I won an aloe plant in a classroom raffle when I was about nine.
Last year I won $50 at bingo. It would have been $100, but someone else bingoed at the same time so we had to split it.
I won 2 Sony 6X9 car speakers in a drawing at a local subway when I was 14. I gave them to my mom to put in her car.
My team and I have won over $2000 in gift certificates to the bar at our local pub trivia (over 4 years time of course)
And my girlfriend and I won passes to the Miller Lite Party Deck for the Bears pre-season home opener this year, but we got there late and they wouldn’t let us in.
When I was about 12, I won a “guess how many gumballs are in this gigantic jar” contest at a toy store. My prize? A $5 gift certificate. Unfortunately, the store had gone out of business by the time I got to go try to redeem it. (My stepfather gave me $5.)
In high school I won a “guess that food” contest on the radio; they’d read the ingredients from a box of food and you had to call in and guess what the food was. (It was croutons.) I won a gift certificate good for a pie from a local bakery.
Earlier this year I won a trophy for being the ninth-place rookie at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
Also my LSAT score got me a full scholarship to law school, if that counts. Speaking of which, I have an exam in the morning to study for…
I won…
…a pair of pants in a poster contest back when I was a cub scout.
…2 tickets to Ghostbusters 2 in a radio call-in contest.
…$445 in the lottery.
…$300 in a Quiz Bowl-type TV show in high school.
…a banzuke for getting a perfect score in the Mainichi Daily News’ Sumo Trivia Contest.
I just missed out winning some money from GAMES Magazine but got a T-shirt out of it.
I just a few days ago won 10 downloads from iTunes.
I won a poster from Hercheys back in the early 80s by cheating. You could peak inside a candy wrapper and see if it was a winner. I never did send away for it though.
And I’ve gotten bunch of stuff from various raffles at parties. The best was an awesome towel, worthy of hitchhiking the universe.
Ah, I also came in second in a voter slogan contest. They gave me a bunch of stuff but none of it was all that great. “Exercise your right, voting is your might.”
I won tickets to screenings of Star Trek The Motion Picture, Star Trek II, Star Trek III, Star Trek iV from radio stations.
I won a poetry contest in sixth grade and got five bucks. (bicentenial silver dollars)
I won a Forrest Gump t-shrt at a bowling alley because I was the first to produce a photo of my parents.
I once won $1,085.75 from a slot machine in Vegas.
I won a 20x30 (cm, that is) copy of this print because I happened to be online when the artist posted a journal saying he’d give a free print to whoever got his 555 555th pageview.
It was pretty sweet.
Since I live in Nevada and rarely gamble, my cash winnings don’t amount to much. Once I was playing Megabucks and won $250, though.
My school district has a wellness program. There are lots promotions and drawings and stuff. The most recent one was called “Sweat to Health”. If you entered, you got a free hoodie sweatshirt. Then , you had to fill out a card checking off that you exercised 30 minutes a day. At the end of the contest, they had a drawing for an Ipod Nano. Which I won! (They gave 100 Nanos away.)
From similar school district contests, I have won a digital scale and a car safety kit.
**Color Printing Kit ** - a door prize given out at the grand opening of a new photography store
**Laserdisc/5-CD player ** - from a record store
**Belt Buckle ** - at a Rodeo
**$100 gift certificate for groceries ** - from the local grocery store
**Lady’s Diamond Cocktail Ring ** - grand prize in a raffle in college. I kept it for a few years and traded it in at a jewelry store when we went to buy wedding rings.
**$200 ** - from Harris Poll. Every time I would complete an on-line survey for them, I would be entered into a sweepstakes. They sent an e-mail telling me I had won, and a check arrived a few weeks later.
Aviation Book - at an aviation seminar
**Bottle of Gin ** - On an airplane, around 1973. It was a charter flight to Hawaii of the Flying Dentists Association (of which my dad was a member). For fun, they had a contest to see who could guess the outside air temperature at the current altitude. I guessed the correct temperature, and won a bottle of gin. Since I was only 12 at the time, my parents kept (and of course, drank) the bottle. On my 21st birthday, they gave me a replacement bottle of gin.
More on a gambling note, I once won 37 bucks at an online casino. Silly, I know, but it was way back when online casinos were just getting ramped up, and they had given me a real, no-strings, no-deposit, free $10.00 beginning account. I played until the first time I lost, and cashed in to the tune of 37 bucks. Got a check a few weeks later and proudly cashed in my only example of truly free money.
Never did go back to that online casino though.
$500 on a scratch of lottery ticket. ( Woooo!)
Maybe $50 in a 50-50 from bowling and mystery.
A variety of concert tickets to classical performers performing at Orchestra Hall in Detroit from the gone-but-not-forgotten classical music station WQRS.
A Sleeping Beauty Coloring Book in Kindergarten.
Won a CD from a radio station in high school. My physics class all had to build a Rube-Goldberg machine for a competition the local college runs. We won (I’m not counting this win, since it was more of a skill type thing,) and as such, our machine wason display in a local mall for a saturday, and a local radio station set up there and did a salute to science day, or something. They asked science question to the crowd and I won by knowing the lightest element. Got an REM CD.
I also called in ot a radio station in college and won two free passes to a screening of Jason X. Our area had a small earthquake that morning, and said it was an X.Y on the richter scale…but he had no idea what the ricter scale actuallly measured, what the numbers meant, other than higher means bigger earthquake. So I explained it to him and got the free passes.
On tip boards:
A case of Coors beer, back when you couldn’t buy it here.
Two .38 cal revolvers.
A heavy, warm Colts parka.
A big fat stuffed bear, which I promptly ran off on another tip board.
A half-gallon of Scotch whiskey.
In sweepstakes:
From Kahn’s Meats, a really nice picnic basket with $75 worth of certificate for meat, a Kahn’s Frisbee, and 20 Kahn’s t-shirts.
From Coca-Cola, airfare for 2 anywhere in the US. We went to L.A., drove down the coast highway, and flew back from San Diego.
From Ducks Unlimited, a beautiful Beretta shotgun.
A mountain bicycle.
3 pairs of binoculars.
About a dozen assorted t-shirts, including one from Rainier Beer saying, “Get a Hummer this summer.”
I won a pair of laser safety glasses from a Laser Institute of America course I took. I’ve yet to claim them, though.
As a youth, I won a fluegelhorn for my intermediate school in a raffle. Since no one played the fluegelhorn in band, the music store (donor) let the school trade it for an F-key trombone which, ::ahem:: someone there did play and get to use for two years.
I keep telling myself I’ll win the lottery, but that plan won’t work until I figure out how to buy tickets, and then actually go through with the purchase with a straight face.
A few years ago when the PS2 first came out, I won one. Before I started spending most of my waking hours on here, I spent them on one of those sites where you play casino type games, bingo, trivia… You could cash in your tokens for various weekly drawings. I got a gazillion tickets for a laptop drawing and one ticket for a PS2. But they were so new, that the game prices were outrageous. So I gave it to a friend in exchange for him installing a new dishwasher.
I won two separate “be the first caller with the correct answer” radio trivia prizes, for knowing (1) Crosby Stills & Nash’s first song to chart (Road to Marrakech), and (2) the name of James Brown’s backup band (Famous Flames). I won a Queen album and JB Live at the Apollo, respectively.
I don’t think I’ve ever won a raffle. But I have hit a royal flush on a video poker machine. 3 times. $1200 - $1600 each time. So I can’t complain too much about luck.