On a cold February day in 1989, a 13-year-old boy named Scotty Landreth was rifling through a stack of newspapers looking to start a fire in his family’s wood stove — the same stove used to heat the house and cook skillet cornbread. All of a sudden, Scotty noticed a flash of something shiny. It was a record. The young boy ran for his record-player. It was the very first record he could call his own. He put the record on, dropped the needle, and a song began to play. When it ended, a voice came on and prompted Scotty to call a number to claim his prize. Scotty’s first record was actually a flexi-disc, one of 80 million produced by McDonald’s in the late 1980s. This particular flexi-disc was part of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory promotion, which had a twist: one of the 80 million records entitled the person who found it to a $1 million prize. It couldn’t have gone to a more needy person. Scotty and his family lived paycheck to paycheck, with barely enough money to eat at McDonald’s once in a while. Since Scotty was a minor, his mother, Charlene Price, collect the winnings. She flew to Chicago to appear on a commercial to further promote the campaign. When she returned, she married the love of her life, used the money to buy the store she had been working in, and renamed it The Price Is Right. She staffed it with her family members and set up a credit system for locals in need. Nevertheless, things didn’t work out for the family. The family members Charlene hired stole from her, she took lavish vacations, she sold the annuity to get a larger lump sum in lieu of regular payments, her marriage fell apart, and one day she awoke to discover that her boyfriend had cleaned out both of her bank accounts and skipped town. Charlene died penniless on a hospice bed in her sister Kathy’s trailer. Scotty, on his own by then, ended up taking a job at the very McDonald’s where he got the winning flexi-disc. He doesn’t have a lot of money — in fact, he lives paycheck to paycheck — but he says he’s happy. He’s got a job and a roof over his head, and he says that’s all that matters.
