The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, by Terry Ryan.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
$24 - 288 pages.

Determination should have been Evelyn Ryan’s middle name.

Married at a young age to a man who soon acquired a lifelong problem with alcohol, mother of 10, and often faced with an empty bankbook, Evelyn Ryan began to write jingles and contest entries to help keep her family afloat. The 1950s and early 1960s were the golden age of the “contest era,” a time when major companies annually sponsored hundreds of advertising contests, and Evelyn managed to earn thousands of dollars in goods and services with her winning entries.

Evelyn Ryan’s daughter, Terry Ryan, tells how her mother helped support their family with her contest wins in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Terry Ryan quotes frequently from her mother’s jingles, poetry and prose, presenting a body of writing that reveals a woman of wit, vivacity, charm, and spunk. Mollie Brown may have been unsinkable, but Evelyn Ryan wins the prize for being irrepressible. She entered contest after contest, losing many, but winning as well, recording the advertising ditties in her notebooks while she ironed or cared for her children, keeping track of the various aliases under which she entered contests, anxiously watching the sidewalk every day for Pokey - her name for the postman - to deliver the mail.

These contests brought the Ryans all sorts of unforeseen benefits. Nearly every appliance in their house - toasters, dryer, refrigerator, washer - was won through a contest. Evelyn Ryan won large prizes - she once converted to cash a sportscar and a trip to Europe just in time to thwart foreclosure on their home by the bank - as well as watches, televisions and radios.

But The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is more than the story of a woman with a knack for winning contests. It is the story of a woman who believed in her family, who raised her children under adverse circumstances, a woman whose enthuasiasm for life seemed inexhaustible. One of the book’s many humorous episodes was Evelyn Ryan’s 10-minute grocery store shopping spree, a prize from one of her contests. Terry Ryan’s description of her mother’s preparations, her race around the store and the cooperating employees who helped her carry off an incredible amount of food will bring a smile to any reader who has ever dreamed of winning a shopping spree.

Terry Ryan also tells us about the other members of her family: Her brothers who briefly played baseball for Detroit, her older sister who always showed Terry love and patience, her brother Rog’s various brushes with the law, including his arrest for riding spread-eagled on the hood of a car going 60 miles an hour. Some of her more somber stories revolve around her father and his nightly drinking bouts, sessions during which he occasionally erupted into rages followed by remorse and contrition. At one point, recovering from a heart attack and therefore temporarily removed from the bottle, Ryan’s father displays a side of his nature that few of his children had seen for so long a period of time, a gentleness and spontaneity that showed them why their mother had married this ruined man. Soon, however, he returned to his drinking, quitting only in the last few years of his life when he was diagnosed with diabetes.

Two pieces from this book puzzled me. Ryan portrays her father as a terrible provider, which he was, yet he manages somehow to leave his wife $60,000 in savings when he dies, an extraordinary sum for a man who supposedly wasted every cent on booze. Ryan calls her father’s act “a legacy of atonement,” yet seems to gloss over this gift, giving the impression - not an uncommon one among children of alcoholics, I might add - that she still strongly resents her father’s drinking.

A second part of the book that left me a little bewildered was the nonchalant attitude toward cheating in these contests. Evelyn Ryan won many of these contests using her children’s names; some of the contests, in fact, were supposedly limited to children. Yet, she entered and won; her children who “won” had their pictures in the paper and accepted the gifts, which she then generally sold to use the money for their family. Her talent and her persistence are admirable, but her use of her children and writing in their stead seem a trifle dishonest.

Despite these misgivings, the book is still quite charming. If you’re looking for something special to read this summer, an inspirational book with a heart of gold, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio may just fit the bill.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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