THE PRIZE WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO

"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. Evelyn's winning ways defied the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated views of a housewife's role in society. To her, flouting convention was a small price to pay for raising six sons and four daughters.

Graced with a rare appreciation for life's inherent hilarity, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for fun and profit. The story of this irrepressible woman, whose clever entries are worthy of Erma Bombeck, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash, is told by her daughter Terry with an infectious joy that shows that a winning spirit can sometimes triumph over poverty.

This is the true story of an "average housewife" whose life is not so average. Evelyn is the mother of ten children and married to an alcoholic, sometimes violent husband. She regularly faces eviction, poverty, and hunger in her small hometown, appropriately named Defiance, Ohio.

In the 1950s and 1960s, women like Mrs. Ryan, were discouraged from taking jobs and often felt powerless in the face of adversity. How could she show her children that life is not cruel, but bountiful? How could she possibly keep all ten of them afloat, and teach them grace and courage in the face of grinding poverty and adversity?

If the potential for true wealth resides in the human spirit, Evelyn Ryan drew from the depths of her spirit many times. With a gift for writing jingles, poems, and 25-words-or-less compositions, she won hundreds of contests that saved her family from destitution, and she did it with incredible humor and joy.

And Evelyn became a magnificent winner! Regularly awarded cash, shopping sprees, automobiles, trips to Europe, gold watches, color televisions, radios, a refrigerator, a freezer, washer-dryer, and bicycles, she stores the smaller prizes in what the family calls "Mom's Legendary Closet," which contained toys, clocks, sporting goods, toasters, silverware, record players, fans, jewelry, and three pairs of Arthur Murray shoes.

This would be an amazing story, funny and poignant, if author Terry Ryan only listed her mother's thousands of entries that resulted in enough cash to pay this large family's many bills, but Evelyn Ryan managed to teach her children lessons of pride and possibility.

Evelyn scraped together suppers of rice and milk-and to her children's horror, soup with bugs she said were "spices." All the while, she ignored poverty, and preferred to think of succeeding at great contests, while relishing the small treasures that keep the family running, like the $1 she received for every inventive poem published by her local newspaper.

When Loyal Jones defined Appalachian values, two of the most important were resourcefulness and independence-qualities clearly evident in the true story of "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," available at the Jesse Stuart Foundation Bookstore, 1645 Winchester Avenue in downtown Ashland. This book will be discussed on Tuesday, June 27th, at 5:45 pm at the next meeting of the JSF Regional Readers, a reading group open to the public.

For more information, call (606) 326-1667 or visit our website: jsfbooks.com.