It's not every day that an author takes two sisters, a brother and three nephews along on a national book tour, but then, Terry Ryan's is not your ordinary family. In The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, released April 10 by Simon & Schuster, Ryan recounts her impoverished childhood with an alcoholic, violent father. Her mother, with the optimism so characteristic of women in the 1950s, wrote commercial ditties that won the family refrigerators and bicycles just as the old ones broke and $1 bills just as the creditors came knocking at the door.
In many ways, the Ryan family's story is typical of "ordinary" life in those days, when women stoically hung on without a thought to leaving a bad marriage, children were born one after another without the brake of the Pill, and America's grand corporations hosted competitions on product labels and box tops. If Evelyn Ryan hadn't projected what author Terry, her sixth child, describes as "an attitude of inner wealth, believing that the attitude was more important than winning and that the attitude itself meant you were a winner," this would be a sobering indictment of "Mom, America and Apple Pie."
But it is not. Instead, it is a paean to a family that still laughs and plays together, and that has rented a pair of vans in order to caravan through 11 cities together on Ryan's tour. "Everywhere we go, people are thrilled to meet the characters in the book," said Ryan, who is "flabbergasted" by the surge of interest and publicity the book is generating. During its first week in the stores, Ryan received a flurry of media attention, including an appearance on the Today show and features in the New York Times Home Section and on Salon.com.
"All my brothers and sisters gave memories for the book," she said. Ryan's sister Betsy, who wrote the afterword, observed: "In the past it was Mom who always held us together, but when she passed away two and a half years ago, we realized we'd have to do it ourselves. In fact, the book has helped tremendously to keep us together."
Ryan, 54, who has written two volumes of poetry, and was the writing half of a cartoon called C.O. Sylvester that was published for 16 years in the San Francisco Chronicle, started the book after all 10 siblings got together to go through the house in Defiance after their mother died. (Incidentally, it was the same house that Evelyn bought with $5,000 down, which she won as first prize from Western Auto). "She never had a driver's license, she never had a job, but she kept everything," said Ryan. "I went home with boxes of her contest stuff."
Back home in San Francisco, Ryan realized that those boxes contained real treasure. Inside were all of Evelyn's contest entries (she often entered different ditties under several names), along with poems and acceptance photos (two next to cars!). "We'd all been telling this story orally since the '50s," said Ryan. Now, with all the dates, all the jingles and all the illustrated contest rules in hand, she felt ready to write it down.
While The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is attracting a national audience, the locals haven't been left behind. Ryan said: "The whole town of Defiance is going crazy. They proclaimed April 10 Evelyn Lehman Ryan Day. The town feels as proud as though they'd written it themselves." And that's because Evelyn Ryan did something so extraordinary: despite Madison Avenue's skewed view of women at the time, despite the want, she gave her children the best gift of all—a love of life so deep that they grew up knowing that they, too, were winners.
