Evelyn Ryan

For the Dawson's Creek character, see Evelyn Ryan (Dawson's Creek).

Evelyn Ryan was an Ohio poet and jingle and slogan writer. A 2005 movie, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, was made about her life.

Early life and education

Evelyn Lehman Ryan was born in Sherwood, Ohio, to Orren and Minnie Lehman; Minnie died soon after giving birth, and Orren sent Ryan and her older sister to live with relatives.^[1] She spent her first three years living with an aunt and uncle.^[2][1] She graduated from Sherwood High School in 1931 as valedictorian.^[2] She started nursing school, but chronic eczema prevented her from continuing.^[1]

Career

Ryan worked as a typesetter and then a columnist at the Sherwood Chronicle, which was published by her step-grandmother, Josephine Etchie.^[2]

Ryan was mother of ten and a housewife.^[2] She began entering contests in the late 1940s, starting with Burma-Shave rhymes, and regularly won prizes such as watches, kitchen appliances, and in one instance an entire case of candy bars.^[1] She often made multiple submissions under slightly different names.^[1]

From 1953 to 1965, to support her family she entered contests for writers which in the US in the 1950s and 1960s were created by large commercial products companies as a promotional tool.^[3][2] In 1953, while she was pregnant with her tenth child, the family was being evicted from a two-bedroom house they were renting, and Ryan won enough for the down payment on a four-bedroom house.^[4][2] In 1965, facing foreclosure after her husband had taken a second mortgage on the house without telling her, she won $3,440.64, a Ford Mustang, a trip to Switzerland and two watches, some of which she used to pay off the second mortgage.^[3][5] Ryan also sold poetry and other writing to newspapers, magazines, and radio shows.^[1]

Corporations changed to sweepstakes promotions, and Ryan went to work for J.C. Penney as a sales clerk, working there until she retired in 1983.^[2]

Book and movie

Her daughter, Terry Ryan, wrote a 2001 book, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, which was made into a 2005 movie, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio.^[3][4]

Personal life

Ryan married Leo “Kelly” Ryan, a machinist, in 1936.^[2] She was widowed in 1983.^[2] She died August 29, 1998.^[1][3]