Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8661

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Publication type: news

Schulz S.
A humdinger of a prize
Grand Island Independent (Grand Island, Nebraska) 2007 Feb 24
http://www.theindependent.com/stories/022407/new_hummer24.shtml

Full text:

Frequent sweepstakes participant wins Hummer H3 in national contest

Images of receiving the keys to her new Hummer H3 have kept Paula Broadway-Jones up for the last week.

Now maybe she can get some sleep.

The Cambridge woman got her keys — and her new Hummer — Friday in the Walgreens parking lot in Grand Island.

She won the vehicle through a sweepstakes sponsored by Novartis, a pharmaceutical company that makes TheraFlu, and the Walgreens company. To enter, she had to mail her information to a promotional company on a 3-by-5 piece of paper. To win, her name had to be plucked from among the other entries, all 200,000 of them.

Broadway-Jones, who was born and raised in Grand Island, was in town visiting her mother, who had just had foot surgery, when she learned she had won. The news came during a Nov. 17, 2006, cell phone call to her husband. He said she had received a UPS envelope and she asked him to open it since she wouldn’t be home for a few days. When he told her she won, she started jumping up and down.

Her mother, Darletta Broadway, immediately got on her home phone and began calling family members.

“My hands shook for four hours,” Broadway-Jones said.

On Friday, the H3 was delivered to the Walgreens store in Grand Island, where Broadway-Jones shops when she’s in town, by Terry Csipkes, a sales executive with Huber Automotive in Omaha. The business is the only Hummer dealer in Nebraska.

She submitted her top three picks for colors and received metallic gray. The 2007 H3 also features all the standard chrome wheels, a sunroof, XM radio, automatic transmission and a year of OnStar. It also has a four-year, 50,000-mile warranty, Csipkes said.

“She has all the goodies,” he said with a smile.

He said it gets about 15 miles to the gallon in the city and 19 mpg in the city. The basic H3 is valued at $29,995 and the model with the extras is worth $34,500, he said.

The sweepstakes sponsors are paying the taxes and paying for the license plates for the H3 as well.

Broadway-Jones said entering sweepstakes is a hobby she shares with her mother. They subscribe to an online newsletter about sweepstakes to learn about different contests. Prior to winning the H3, Broadway-Jones won two tickets to the Daytona 500 and $5,500 from Kraft Foods.

She said she had been thinking about a new vehicle since her 2000 Oldsmobile Silhouette van has 89,000 miles. She had planned to wait until her two stepchildren graduate from school.

“How could I not be happy?” she said of the win.

Emily Spurlock of Mercury Promotion worked with Novartis on the sweepstakes. She flew to Grand Island from Detroit to be on hand for the presentation.

“I came to make sure everything happened smoothly,” she said.

Also on hand for the exchange was Dave Litz, a manager at Walgreens. The win was the first in his career with Walgreens and he said the company has some sort of sweepstakes about every other month.

“She was pretty excited,” he said of Broadway-Jones. “It’s a neat truck.”

Broadway-Jones has no plans to let her husband drive the new vehicle. She said he hit a family of raccoons and a deer while driving her van so there’s no way he’s getting behind the H3’s wheel.

“It’s mine,” she said. “I’ve never had a car that’s only had 57 miles on it.”