Helen Hadsell

Helen Hadsell Helene Hadsell (June 1, 1924 – October 30, 2010) was an American widely known as the "contest queen".

She entered and won many contests for items and for all-expense paid trips.

Helen Barbara Daeschel was born in 1924 and raised in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

She attended Central High School there, where she was a member of the school choir.

At age 18, she left home for Vancouver, Washington, where she found employment as a file clerk in a shipping yard.

She met and married Pat Hadsell, who was from Denton Texas, during World War II.

The couple later settled in Grand Prairie, Texas, and they had three children.

She was a homemaker who was also president of the Grand Prairie Community Chorus, a Girl Scout leader, and on the board of her local PTA.

The Hadsells started entering contests in 1948, as a family hobby, focusing on the skill contests.

In 1949 she won a Toni Home Permanent Kit as a 48th-through-168th place prize in a contest run by Skillern's Departmental Drug Stores.

However, for the first ten years or so, they almost never won.

This changed after Hadsell took a correspondence course in contest writing and learned that contest judges were, as she said in an interview a few years later, "looking for something different, coined words or phrases and humor. I'd say humor has won for me more than anything. I have another saying – pun for the money."

Hadsell's husband Pat assisted with the writing of a number of the contest entries.

By 1957, the family was starting to win contests more frequently, including the Hadsells' six-year-old son winning some toy guns for naming a pony.

In 1958, she entered the Mrs. America Pageant and made it past the first round, before losing in the Fort Worth division finals.

In 1959, the family moved from Grand Prairie to Irving, Texas.

She became the society news editor for the Irving News-Record, which became the "Strictly Personal" column for the Irving News Texan.

After having been named to a supermarket magazine advisory board, a local paper described Hadsell as "an enterprising girl if ever there was one."

In Hadsell's era, there was an activity known as "contesting", in which people would dedicate their time and efforts towards winning sweepstakes, where winners are chosen at random among those who have entered and the usual strategy was to submit as many entries as possible, and consumer skill contests, in which prizes were won by submitting some kind of writing extolling a particular product, often "In 25 words or less".

Such enthusiasts were known as "contestors" or "contest bugs".

There were national magazines and newsletters with contesters as the targeted audience.

In 1959, Hadsell told a local newspaper columnist that she had just won an electric food mixer for coming up with a name for a new kind of cake, and that she had won two other mixers in contests during the preceding year.

In 1963, Hadsell was selected as president of a Dallas area writing and contesting club, known as the Competriots, many of whose forty members were published writers of fiction, poetry, or textbooks who were now focusing on contests.

The members traded contest information and entry blanks.

She also won a house which was showcased at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair.

Later she lectured and held workshops on positive thinking.

A "Doctor of Metaphysics", she was the author of the popular book The Name It and Claim It Game: with WINeuvers for WISHcraft.

By early 1964, the family said they had won many prizes, ranging from the mundane such as lawn-mower blade sharpeners to a trip to Disneyland; the latter was followed by trips to Washington, D.C., and Venice.

Nonetheless, Hadsell thought that they hadn't yet "won any of the big prizes, like cars or trips around the world."

But that soon happened.

The Formica Corporation had an exhibit at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair which showed a house where all interior walls, and many of the appointments and furnishings, were made of the company's laminated plastic.

As part of this, the company ran a $100,000 contest, the grand prize of which was a $50,000 replica of the house to be built anywhere in the United States, lot included.

Contestants had to fill out an entry form at either the World's Fair or at any of a number of Formica model homes that had been built around the country, one of which was in the Dallas area; the form itself asked the entrant for short responses regarding what they liked about the house and what suggestions they had for future Formica products.

Hadsell was one of 1.5 million people to submit entries.

She won the contest, a result announced when a marketing directory for Formica Corporation came to Dallas to present the Hadsell family with a model of the house to be built.

She attributed the win to her creativity.

At the time, the Hadsells said they were unsure regarding which town they would have the house built in; it was eventually built in Irving, and the Hadsells lived there for a number of years.

Around two years after she won the house, Hadsell began to change her focus.

In late 1967, Hadsell sponsored a seminar in Dallas on mind control.

In 1968 she was part of a lecture series in Dallas on subjects related to psychic abilities and mental potential; her topic was the power of positive thinking.