My dad was obsessed with contests. He entered every contest and sweepstakes that there was. He is probably one of the reasons that Publishers Clearing House got so big. Dad subscribed to a bunch of magazines and I think he kept every copy. I don’t know why. I know when I had a family, Kathy and I tried to purge our outdated magazines constantly with one exception… National Geographic. I mean you couldn’t throw those away… right? Anyway, when I was growing up we had years of Mechanics Illustrated, Popular Mechanics, Life, Look, Time, US News and World Report, Readers Digest, Better Homes and Gardens to name a few. None of these made the Paper Drive although if they had our payout from the paper recycling company would have increased a fair amount. I didn’t think I needed to reveal that there was an unusually large number of magazines at our house not donated to the paper drive. That fact would remain secret for years to come. Ok, I am getting off the subject.
Contests…. dad entered so many it was hard to keep track although I think knowing my dad he must have had a system to track the progress of each contest or sweepstake. There was no lottery then. Later after I left home and the lottery was alive and well my dad became a regular, playing a number of lotteries. He had a system. He always had a system. That will need to be for another story. He would win stuff from time to time. Nothing that really amounted to anything, but there was this one time when we received a very large cardboard box. Before opening we were looking at the place it came from. It was definitely from another state. It was addressed to my dad so we couldn’t open it. There was great anticipation as my dad, after he came home from work, finally opened the box. When I say big, I mean big. It probably even seemed bigger because we were little kids. Once opened it was a box full of board games. There must have been 20 board games in that box. Monopoly, Risk, Careers, Sorry, all the popular board games at that time. Most of these were special versions of the games. For example, the tokens for Monopoly and the houses and the hotels were all metal. The games were amazing and we played them all. It was a great day for us. My dad beamed having won such a great prize. As far as I am concerned this was way better than the Leg Lamp in the Christmas Story. In reality this was my Dad’s and our MAJOR AWARD.
