Cereal Toys

Los Angeles, California is a great, sprawling metropolis. Few of the people who work downtown live there. All of those people driving their automobiles in and out of the downtown area create gridlock, and the emissions from their vehicles add a tremendous amount of pollution to the air. The government has tried to relieve some of the gridlock and pollution by putting pressure on businesses to decrease the number of employees who drive to work. This has been going on for decades, and the larger businesses have been responding to the pressure by encouraging their employees to use mass transportation. The problem for those employees is that Los Angeles has not had an efficient mass transportation system since the red car tracks were torn up in the first half of the twentieth century.

When I was commuting to and from Los Angeles what passed for mass transit were the express buses. Express buses were called that because each bus had a designated collection and drop off point outside of the city, and they made only six or seven stops to drop off or gather passengers in the city. Since the buses traversed the same roads as the automobiles, however, they were caught up in the same gridlock as the automobiles. On a Friday afternoon it usually took between one and a half to two hours for a bus to travel from down town Los Angeles to Long Beach, and that was after it made its stops in the city.

Some of the enterprising passengers of the bus I took to and from Long Beach started having wine parties in the back of the bus during those slow Friday afternoon trips. I soon joined them and became a member of the group. Alice was in her late thirties. She had light brown hair and was still very attractive. I had just turned forty. Bruce was probably thirty-four or thirty-five. He was the tall, dark, handsome type, but he was packing the pounds men frequently gain in the first few years of marriage. Jeff was probably around twenty-six. He was very bright, but we thought of him as the baby of the group. We thought of Dave as the grandfather of the group even though he was only old enough to be the father of some of us. He had a bushy, white mustache and blue eyes that seemed to take in everything. This was particularly true when he was amused by what he saw. He poured everyone a glass of wine. A new rider was sitting near us. He was almost as old as Dave. He told us his name was John. Dave offered him some wine, and he accepted.

“Folks,” Bruce said, “I know it’s my turn to bring the wine next week, but I won’t be here. I’ll make it up to you when I return.”

“Going on vacation?” Alice asked.

“Don’t I wish! The company is sending me to our office in Battle Creek, Michigan for a week.”

“Battle Creek, Michigan!” The name brought back visions of my childhood. “I used to think that was the toy capital of the world.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “It was where you sent the cereal box tops and small amounts of cash for the toys advertised on the radio or television.”

“And the toys were never quite what they appeared to be on television,” I added. “I remember a submarine. They showed it diving and rising in this wonderful ocean scene. I was really excited when mine finally arrived. My sister had a fish tank she abandoned when her gold fish died. I left the fake plants and rocks in it when I filled it with water. I can’t tell you how much I anticipated watching the submarine diving down to those plants and rocks and then rising to the surface again. I filled the submarine with baking soda as instructed, and I gently placed the sub in the water. It sunk about one inch. Then it rolled over and farted at me! I tried several more times, but it just kept repeating its farting act without sinking and rising as advertised.”

Jeff said they must have improved the submarine by the time that he got his. “Mine worked fine.”

Dave took a sip of wine and smiled. “Good thing Steve didn’t bring the wine or he’d probably refuse to refill your glass.”

Everyone laughed.

“Steve got off lucky,” John said. “Did any of you see that movie; I think it was called A Christmas Story. There was a scene in there where this kid sends away for the secret decoding ring. He excitedly begins decoding the message only to have the secret message tell him to drink more Ovaltine. Well, that wasn’t fiction. I did the same thing that kid did, and all a got was that same damn ad. To a ten year old boy this unpleasant surprise was worse than a neutron fart.”

“A neutron fart?” Alice asked.

“Yeah, lots of fallout.”

“Ewww! That’s gross.”

Dave Laughed. “You think that was bad, let me tell you what they did to me. The Lone Ranger radio show offered a map you could use to follow the movements of the Lone Ranger. It took six weeks for the damn thing to arrive. By that time they ended the promotion and no longer described the movements in a way that you could follow on the map.”

“Oh man,” Jeff said, “you guys got hosed!”

“Maybe,” Bruce said, “but don’t expect me to take your complaints to them. I’m not packing that baggage. Besides, it wasn’t all bad. I got this little plastic toy on a cord. It made the sound of a siren when you swung it. My brother and I were playing cops and robbers. I was chasing him around the yard swinging the siren toy above my head. I must have misjudged the length of the cord because I hit a tree with it. It was a shame. I really liked that toy.”

“Cheap plastic,” John said. “It was pretty brittle back then.”

Jeff agreed. “I got what was supposed to be a flute. It had a hole at one end and a hole in the middle. If you blew into the mouthpiece and covered the hole in the middle, it produced a fairly low tone. If you covered the hole at the end and left the middle one uncovered, it produced a high tone. I practiced with it until I could duplicate the sound of a boson mate’s whistle in the navy. I was really into navy things then. I played with that whistle for hours. I was calling all hands on deck for battle or calling them to prepare for a storm. Unfortunately the whistle must have fallen off the table at night. I found it on the floor in the morning. The plastic was so brittle that it split down the middle.”

Alice seemed amused by Jeff’s story. “You say you played with it for hours?”

“All day.”

“When I had something that annoyed my parents it always got lost.”

“Oh no! You don’t think my parents broke it, do you?”

“You don’t have kids, do you?”

“No.”

Everyone laughed. Dave held out the bottle of wine.

“More wine for the whiners,” Bruce joked.

Dave refilled Bruce’s glass. “Very punny. I see you’re not above joining us.”

“Not at all. Did any of you get the pen that wrote with invisible ink?”

“No.”

“Well, I know it was pretty cheesy, but it was also rather clever. They sent you a little pad of paper and something that resembled a fountain pen. You dipped the pen in milk. Then you wrote with the milk. When the milk dried you held the paper over a light bulb. The heat from the light bulb made the milk turn dark so that you could see what was written.”

We all agreed it was clever. I told them that one of the good things I remembered were the snap, crackle and pop hand puppets. “They were very expensive for cereal toys, but they were really good. They even inspired my cousin to start collecting hand puppets.”

Alice said the puppets were the exception. “Almost all of the toys you got from the boxes or from sending for them were cheaply made, but we still had fun with most of them.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “We made up for the shoddiness of the toys with our imaginations.”

“We’re part of the generations of kids that could make a house or a fort out of cardboard boxes,” Dave said.

“The other thing my generation had going for it was the fact that television was showing Laurel and Hardy and other movies my parents had watched in theaters,” I said. “That gave us a better understanding our parents’ experiences and many of their fondest memories.”

“Less of a generation gap,” Dave said. “I like that.”

John looked at Alice. “Do kids still send away for cereal toys?”

“I don’t know. Mine are always playing video games.”

We rarely drank more than one and half or two small glasses of wine during our commute. The permissible limits for driving are now so low that even those small amounts would probably get us into trouble today. Very few of our conversations were as nostalgic as the one I described, but there was always a lot of laughter during those trips home. 

First published in macsbackporch.foxtail-farms.com on Jan. 20, 2010