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It says a lot for the skill of Terry Ryan as an author, for the reader to be able to feel so close to the people she writes about. You are right there while you read, you feel the emotion right along with everyone else. While I read, I felt as though I was growing up alongside the other kids, and felt as much sadness as a grown child left home as the younger kids. I was completely immersed in the Ryan family.
I highly recommend this book. When so many biographies are of the rich and (in)famous, it was lovely to read about an ordinary woman who was far from ordinary. She is an inspiration to her children, and she will be to you.
Evelyn Ryan, raised her ten children with grace and style, using her wit and ability to see the humor in a life that would have most people begging for relief to win prizes large and small. It is an unflinching look at a large family that depended on an alcoholic and abusive breadwinner who was more likely to drink his wages rather than pay his mortgage.
"The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio" is a fantastic chronicle of an America that no longer exists and in some ways never existed. It shatters the myth of the middle class 50's housewife who stayed at home and took care of the children without 'worrying her little head' about the finances. In this America contests were won by skill rather than luck and Evelyn managed to keep her family going with prizes such as that ranged from bicycles to two-week trips to Switzerland (converted to cash) to TVs and juke boxes. Ryan had the touch.
This book has made me laugh and cry and think about my family. My grandmother was in an abusive marriage, with an alcoholic husband and seven children, at around the same time that Evelyn was at a time when the law and the community blamed a woman for an abusive husband. What a life.
What a great story. Buy this book and celebrate the life of Evelyn Ryan, or E.L. Ryan, or Mrs. Ryan, or whatever entry was the winner of the day, with her daughter, Terry Ryan
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"Good Owners, Great Dogs" by Brian Kilcommons and Sara Wilson addresses more problems and gives solutions that work.
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