The Door Prize Was a Heifer
A raffle for a gift basket at our Stephenville scholarship dinner goes sideways when the winning ticket turns out to belong to a heifer.
Each year the dairy auxiliary hosts a scholarship dinner with a raffle, and the prizes usually run toward gift baskets, a quilt, and a fruitcake somebody has been trying to give away since 1998. I was in charge of the drawing. My job was to reach into a coffee can and read the number out loud, which I am qualified for.
The grand prize that year was a young heifer, a donation from the Murdock family, and we had her in a pen behind the hall with a big red bow around her neck. Ticket holders were told to claim their prize at the back door at the end of the evening. The ticket numbers were printed on little pink stubs, and a very careful volunteer named Arlene kept the master list.
I pulled the winning number, 4471, and read it out. Nobody moved. I read it again. A man in the back said he had 4471, but then he looked at his stub, squinted, and said it was 4417. We waited a full minute. Eventually Arlene came to the microphone, adjusted her glasses, and told us that ticket 4471 had been bought by 'Miss Daisy Lou, c/o the Murdock farm.'
Now Daisy Lou, it turns out, was the heifer. The Murdock children had put her name on a ticket as a joke and paid for it themselves, and nobody had noticed. The heifer had won her own raffle. A round of applause went up, and I will say it was the first time anyone had clapped for a cow who had not milked.
The committee decided, after a long debate, that Daisy Lou would keep her prize. The Murdocks agreed to donate a second heifer, and the second ticket went to a very happy girl from Dublin. The scholarship fund hit a record that night. If you are thinking about your own fundraiser, the notes from dairy industry guides have good ideas, and I tell the rest of this story at farm.FM whenever somebody buys a ticket.
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