And the Winner Is ... Uhh ...
John Doe! D'oh!
Locating and digging up a 50-year-old Plymouth may prove to be the easy part
in completing a contest started in 1957.
Finding the winner of the car, now there is the trick.
Members of the committee charged with unearthing the Plymouth
Belvedere buried in a time capsule by the Tulsa County Courthouse met
Monday to consider contingencies.
To complicate matters, committee members don't even know for sure what
information is on the entry forms.
"From what we hear, it may be only a name, an address and a guess,"
Chairwoman Sharon King Davis said Monday.
All of this came from a seemingly simple start. To mark the 50th anniversary
of statehood, organizers ran a contest in conjunction with the car's burial on
June 15, 1957.
The contest had only two rules: The person coming closest to Tulsa's
population in 2007 got the car and a savings account that was started with $100
in 1957.
If that person was dead, the car and the savings account would go to his or
her heirs.
That was it. There are no further instructions on what to do if the winner or
winner's heirs can't be found, or if there are 10 winners and 100 heirs claiming
the prize.
A few puzzles have been worked out. The savings account was tracked down,
despite having gone through the failures and mergers of several savings and
loans. The exact dimensions of the time capsule vault have been identified.
But the big question ? how to determine a winner ? remains.
Determining the winning number will be relatively easy ? it will be Tulsa's
population on a specific date as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Ideally, one person and one only will have guessed that number and not only
will still be alive but will reside at the same address as 50 years ago.
The odds of that are probably greater than the odds of winning the
contest.
Far more likely is a winner named John Smith or something equally generic who
left Tulsa in 1958 ? with his wife and 10 kids.
Or perhaps the best guess was given by someone now long deceased who left
behind four children who haven't spoken to each other since the fight over who
got Mom's china.
Some people think the car should go to an individual, no matter how long it
takes.
"I think that was clearly the intent," committee member John Ehrling
said.
But others, concerned about sorting through endless ownership claims and
potential legal entanglements, think the car should go to a museum or be
auctioned for charity if a single winner cannot be identified quickly.
Otherwise, Davis cautioned, "we could still be trying to figure it out in
2009."
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