Two Hundred Record Albums

During my first winter break from college I was at my father’s house. I was going to spend the spring semester with him. But it was still a couple weeks away, so my father gave me some Richard Brautigan and Hunter Thompson books to read while I listened to the WMMR, Philadelphia’s best-known rock station, on the radio.

The last week of December WMMR was having a contest in which they were giving away the 200 best-selling record albums of 1976. To enter you had to mail in a postcard with your name and address. I mentioned the contest to my father because I knew he always had some angle on such contests.

Ever since he was a kid haunting the casinos of Las Vegas in 1949, while his mother waited out the six-week residency for a Nevada divorce, he was learning how to work different gambling games and machines. He was befriend by dealers who showed him tricks and other sleight of hand moves with cards and poker chips. He even figured how to rig an electronic horse-racing game to pay out every time he played it. All this at age of 12.

“You have to figure out a way to give yourself a slight edge over the next guy,” he would say. “If you have to mail in a postcard and you mail in two, you have twice the chance of winning than anyone else. Three postcards give you a three times greater chance and so on. Although one or two additional postcards won’t give you that much greater probability of winning overall you still dramatically increase your chances in comparison to any other person.”

“Yeah, but they only allow one entry per person,” I pointed out.

“Then you send a bigger postcard,” he said. “The same concept applies to size as well. If you send a postcard twice the size of a regular 3x5 or 4x6 postcard you still have twice the chance of winning.”

“Can you send bigger postcards through the mail?”

“Yeah, the mistake people, though, is putting only the postcard amount of postage on it. If you have a postcard that’s bigger than 4x6, you just have to put first class postage on it. And if it’s bigger than what they allow for first class, you have to put the postage for large envelopes on it.

“Where am I going to get a big postcard?”

“You make it,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

We went into his darkroom where he got out some artboard and an X-acto knife and preceded to cut out a large postcard.

 “It’s best to make it out of artboard and cut it into a parallelogram with sharp corners, so that when they reach in to the barrel to pull out entries, it will jab their hand and their natural inclination will be to pull it out and voilà!—they have a winner.

Three weeks later I was notified—by postcard—that I was indeed a winner.