Description of the Tip-Top Talent Contest, 1961
Clifford Larkins was the winner of the 12-13 year old division

            In 1961 I entered the 12-13 year old division of the first state-wide "Tip-Top" Talent Contest (Tip-Top Bread) in order to win the first prize bicycle. The talent contest was held on an outdoor bandstand on Belle Isle Park in Detroit, Michigan. I won by performing the "Hulley Gulley Time Steps", an original adaptation of the classic tap dance "Time Steps" choreographed by his older sister, Jackie (age 14), and me.
           From my recollection, this was the first Tip-Top Talent Contest staged. I have searched online for any mention of a Tip-Top Talent Contest, and to my amazement I found a website that explores the winner of the third Tip-Top Talent Contest, in 1963. It says that the contestants had to collect numerous Tip-Top bread wrappers to get there. I don't remember having to do that.
            According to the article, in 1963 the grand prize was a four-year contract with Motown Records. (I don't think Motown would have been interested in a tap dancer.) An excerpt from this article is posted below. It is very interesting who won that contest and how it affected her life.

Carolyn Crawford was the winner of the Tip-Top Talent Contest, 1963

"Carolyn Crawford Is the Best Motown Singer You’ve Never Heard Of"

Below you can read a bit of the "discussion thread".
For more go to soulfuldetroit.com.

            On a bright Saturday morning in the summer of 1963, 13-year-old Carolyn Crawford walked onto the stage of Detroit’s Fox Theatre and sat behind a piano. She had to bring her A game to this performance, the finals of the Tip-Top Talent Contest, hosted by a local gospel and R&B station. Crawford had collected untold numbers of Tip-Top bread wrappers to get there, and now it was her turn to compete for the grand prize: a four-year contract with Motown Records.

            She began to sing “Laughing Boy” by her idol, Mary Wells, adding an extra verse for good measure. Her ingenuity, combined with honeyed vocals that stung with the emotional depth of someone at least twice her age, secured Crawford’s first-place finish.

            Shortly after the contest, Crawford and her mother took a meeting with Motown founder Berry Gordy. “He asked if I had any questions for him, and I had three,” says the now-74-year-old woman from her Detroit home. “The first was, ‘Can I write my own songs?’ And he said, ‘Can you write?’ And I said, ‘I believe I can.’” Her second request was to keep her given name. And the third was that she wanted to be on the Motown label, “the one with the big blue M — I didn’t want to be on VIP, Gordy, Soul, or any of those other ones,” she says.