing a happy home for her six sons and four daughters. Evelyn, who would surely be a Madison Avenue executive if she were working today, composed her jingles not in the boardroom, but at the ironing board.
By entering contests wherever she found them -- TV, radio, newspapers, direct-mail ads -- Evelyn Ryan was able to win every appliance her family ever owned, not to mention cars, television sets, bicycles, watches, a jukebox, and even trips to New York, Dallas, and Switzerland. But it wasn't just the winning that was miraculous; it was the timing. If a toaster died, one was sure to arrive in the mail from a forgotten contest. Days after the bank called in the second mortgage on the house, a call came from the Dr Pepper company: Evelyn was the grand-prize winner in its national contest -- and had won enough to pay the bank.
Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. From her frenetic supermarket shopping spree -- worth $3,000 today -- to her clever entries worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, the story of this irrepressible woman whose talents reached far beyond her formidable verbal skills is told in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio with an infectious joy that shows how a winning spirit will triumph over the poverty of circumstance.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This was a great book. The father was very believable and the story was a wonderful true story. We need more books like this.
Rating:  -
Love the book, service was great! I never dreamed there was another family so much like mine.
Rating:  -
The whit wasn't catchy & neither was the book. I suffered through the first 5 chapters, then put myself out of my misery by tossing this one in the donation pile!
Rating: -
This book is a quick, easy read. Terry "Tuffy" Ryan writes about life in the 50s and 60s from the context of her mother's writing. Companies would hold contests to create jingles and slogans for their products, and Evelyn Ryan, with her sharp sense of humor and gift for brevity, was the queen of these contests. She also sold short poems and stories to local and state newspapers. With the payments and prizes she received from her writing, Evelyn at times completely supported her family of twelve. ... Read More
Rating:  -
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is the biography of Evelyn Ryan written by her daughter Terry (child #6). She was a wife and mother of ten children in the 'contest era' of the 1950s and 1960s. When I think of a families from then I imagine Leave it to Beaver but Evelyn's family was not as idyllic as a TV family. Evelyn's husband was an alcoholic and abusive; never seeming to make enough money to raise his large family in small town America.
Evelyn converted to Catholicism when ... Read More
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