In Florida: A Contest Winner's Road to "Shoppertunity'

By Anne Constable

You name it, I've won it," says the seventyish lady in silver harlequins as she tugs at her champagne-colored, pixie-style wig and smoothes the fabric of her hot-pink shift. Mrs. Diane Haley is standing in the kitchen of her tropical green bungalow in Clearwater, Fla., surrounded by prizes: brown vinyl reclining chairs, rattan porch furniture, a turquoise side-by-side refrigerator-freezer, a hairy purple stuffed dog, a pair of TV sets--stacked one atop the other--two imitation art nouveau lamps. An avocado-colored Ford Maverick Grabber parked in the driveway and the gold-patterned floor in the sun porch were won in contests. Piled in a hallway is some yet unpacked booty: a set of West Bend serving dishes, a Lionel racing set with a "hoop of fire," a CB radio and antenna.

Mrs. Haley hospitably offers a glass of Minute Maid lemonade--and yes, it turns out she won that too. Mrs. Haley is one of millions of "contesters" who compete yearly for the more than $100 million worth of prizes offered by U.S. advertisers to promote their products. Most contestants, like her, are retirees who have come to the Sunbelt after years of hard work in cold towns of the North and Midwest. They stay in touch with one another through a network of contesters' groups and subscribe to bulletins like the monthly Contest News--Letter (circ. 50,000) to keep abreast of events in the something-for-next-to-nothing world of merchandising competitions. Mrs. Haley is past president of the Florida State Contesters Association and once belonged to a local group called the Gulfwins.

She sighs. The Gulfwins, it appears, disbanded three years ago when the number of contests decreased. Contests, as opposed to sweepstakes, she is quick to explain, require skill--finishing a limerick, supplying the correct answers, coining a phrase. For some years now they have been losing ground to sweepstakes, a degenerate form in which the judging agency simply draws the winning entry from a bag of mail. True contesters, like Mrs. Haley, look down on sweepstakes. "There are no skill contests left. It's driving me nuts," she says. Most of what Mrs. Haley wins she sells at half price to her Florida neighbors or gives away to her relatives. To get rid of the surplus she also advertises in the Clearwater Sun and in the local Laundromat. Toward the end of every year she hoards the loot in anticipation of inflated prices as the holidays approach. Occasionally the bargaining is tense, as it was last Christmas when she unloaded two microwave ovens and a camera for nearly $1,000. "The first thing people say to you is, 'It didn't cost you nothing.' That makes me so mad."

Mrs. Haley has not really kept track of her winnings over the years. But among the prizes that she does remember are: two clothes dryers, two refrigerator-freezers, two Caribbean cruises, about 75 radios, six cameras, a trip to Europe, a set of American Tourister luggage, blenders, clocks, record players, an electric organ, a year's supply of coffee (2 lbs. per week), a scholarship to any college in Pinellas County (which she gave to the daughter of a friend) and one square inch of Alaska.

Mrs. Haley recalls clearly how the whole thing began--with a win that changed her life. It was in 1947 when she was walking to work in Kenton, Ohio, a new graduate of a Lima, Ohio, beauty school. She was munching a 100 Queen Anne Pecan Roll with a jingle on the wrapper: "Jimmy bought a jingle bar,/ He loved each luscious bite;/ Said he, Queen Anne's jingle bar . . ." Diane filled in the last line with "Is fit for a king all right." She won two motor scooters, which she promptly sold for $500. With the money she bought the equipment to open her own salon, the Starlight Beauty Shoppe. The lights in the ceiling twinkled and a shampoo and set was 75-c-.

Mrs. Haley pardonably prides herself on what she refers to as "wintuition." But there is a lot of work and considerable technique involved. Take the copy that recently won her the Florida Championship in the Clarion Master Modulator contest, with prizes including a CB radio and antenna, plus a chance to compete for the grand prize of a Datsun 280Z, a $5,000 personal appearance contract and an all-expenses-paid vacation for two in London. Sample: "Amigo, knock the slack out, turn on your ears to the 40-channel maximum, legal power ... Stop walkin' the dog, gettin' bad scenes, signal dropout and bleedovers. Why be a tweakie?"

She took the trouble, Mrs. Haley explains, to learn CB language from a book. As a true contester, she made that extra effort, though, she freely admits, a knack at writing "picturesque speech," sharpened by a correspondence course at the All-American School of Writing in Philadelphia, helped a good deal.

Mrs. Haley offers plenty of tips on how to be successful at contesting. She follows the rules strictly, making sure that the cards, paper and envelopes are the proper size. Mrs. Haley went to East High School in Columbus and was good at spelling and penmanship. She tries to tailor her entries to the known preferences of the judges. Over the years she has become familiar with their likes and dislikes by reading the winning entries and studying the advice in the contest newsletters. Says she: "Some want cleverness, others want simple, homespun ideas."

She also consults a carton full of rhyming dictionaries, a thesaurus, catalogues of puns and books on analogy. She researches the products and tries to incorporate the manufacturers' sales pitches. Clever titles will give you an edge, advises Mrs. Haley, who has come up with such concoctions as "I Remember Mania's Turnips" and "Reunion Chicken." She won a $600 microwave oven for a frankfurter casserole called "Putting on the Dog," a freezer for a sandwich dubbed "Ham Snacktaculars" and a stuffed tiger from the health food store for naming it "Eaton Wright." Other Haley coinages include "Blendelicious" for a multiflavored ice cream, "Purrsnickety" to describe a fussy cat. There is also a word technique known as "advanced merging," as in Shopper + Opportunity = Shoppertunity. Mrs. Haley once won six classical record albums for that one.

She sometimes spends all morning on a single entry, other times she does noth ing for a week. Her husband Bill, a retired quality-control inspector whom she married in 1937, works continuously too, driving to the post office to mail entries (she won't risk the mail box) and buy stamps. He scouts around for precious entry blanks, but higher postal costs have forced Mrs. Haley to cut back on the number of entries she sends.

In the final days before a sweepstakes drawing, the Haleys send in some extra entries to boost Diane's chances. But in skill contests, she warns, "if you think you've got a terrific entry, don't compete with yourself." She redoubles her efforts in the summer and around Christmas, when she figures other contestants may be busy with other activities. Yet she has nothing but scorn for the Westport, Conn., pilot who submitted more than 100,000 of the 165,000 entries in a contest and won an $85,000 airplane. "That's not keeping the spirit of contesting," she sniffs.

When not contesting, Mrs. Haley knits pillows to sell at the senior citizens center in Clearwater. She and Bill are also seashore bounty hunters. "We got a couple of old pocketbooks at the Goodwill, and we go out and walk along the beach with metal detectors," she explains. Their harvest has so far brought in coins, watches, fishing knives and a hubcap from a circa 1931 Essex. Says she: "People who say 'I can't find nothing to do' kill me."

She is always entered in half a dozen contests, but her main ambition these days is to win in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, granddaddy contest of them all. The prize is a whopping $25,000. Mrs. Haley, how ever, makes clear that what she really cares about is not the cash but the thrill of the quest. Says she: "Winning makes me think I'm not ready for the rest home yet." -- Anne Constable

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.