Lucky Winners

My youngest son David is very lucky. Lucky in that he wins things a lot. Things like drawings and raffles. This spring he won a new basketball hoop from a drawing at the local grocery store.


His luck helped us late in the summer or early fall of 2004, when my sons and I were shopping at a different local grocery store. There was a drawing being held in the meat section, sponsored by Hormel, which has also sponsored the bobbleheads given away at the Dome. The cardboard box in which the drawing slips were supposed to go seemed empty, and I thought I remember reading that the date of the drawing had passed. Yet, the box, drawing slips and a pen were sitting there, so we filled out and put in one slip.

I didn't think much about it after that. Then one day I arrived home to find a box sitting on my front step. The return address was listed as Hormel. I thought to myself, "What, my wife is buying meat products through the mail now"? When I opened the box, I was happy to see that it was filled with five bobbleheads. I took one out of it's box and was really excited to see that it was autographed!


In all, we had won five bobbleheads. Four of them were signed (Joe Mauer, Al Newman, Paul Molitor and Shannon Stewart) and one was unsigned (Walter Johnson, who passed away in 1946).


My sons and I were really excited to have won these. Thanks Hormel! The odd thing was that the box simply contained the five bobbleheads. No letter saying we had won, no correspondence of any kind, just the bobbleheads.