Daisy Bennett, center, of Ripley, and her daughters, Gina Guffey, left, of Leonardtown, Md., and Amy Phipps, right, of Burns, Tenn., are the first-place finishers in the Mother-Daughter Look-Alike Contest sponsored by The Parkersburg News and Sentinel.
PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — A retired librarian and her two daughters are the winners of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel Mother-Daughter Look-Alike Contest.
“Oh my goodness,” said an excited Daisy Bennett of Ripley.
Her daughters are Gina Guffey, 50, of Leonardtown, Md., and Amy Phipps, 48, of Burns, Tenn. Bennett is 74.
“Many times people say we look just like sisters,” said Bennett, who is retired from Kanawha County where she was a librarian.
The inaugural contest was sponsored and judged by The News and Sentinel. Nearly 60 mothers and daughters participated by sending photos of themselves.
Second place went to Julie Speece and her 20-year-old daughter Katie, a sophomore at the University of Charleston where she is working on a degree in English.
Third place went to Teresa Bush, of Ravenswood, and her daughter, Amanda Wells, of Fayetteville, W.Va.
Bennett and her daughters live eight hours apart, close enough they can get together three or four times a year. It’s not enough, “but you value what time you have,” Bennett said.
Bennett and her husband, Milton, who also is retired, Phipps and Guffey’s stepfather, have two granddaughters, Jenna, 19, and Emily, 18, and two grandsons, Drew, 16, and Jaren, 13, with daughter Amy.
“They don’t look so much like us,” Bennett said.
The resemblance is more apparent with Bennett and her oldest daughter, Guffey, who most people mistaken as sisters, Phipps said.
“My mother and my sister get that more than I do,” Phipps said.
Bennett was a librarian for 21 years. Her hobby is sewing and quilting and she displays her work at more than a half dozen crafts shows. When the girls were younger, she made all their dresses for proms and special occasions.
People stop in their tracks and are amazed at the resemblance, Guffey said.
“We kind of get that a lot,” she said.
Speece is a substitute teacher and has triplet daughters. A story she wrote, “Our Sunrise,” about the morning she gave birth to her three girls, was published two years ago in “Chicken Soup for the Soul: Parenthood.”
“She likes to say she’s the quadruplet,” daughter Katie said.
“Of the three girls, people have always remarked on my and Katie’s resemblance the most, and several people brought this contest to our attention,” Speece said.
Mother enjoys it, Katie said.
“When people tell her that, she’s flattered,” Katie said.
Of the three girls, Katie, Emily and Cari, Katie said she also acts the most like her mother and they have similar interests. Katie is majoring in English and her mother is a writer.
“Everyone says the resemblance is uncanny,” Katie said.
Bush is 42 and her daughter, Amanda, is 20. She is often complimented about looking like her daughter.
“People tell us that all the time,” she said.
She has another daughter, Kristin Wells, who is 24.
“We look a lot alike, too,” Bush said.
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