by Sherri Kimmel

If you call Dave Sayer ’59 a dream maker, he’ll correct you: “People make their own dreams, then we answer their prayers.”

For 36 years, he’s been the leader of the Publishers Clearing House (PCH) Prize Patrol, showing up at lucky sweepstakes winners’ front doors with bouquets of roses and balloons, a sunny smile and a great-big cardboard check.

“I’m truly blessed having a job where you’re always welcome — I’m never turned away,” says Sayer.

Originally designed as a way to promote discounted magazine subscriptions, the sweepstakes — with prizes worth millions of dollars — has fueled the dreams of generations of Americans.

Sayer, an English major at Bucknell, spent 20 years working for major advertising firms in New York City before joining PCH.

His Bucknell experience “managing the band’s concert tour in 1959 gave me travel logistics experience I never expected to use professionally but have, planning hundreds of prize award trips to all 50 states and Canada,” he says.

Now semiretired, Sayer presents prizes once or twice a month and performs in a piano bar near his home in Venice, Fla.