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Those dang city slickers won everything!

August 1, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Keith Schell

During a recent conversation with a good friend of mine, he told me a story about the biggest prize he ever won in his life:

Twenty-odd years ago he was the manager of a courier office in the city when a delivery man from a rival company came in to his office with a delivery.  After the transaction was completed, the delivery man took a book of raffle tickets out of his pocket and asked my friend if he would like to buy one.

The raffle was a fundraiser for a small town conservation fish and wildlife club some fifty miles away in the gentleman’s hometown. The grand prize in the raffle was a high-end ATV, all tricked out with a top-notch hunting package, complete with a winch attached to the front end for hauling things out of the mud.

Not being an outdoorsman, my friend had no real interest in buying a ticket for the draw but the gentleman persisted, and so my friend bought a couple of tickets for the draw just to placate the gentleman so he would go on his way.

And a month or two down the road, my friend got a totally unexpected phone call: He had just won the grand prize in the conservation club raffle!

After determining the date and time of the award ceremony, my friend contacted his Father-in-law, who had a big enough truck to help him bring the prize back to his house. They then went the fifty miles to the small-town conservation club to claim his prize on the appointed day.

As he stepped out of the truck at the conservation club to get his prize, he noticed a general air of disgruntlement amongst the members of the club who were milling around waiting for the award ceremony to begin.

He approached one of the members, who was dressed in the appropriate plaid shirt and accompanying hunting ensemble, and asked why the crowd was so unhappy.  

The club member angrily replied, “Because some city fella won the grand prize in our raffle!”

Oh.

That ATV was coveted by every hunter and angler in the conservation club. And for an outsider to win it, and a ‘city slicker’ to boot,was too much for many of the local club members to bear.  

Sensing that the mood of the crowd around him was less than enthusiastic and wanting to get out of there in one piece, when the award ceremony began he hurriedly shook hands and said his ‘Thank Yous’ to the raffle convenors, helped his Father-in-law load the ATV in the back of their truck, and quickly hightailed it out of there before the crowd around him became too unruly.

When he told me this story, I had to chuckle. This sort of thing used to happen all the time in our little town when I was a kid.

Growing up in a small town in cottage country, the population of our town would swell by at least five times over the summer as the people from the city came to their cottages to enjoy their summer on the water in our neck of the woods.

Our local Lion’s Club always held a massive fundraising raffle every summer, with the grand prize drawing happening at the end of the summer at our annual fall fair just before everyone went back home for school. Tickets were sold through nearly every business establishment in town over the course of the summer, taking maximum advantage of the summer tourist trade in order to help boost sales and maximize the amount of money raised for local charities.  

The local Lion’s club always had an excellent grand prize every year, generously donated by one of the local merchants.

One year, it was a deluxe fishing boat, complete with outboard motor and trailer, and the year after that it was a large-sized fold-down tent trailer so you could take the whole family with you on a camping trip! All were great prizes that elicited excitement for the draws and made you want to step up and buy the winning ticket!

The problem was, back then none of us locals ever won any of the grand prizes in our own draws! It was always a cottager there for the summer, a ‘city slicker’,of all people,who always won our grand prize!  And we locals kept getting more and more disgruntled every year because the dang city fellas kept winning all the grand prizes in our local draws every fall!

I guess it stood to reason because there were five times as many of them as there were of us in the summer, so the odds of a city person winning our grand prize always increased by a factor of five over the summer while our odds never seemed to change.   

While this story was written with tongue-firmly-in-cheek, I honestly don’t remember any of us locals ever winning any of the grand prizes in our own draws, ever! Just once we would have liked to have seen a local win the big prize, even if it was a local we didn’t like! But in fairness, you really couldn’t complain because the draw was fair for everybody and the cottagers made a generous contribution to our local economy every summer, with many of our local jobs and businesses being dependant on the summer tourist trade. Many a time those summer jobs kept the people in our little town afloat.  

So even though we locals never won any of the big prizes in our own raffles, in truth our little town was always the big winner. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the local Lions club and other noteworthy service groups, the money raised by those organizations always went to our local hospital for new equipment or to causes that benefited many disadvantaged people around our town and the surrounding area. So you could take solace in the fact that the money raised through those raffles certainly did a lot of good for our local charities.

But it sure would have been nice to win one every now and then!  

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