1952 - Jackpot Annie

I read this article in Reader’s Digest or maybe a Sunday supplement, about people who won a lottery and the dramatic ways that coming into serious money affected their lives. Some did well, but many squandered it all and a few met tragic ends. It made me think of Annie Baca and how her life turned out. I never knew Annie Baca. But I read about her once in an interesting story in the Santa Fe New Mexican from 1952 about a local family winning a huge jackpot in a national radio contest.

“Stop the Music” aired in Santa Fe on KTRC. It was one of many radio quiz shows on the air in the early fifties, like “Strike it Rich” and “You Bet Your Life” with Groucho Marx. On “Stop the Music,” Bert Parks, the host, called a random number somewhere in the U.S., and offered the listener a prize to name a song after hearing just a few bars played. The orchestra would play for ten seconds or so, then the announcer would shout, “Stop the Music!” and ask the listener to identify the song.

Now the right answer would win a small prize – a television set or a household appliance -- but it also earned a chance for an even bigger prize if the listener could identify the “Mystery Melody!”

This was no easy task. The Mystery Melody was always nearly impossible to identify, but the listener could learn the name of the Mystery Melody by listening to Walter Winchell on the radio. Winchell, still popular with his telegraph style of gossip and right wing political commentary. At some random time during the course of one of his broadcasts, Walter Winchell would announce the name of the upcoming Mystery Melody on “Stop the Music”.

And that brings me to the Baca family of Santa Fe. Mr. E. A. Baca, his wife and three girls lived in an adobe home on Urioste, a narrow street that runs north off Agua Fria down to Alto Street. Mr. Baca had worked for the railroad until an injury forced his retirement so he ran a little washing machine repair shop out of his garage. Mrs. Baca and one of her daughters were cooks at Jaffa’s restaurant, another daughter worked as a housekeeper for Mrs. Cunningham and the youngest, Annie Baca, 23, worked the counter at Taichert’s downtown.

One Sunday evening in 1952, Mrs. Baca answered the phone and promptly became confused when the voice said it was New York calling so Annie took the phone. It was “Stop the Music” calling and, over the national airwaves, Bert Parks asked Annie to identify a song.

Annie correctly identified the first song as “Cold, Cold Heart.” (The Tony Bennett version had been number one for six weeks in 1951 so it was an easy song.) That right answer qualified Annie to win the big jackpot if she could name the Mystery Melody.

Now, as luck would have it, Mr. Baca had been tuned to KTRC in his shop a few days earlier, listening to Walter Winchell, when he heard the name of the Mystery Melody and he wrote it down. So Mr. Baca promptly sent his daughter, Polly, out to the shop to fetch the note back to Annie on the phone. Annie read out the name “We All Have Troubles of our Own.” That was the correct name of the Mystery Melody and the Baca family won the big jackpot.

And what prizes! $16,000 cash, a brand new Kaiser automobile, a big television set, an automatic washer, a new kitchen range, a deep freeze filled with gourmet food, a spinet piano, a new living room suite, new wardrobes for two and a wristwatch for everyone. But wait, as they say on TV, there’s more! The family also won two French poodles along with a year’s supply of dog food, bottles of expensive perfume, cosmetics and the services of a personal maid for a whole year. And the biggest prize was a trip to Cannes, France for the entire family.

The paper carried a wonderful photograph of a jubilant Annie Baca hugging her equally pleased mother. Neighbors called to congratulate them and even Dan Taichert visited in person to wish Annie well, although he was a bit wistful that Annie might not come back to the five and dime store after winning all that cash. This was 1952, after all, when the median income for the average Santa Fe household was about $2900 a year.

Curiously, there was never another article about what happened to the Baca family or what they did with their prizes. Was there a shiny new Kaiser parked on Urioste Street? Did Mrs. Cunningham envy her housekeeper who now had a personal maid of her own? Did Annie Baca ever stroll down the French Riviera, dressed to kill, with twin poodles on a leash?

Whatever happened to Annie Baca, the girl from the five and dime? I never found out but I like to think that Annie lived out a Hollywood fairy tale, traveling to France, perhaps meeting and marrying a handsome young nobleman and settling into a villa on the Cote d’Azure. And that’s where she is today, gazing at the Mediterranean from the balcony of her villa, a very long way from Urioste Street in Santa Fe.