How Evelyn Won a House
In 1953, the Ryan family in Defiance, Ohio, was large, noisy, and poor. Evelyn Ryan and her husband Kelly were raising ten children, with very little money to spare. Kelly worked at a machine shop, but much of his pay disappeared into alcohol, leaving Evelyn to stretch what remained across food, clothes, school costs, and emergencies. The family lived packed into a tiny rental house, with children squeezed into every available space.
Evelyn found a way to fight back against that poverty through contest writing. In the years after World War II, companies regularly offered prizes for jingles, slogans, and short promotional entries. Evelyn treated these contests like skilled work, not luck. She studied the rules, learned which kinds of wording different companies liked, saved labels and box tops, and sent in entry after entry while managing the endless labor of a household with ten children.
Her wins came steadily and mattered. She brought home watches, blenders, candy, skates, appliances, and cash prizes that filled urgent gaps in the family budget. Then the family was hit from several directions at once. Their landlord told them to leave, and their oldest son, Dick, was struck by a car while delivering newspapers. He survived with a broken arm, but his bicycle was ruined, and he lost his route.
Evelyn answered the crisis the only way she knew. She aimed her writing at the family’s exact needs and entered a bicycle contest in Dick’s name. When three men in dark suits arrived at the house, the children feared bad news. Instead, they announced that the entry had won the national grand prize: a new bicycle, a washer and dryer, and 5,000 dollars in cash.
That prize changed the family’s life. Evelyn used the money as a down payment on a four-bedroom house on Washington Avenue. For the Ryan children, the move felt almost impossible to believe. Their mother had written them out of eviction and into a home of their own.
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