Who are George Hill and Helen Hadsell?

The sweeping world is full of colorfull personalities who approached our hobby with dedication and perseverance. One fulltime contester was George Hill.  He was a  postman from North Dakota and at one time president of The National Contesters Association. He started his hobby in the 1930s and won an average of nearly two prizes a week for decades. This man appeared on several TV shows as a result of his winnings.

Helen Hadsell is one of the greatest prizewinners in American contesting. She has the distinction that she never lost a contest. She started contesting  in 1958 after a long illness which Brad Steiger describes in one of his books. In 1982 Carolyn and Roger Tyndall who published the Contest Newsletter for a long time, write that Helen had won over 5,000 prizes by 1982 that were worth an estimated 250,000 dollars. Among her many remarkable prizes was a $ 53,000 dream house built by Formica, Inc.

This lady is 83 tears old and lived in Irving, TX in the 1980s. She was a strong believer in Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking. She is a psychic who still gives readings to people using  Astrology and Numerology. Her method of winning is based on  “projecting” her wins in advance, focusing clearly on what she wants to get as if she had already gotten it. It works for her. Check it out! She encouraged her own two boys to enter contests and one of them won a bicycle and the other one won a familiy trip to an Arizona Dude Ranch and Disneyland,CA.  That is not bad and worth writing about, isn’t it.

People like Helen look at contesting like a hobby of collecting prizes. The Tyndalls claim that successful  collecting and successful contesting have a lot in common. The give the Davy Crockett bubble-gum series card collection as an example to remind us that the final number in that series of cards doen’t just appear out of nowhere.  The collector seeks each card actively, puts ads in collectors’ journals, attends swap conferences, and budgets a certain amount of time and money each week or month to make sure that he can meet his goal.

The big-time contest winner does just about the same thing. One of the first prizes that Helen ever won was an outboard motor that her husband badly desired to go fishing. To win it, she did not just dream about how nice it would be to have one; she consciously and deliberately set out to collect the prize as her own. In her mind the outboard was already her own. All she had to do was come up with a 25 word sentence that would convince the contest judges she was right. The time and thought she put into that sentence was equivalent to that which an avid collector puts into hunting up that cherished rare item. To Helen, as with any collector, actually getting the item was only a matter of time.

ENTER OFTEN, FOLLOW THE RULES, THINK  “WIN”. YOU HAVE TO BE IN IT TO WIN.

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Tags: collector, gream home, no contest lost, postman