Readings

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

Simon & Schuster, 351 pp., $24

1950s. Small-town Ohio. Evelyn Ryan has 10 children and a husband whose weekly paycheck, small enough to begin with, shrinks to microscopic once he’s drunk up a third of it. What’s a mother to do? Write your answer in 25 words or less. Rhyming helps.

The true story of a woman whose character practically demands Family Channel-style adjectives like “indomitable” and “inspiring,” The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio may not sound like your kind of story. But it is. The writing, like the heroine, is clear and direct, but never, ever stupid. Add the wealth of excellent anecdotes churned out by any large family, and this memoir by Terry Ryan, the sixth of Evelyn Ryan’s brood, is engrossing as well as funny and touching: the curiously stirring tale of a merry heart.

I’m glad I use Dial

It does what it’s supposed to.

Gets me clean, keeps me fresh,

Makes me nice to be close to.

Those final three lines were one of Evelyn Ryan’s tries at winning $25,000 from Dial Soap. She didn’t win that prize, nor any that big. But she did win enough — watches, appliances, bicycles, $5 bills, and sometimes, at crucial moments, a good bit more — to keep her family housed and fed in the face of overwhelming odds.

For example, this verse won her 10 minutes’ worth of free grocery shopping at Big Chief Supermarket, a spree sponsored by Seabrook Farm’s frozen foods:

Wide selections, priced to please her;

Scads of Seabrook’s in their freezer

Warmth that scorns the impersonal trend

Stamps “Big Chief” as the housewife’s friend.

Without ever saying so, Ryan makes clear in her account of the family’s anxious preparation for this spree — mapping the store aisles, measuring the cart — what free food meant to a poverty-stricken family of 12. With the help of her children shouting the time remaining, a sympathetic prize official who winked at a couple of rules, and a butcher inspired to double her cart capacity with large flat slabs of meat, Evelyn turned that 10 minutes into the equivalent of $3,000 worth of food today. That was more than she could fit even into her recently won deep freezer.

Stories like that one are delightful, but the heart of the book is Evelyn Ryan’s obstinate cheerfulness through a life that might have justified the blackest depression. A once-promising young newspaper writer, Evelyn married a man who not only drank his pay, but also sat in their kitchen nightly screaming at umpires on the radio, occasionally abused her, and was alternately jealous of and overly dependent on her prizes. With none of the family handy with a wrench, their house was falling to pieces, held together only by Evelyn’s game Rube-Goldberg efforts at repair.

But Evelyn stayed stubbornly — never foolishly, only stubbornly — cheerful. No wonder the children watched Queen for a Day, that Fifties TV mainstay of female misery and martyrhood, with disdain. “Despite the many times we saw Queen for a Day, we never pictured our mother as a candidate,” Terry Ryan writes. “We felt sorry for those poor crying women, even though their home lives may have been better than ours. We knew my mother would never describe her life or ours as wretched. Her delight in living, reflected in her poetry and contest entries, rose out of bed with her every day. It was one thing Dad couldn’t drink away.”

It is hard to describe how un-corny, how fresh and frank this all is. Evelyn’s “contesting” was not only a way to help support her family, but also — as it apparently was for many women of that time — an outlet for her wit, intelligence, and skill with words. Her notebook of verse and contest entries was always propped on the ironing board beside her. When Evelyn Ryan died in 1998, her children found a trunk full of such notebooks. Terry Ryan used them as a starting place for this lovely book, a fitting tribute to her mother’s strong and happy heart.

This article appears in May 18 • 2001.