When I was eleven, three local K-mart stores had a simple drawing to win 1000 dollars worth of Legos. They had these little boxes with stacks of entry forms next to them and a pencil to fill them out while you were in the store.

Each store was going to give away a thousand dollars worth of legos.

Even though there was a store just a few minutes from us, we drove to the one 20 minutes away in a dilapidated shopping center because inspection of the drawing box indicated that fewer people were submitting entries at that store. We would drive to the stores in the morning, take all the entry forms available except for a few and I would spend my summer mornings filling them out. I believe we dropped close to a thousand entries in the various boxes. I put the majority in the low traffic K-Mart but entered a hundred or so in the other two stores as well.

I got a big manilla envelope in the mail with Lego letterhead congratulating me and 3 different catalogs, lego, duplo and technique.

I spent two glorious weeks poring over the catalogs with my brother carefully tallying up to the 1000 dollar total.

A month after submitting the order we received two giant boxes. Few things have ever made me as happy.