All Posts – Page 42 – I Remember JFK: A Baby Boomer's Pleasant Reminiscing Spot

When Microwave Ovens Were New

It would be difficult for me to imagine life without a microwave oven. I probably use one twice a day minimum. Yet, I grew up without one of the expensive, newfangled, radiation-emitting appliances. We didn’t get a microwave oven until the mid 70’s.

But many of us Boomer kids recall having them as far back as 1967, when Amana introduced the Radarange home model.

The heating power of microwaves was discovered by accident by Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer with the Raytheon Corporation. In 1945 or 1946 (accounts vary), he was testing a magnetron, a vacuum tube that emitted microwaves, when he noticed the candy bar in his pants pocket had inexplicably melted.

Intrigued, Spencer placed a pile of popcorn kernels next to the tube and fired it up again (this time standing back a ways!). Sure enough, the kernels soon began popping. His next experiment involved an egg, which blew hot yolk all over him when it exploded.

Spencer immediately saw the potential for microwaves as a means to cook food. First of all, the waves would need to be contained. The nature of microwaves is such that their 12.24 cm length can be contained by metal or metallic mesh. So Spencer devised a box with a tube through which the microwaves would be fed in. The contained energy cooked any food placed in the box very rapidly.

The first mocrowave oven a Raytheon Radarange from 1947. (Courtesy: Raytheon)

The first Raytheon Radarange (the name was a winning entry in an employee contest) was built in 1947. It was 6 feet tall and weighed 750 pounds. It was also water-cooled and consumed 3000 watts of power. But research continued, along with gradual miniaturization, and by the mid 50’s, free-standing microwave ovens were using half as much power and cost less than $3000. That made them affordable investment by eateries and bakeries, whose operations were revolutionized by the ability to cook much faster.

As the technology got smaller and cheaper, Raytheon saw the potential for selling home-sized microwave ovens. So in 1967, Amana, a Raytheon division, began marketing the Radarange for $495.

That was a lot of money back then, and sales began slowly. But that wasn’t the only factor. Urban legends have exploded with the growth of the internet, but they were around back in our childhoods, too. And many myths surrounded cooking your food with microwave radiation. Tales of sterility, impotence, and radiation poisoning hindered sales of microwave ovens.

But the numbers steadily increased as the truth showed fears of such incidents to be unfounded. By 1970, 40,000 were sold. In 1975, more microwave ovens were sold than gas ranges. The next year, 60% of US households had one. I think that’s when my thrifty father finally sprang for one, and the Enderland household began experiencing the miracle of microwave cooking.

One tale about the ovens did turn out to be true: metal and microwaves don’t mix. Many a 1970’s homeowner was horrified by miniature electrical storms when they put aluminum foil or metallic utensils in their microwave ovens. It was a mistake that was generally only made once.

Today, of course, there’s nothing cooler than frying a CD in an old microwave. And you can get a basic oven for less than fifty bucks. If you don’t have a microwave oven in your house, it’s for personal reasons rather than economic. But if you remember JFK, you can also recall a time when warming food required heating a big oven or firing up a cooktop, no exceptions.

When Jelly Came in a Glass

If you looked in the kitchen cupboard of any middle-class home that had children living there circa 1965, you would probably have spotted former jelly jars now serving as glasses festooned with images of the Flintstones.

Welch’s began the tradition of packaging jelly in commemorative jars that were designed to be used as drinking glasses in 1953. Its first subject was Howdy Doody. It was such a success that new series were released every couple of years. Others who were honored included Davy Crockett, the aforementioned Flintstones (three different series released in the early 60’s), the Archies, Bugs Bunny and other Warner Brothers characters, football teams, Tom and Jerry, Dr. Seuss, and many others.

Welch’s released a set of glasses as recently as 2002, so this tradition we grew up with is still going on.

In my house, we had some other sort of jelly glasses that were generic in nature. I believe it may have been a local brand. You could always spot a former container of jelly from the slightly protruding rim which provided a place for the lid to provide a seal.

It was simply good business for the makers of jams and jellies to provide motivation for consumers to buy their products. Jelly glasses were also a very user-friendly form of recycling. And among our social circle, such glassware would never be looked down upon, as everyone’s cupboard was full of them.

Today, that original Howdy Doody series of glasses are collectibles, but affordable ones. As I wrote this piece, you could buy one on eBay for $25.00.

Nowadays, most jellies are sold in plastic squeeze bottle. They make really lousy glasses.

When Candy Was Wax

Wax is made from petroleum distillates. In other words, crude oil. But someone once came up with the idea of impregnating flavor and food dye into the foul substance, and molding it into objects like gargantuan lips, containers of sweet liquids, and the ultimate: the Wowee Whistle. And you know what? We kids of the Boomer years just couldn’t get enough of them.

I would have loved to have posted a picture of a Wowee Whistle. I must have bought at least a hundred of the familiar plastic-wrapped orange edible (well, let’s say chewable) waxen musical instruments. But alas, I couldn’t locate a photo anywhere.

Wax candy is one of those things that never completely disappeared, but its popularity has greatly diminished since store candy shelves were packed with them circa 1967. A Canadian candy company called Concord Confections still produces the lips, and supposedly, even the Wowee Whistle.

The lips had a tab that you bit into to hold them in place in your mouth. That tab was handy for notifying you as to when it was time to stop wearing the lips and start chewing them. It did so by being chewed through.

Of course, if you were missing front teeth, as many of us were at around the age of seven, the lips lifespan was greatly enhanced.

The Wowee Whistles were the best, as I mentioned earlier. They were wrapped in cellophane adorned with black cats, bats, and the like. That first whiff of the newly-unwrapped wax was heavenly. Then you proceeded to make a whole bunch of noise blowing into the miniature ocarina (I know, it wasn’t REALLY an ocarina, but I can’t think of another instrument to compare it to 😉 and try to play a song.

The whistles seemed to be properly tuned so that a musician might play them, but I’m only guessing. All I know is that none of the kids in Miami, Oklahoma could make them do anything but blast out random toots.

Another wax-encased candy was the Nik-L-Nip. I believe it warrants its own article. Look for it.

So never, ever forget, Boomers, when we happily consumed candy creations made from the same substance that produces the fuel for our cars!

When All Food Was Fried

Jumping in the old Plymouth Fury III circa 1966 and heading down the road to eat out for the evening, one faced a variety of choices. However, if it was not to be a sit-down dinner in a real restaurant, the odds were that whatever delicious edibles would be consumed would have been fried in oil, fat, or just good old lard.

Fast food was a relative term in small-town America in the 60’s. Mcdonalds was a chain we had heard about, but which, by and large, hadn’t made it to the smaller towns.

But we did have restaurants that filled the bill for those evenings when mom would warrant a break from cooking, but dad didn’t have enough money in his wallet to go to a “nice” place.

One of these was a little joint owned by neighbors four houses up the street from us that featured broasted chicken. Broasted chicken was fried under pressure. It was okay, but when they cut potatoes in half and submitted them to the same process, they tasted INCREDIBLE! I haven’t had a broasted potato since LBJ was President, but can still taste that delectably spicy, crunchy bit of heaven from tapping my memory banks.

Of course, everything that you could obtain at the broasted chicken place was steeped in saturated fat. So was the food at their competitor, Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Colonel Sanders saw a big opportunity in small town America, and Kentucky Fried Chickens soon sprung up all over the mid-south in towns of 10,000 or more like Miami, Oklahoma. And the deep-fried chicken was delicious. TV commercials featuring the colonel himself were blasted all over the heartland, and our parents bought it in buckets and barrels.

Such was the diet of the middle-class American. What was eaten was likely fried.

Today, we may look back and shake our heads at our parents’ unhealthy dietary habits. After all, didn’t they realize that all of that fat was clogging their arteries?

Well, as a matter of fact, our parents considered themselves to be enlightened when it came to dietary matters. As a matter of fact, they WERE. They grew up in the Great Depression, when lard was the oil in which all of their meals were fried. Lard was considered “rich,” not good for you.

Ergo, they bought Crisco, which was “digestible.” They watched commercials in the late 60’s that showed that foods cooked in Crisco retained only a tiny percentage of the oil.

What they didn’t realize was that the tiny percentage that WAS retained was saturated fat, and was prone to go directly to the insides of their arteries.

Today, I eat lots of green salads, and cook lots of meals on the grill. When I use oil, it’s olive oil, loaded with good, life-sustaining stuff.

At least that’s what popular culture has led me to believe. Perhaps forty years from today, our “healthy” diet will be revealed to be otherwise. After all, our parents felt that their diets were far advanced from those of THEIR parents.

TV Dinners

Once upon a time, a time our parents recalled well, a family would enjoy a nice dinner that mom had spent hours preparing, then afterwards gather around the radio for Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, or the like.

The television changed all of that. The faster-moving jet age of the 50’s demanded more of everyone’s time just to keep up. Mom started working at her own job, in many cases, or she was involved with the PTA, the garden club, or other diversions. Dinner needed to be prepared more quickly. And that TV needed to be on by 5:00 to watch the evening news!

With that, in 1953 or 1954 (sources disagree), Swanson introduced us to the TV dinner, which could be heated in an oven, enjoyed in front of the idiot box, and tossed into the trash afterwards!

The ironic part about all of this was that families would eat their TV dinners and watch shows about the Cleavers, the Nelsons, and the Stones who would always enjoy dinner as a family around a regular table. Strange . . .

The idea supposedly occurred to Swanson exec Gerald Thomas, when the company had literally tons of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving. The aluminum tray idea came from the ones used by airlines. TV dinners were an immediate success, and turkey dinners are still the most popular Swanson frozen dinner. Interestingly, Swanson stopped calling them TV dinners in 1962. However, the rest of the world continued doing so.

Swanson’s original TV dinner featured turkey, corn bread dressing and gravy, buttered peas and sweet potatoes. It cost 98 cents and came in a box that looked like a TV. It was sold frozen, but freezers were rare in 1954 homes, so they were usually consumed the same day they were bought.

However, years earlier, in 1945, a company called Maxson Food Systems created a self-contained meal consisting of meat, a vegetable, and mashed potatoes, each housed in its own separate compartment on a plastic plate. But Maxson’s product was only sold to airlines for inflight meals. If you’ll recall, they actually HAD inflight meals once. 😉

Though they toyed with the idea of selling the pre-packaged meals to the general public, it never happened. Hence, Swanson gets the honors for inventing the TV dinner.

You may or may not have noticed, but the aluminum trays we grew up with are not around anymore. As microwave ovens became more affordable and began proliferating, it was recognized that the metal trays needed to be upgraded. Swanson ditched them in favor of microwavable plastic ones in 1986.

Today, the idea of heating a frozen TV dinner in a conventional oven seems strange. But we Boomer kids can recall a time when mom didn’t feel like cooking, and dinner came in the form of a blazing hot aluminum tray that required the removal of a metallic foil cover before it could be consumed. And the whole thing fit perfectly on a portable tray in front of the couch.

Tupperware

We Boomers are proud of the fact that we came into existence within a few years of the end of WWII. And as the nation put all of the creative efforts that were once channeled into making the world safe for democracy into business ventures, many familiar household names sprung up during this time as well.

One of the most familiar monikers is that of one Earl Tupper. It was he who devised plastic containers for food storage that featured a delightful operation known as “burping.”

Tupper started out in the landscaping/nursery business. He did well for a while, until the Great Depression came along. Like millions of other Americans, he was forced into unemployment by the harsh economic times, and was fortunate to find a job with the DuPont Corporation.

He was given an assignment: find a use for worthless chunks of plastic slag that were left over from other the production of other products. He purified the slag and was then able to use it to form lightweight, durable implements for servicemen including bowls, glasses, plates, and even gas masks. Later, he developed sealable tops for containers by studying the lids of paint cans.

Tupper bailed from DuPont in 1938 and started his own company. He did okay while the war raged, but in 1946, the future of home food storage crossed paths with Tupper plasticware.

Tupper’s plastic containers with their distinctive resealable lids went on the market in 1946. He called on local hardware and department stores in an effort to convince them to begin carrying his products. A few years later, however, a monumental decision would be made that would put Tupperware into the lexicon of the English language, and also into 20th century culture.

A sales representative for Stanly Home Products by the name of Brownie Wise called Tupper up one day and gave an impassioned plea on the benefits of directly marketing his wares by means of home parties thrown by millions of housewives who would delight at the chance to make some income in those stay-at-home days.

Earl Silas Tupper, inventor of Tupperware, holds one of his original designs.

Tupper was impressed with the contagious enthusiasm of West, and hired her on the spot as vice-president. The first thing she did was remove Tupperware from stores altogether.

Wise believed fervently in the spirit of homemakers, and put them to work putting on Tupperware parties. She sweetened the pot by creating annual jubilees in sunny Florida where Tupperware representatives would gather for a week’s worth of socializing, fellowship with other home representatives, and motivational speeches. There were also prizes galore given out.

The combination of an excellent product and the fun and profitability of the parties and the perks made Tupperware a household name during the 1950’s.

Brownie Wise made the cover of Business Week magazine in 1954, the first woman to do so. However, her growing celebrity status was a source of irritation to Tupper, who preferred quietly becoming wealthy to the spotlight, both for himself as well as his company.

In 1958, tensions between Tupper and Wise came to a head over the high cost of the jubilees, and she was fired. Soon afterwards, Tupper sold the company lock, stock, and barrel to Rexall Drugs for a cool sixteen million 1958 bucks. Tupper then renounced his US citizenship and moved to his own island in Costa Rica in order to avoid a crippling tax burden.

Tupperware proved to be an excellent investment for Rexall. They continued the home-sales-only approach, and thus many of us Boomer kids have fond memories of our mothers either attending or throwing Tupperware parties. The hosts were rewarded with Tupperware goodies of their own, and they could climb the ranks and take on managerial roles that would pay out real cash if they were so inclined.

Here in the 21st century, Tupperware is still around, but is at sort of a crossroads. Its product name is still highly respected, but it’s getting harder and harder to find Tupperware parties.

The company tried selling directly to Target stores, but this only resulted in angering representatives who now had to compete with a huge national chain. Additionally, sales were disappointing, causing much harm to the business model and the goodwill of its home-grown representative base. Additionally, cheap clones of genuine Tupperware abound, and the name isn’t as strong as it was when our mothers were aggressively marketing it at a time when you had to go to a party just to buy it.

So why not put out feelers of just who in your local community might be holding a Tupperware party and go check it out? It’s a part of our Boomer heritage that is in danger of disappearing altogether.

It would be sad if something as nice as a gathering of family, friends, and neighbors to obtain high-quality kitchen items was to vanish.

Those Unforgettable Breakfast Cereal Ads, Part 2

It’s amazing how many icons created by advertisers to sell cereal during the time of our childhoods still exist today. For example, take the Trix Rabbit. He was born the same year I was, in 1959. Its creator was Joe Harris, an adman for General Mills. He sums up the astronomical success of the campaign:

“As a result of the success of the commercial, the little-known Trix brand suddenly leaped into the national consciousness and became one of General Mills’ best sellers. My line, ‘Trix are for kids’ became a countrywide mantra. It still is, 43 years later. I believe it may be that Trix is one of the oldest, if not the oldest commercial in existence to have sustained itself with the same character, the same selling line and the same plot since I created it.”

The undisputed single greatest commercial has to be Life’s Mikey spot. This ad first appeared in 1972 and was shown for an incredible twelve more years in its original format! Read what the Life Cereal folks have to say about it:

Although the commercial has not been shown regularly on TV for many years, people still remember the finicky four-year old. A recent research study revealed that 70% of adults could identify the Life Cereal ad from just the description! And, in 1999, the “Mikey” commercial ranked number 10 in TV guide’s, “The 50 Greatest Commercials of All Time.”

Here it is on Youtube.

Another pitchman who survives to our day is L.C.Leprechaun, born in 1964. He would wave his magic wand and create “yellow moons, green clovers, orange stars, pink hearts.” The lineup has since been expanded with more items, but those are the ones I grew up hearing about.

Cap’n Crunch is still around, too. He was born the year that JFK died. Sailing the tall seas on the S.S. Guppy, he and Sea Dog (and his crew of kids) would face many a Saturday morning thirty-second battle with Jean LaFoote, the barefoot pirate.

Wow, I’ve barely scraped the surface of the myriad commercials we watched for breakfast cereal. Look for more columns on the subject in the future.

Those Unforgettable Breakfast Cereal Ads, Part 1

How many hours did we spend stretched out on the living room floor or crashed on the couch watching Saturday morning cartoons? And how many thousands of ads for breakfast cereal did we take in, often while consuming the very product that was being hawked?

When I think back on television ads, it seems that a majority of them were for cereals. I watched a lot of TV that was aimed at kids, and the cereal manufacturers knew that they didn’t have to impress our moms. They just needed to make us kids want the products, and we would nag and cajole the rest of the way to the ultimate goal of a sale at the supermarket.

Sugar Bear was a very familiar face. Once the diminutive ursine had a bowl of Super Sugar Crisp, there was nothing he couldn’t accomplish, including bailing Grannie Goodwitch (voice of Ruth Buzzi) out of jams.

But it wasn’t just Sugar Crisp. We were exhorted by Tony the Tiger to enjoy Kellog’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. And if you can’t remember what Tony the Tiger said, you have no business reading this. 😉

The Honeycomb Kid would ride a white horse to persuade us to purchase the strangely-shaped cereal that would hold its crispness in milk. And purchase it we, or rather our harried mothers, did, in large numbers. Honeycomb was good for munching right out of the box while Leave it to Beaver was on after school.

Man, no wonder I had a mouth full of fillings by the time I was a teenager.

Then there were the Smack Brothers. Their routine went thusly:

Oh give me a smack, a wonderful smack . . .
The singer is punched by his sibling.
And since you’re me brudder, I’ll give you anudder!

Now keep this in mind. I have viewed lots of commercials on YouTube. But I haven’t heard this particular Sugar Smacks commercial since it last aired on network television, probably around 1970.

That is some testament to the power of commercials on kids.

Tune in tomorrow as we spend some more time dusting off some old breakfast cereal ads from our childhoods.

Those Red Plaque Disclosing Tablets

We Boomers in school were used to having our health enhanced, as well as our minds. For instance, in elementary school every year, a dental technician would show up with posters, free toothbrushes for all, and something ominous known as plaque detection tablets.

The posters were scary, too. They would show what happened to little kids who DIDN’T brush their teeth regularly. Yikes, talk about some ugly rotted images.

The results of chewing plaque-disclosing tablets

But the scariest thing was popping those red tablets in your mouth for the first time. It was the first grade for me, and I remember some kids crying because they were frightened by the scarlet pills. But the teacher tried to reassure them, while still pointing out that resistance was futile. You WILL have your plaque exposed.

And boy, did we have plaque. It seems that we were all hopelessly incompetent at brushing our teeth. The dental technician would shake her head in sad wonder. Then, she would educate us on avoiding the future embarrassment of failed plaque detections.

The problem was that we just weren’t brushing hard enough or long enough. So we were trained to brush our teeth in such a way that would virtually guarantee future receded gums. Up like a rocket, down like the rain, back and forth like a choo-choo train. For at least five minutes.

A shorter brushing session followed by flossing was a better idea, but nobody was doing that in 1966.

True, the dental tech’s advice on brushing might have been overzealous by today’s standards, but I look in the mirror today and see a healthy set of forty-seven year old choppers. My father, raised in rural Minnesota through the Depression, had a set of dentures by the time he was forty. Baby Boomers as a whole have managed to keep their original teeth, thanks in large part to those ominous red plaque detecting pills.

Those Old Flat Barbecue Grills

Man has long had rites of spring. Once upon a time, it was the pagan festival of Astarte (from which we derived the term Easter). The Druids would celebrate the equinox at Stonehenge. But in the 1960’s, it was the annual purchase of a cheap flat barbecue grill.

These grills could be obtained at places like Western Auto, Otasco (a local home/auto chain store based in Oklahoma), Sears, Montgomery Wards, and other pre-Wal Mart establishments. They ran about ten bucks or so in their most basic form.

They consisted of thin steel painted blue or red. The cheapest ones were simply flat cylinders about three feet in diameter and four to six inches in depth, with two brackets diametrically opposed allowing you to move the grill itself up and down over a range of six inches. They sat upon tubular legs which placed them about 36″ high.

However, if you were willing to spring for a few extra bucks, you could get yourself a deluxe model with a windscreen.

As tight with a buck as dad was, I remember we always had barbecue grills with the wind screen. As a matter of fact, circa 1971, we had one with a motorized spit, which would slowly turn a whole chicken or roast while you went inside and watched the baseball game.

The thin metal which comprised the grills meant that you bought a new one every year. That paint would soon begin flaking off, and the grill would begin to rust. By fall, it was looking pretty sad. When it got too cold to cook outdoors, it would simply sit in the weather and continue to deteriorate, until it would be disassembled and consigned to the trash.

It was possible to get a second year out of it if you kept it out of the weather. But the heat from cooking would still get to the paint and make them ugly.

Of course, along with the grill was kept the supply of charcoal briquets and starter fluid. The briquets needed to be kept dry, else they would swell up and become nonburnable. Starter fluid came in a tin vessel that was about eight inches tall, four inches wide, and two inches thick. It had a popup plastic spout, so you could turn it upside down and liberally douse the charcoal (piled into a heap in the middle of the grill) in the hope that you would have a beautiful bed of glowing embers upon which you could cook your burgers.

However, what was more likely to happen was that you would fail to let the fluid soak in thoroughly enough. A match would cause the pile to flame brightly, but it would soon go out, with the bare edges of the charcoal lightly glowing, giving you a vague hope that cooking would be taking place within the next thirty minutes.

That necessitated spraying more fluid on, which would quickly burn off, but creating slightly more glowing edges to the briquets. And you needed to let EVERY TRACE of that fluid burn off, else your food would have a distinctive petroleum distillate tang to it.

Time to go get a beer and let it set.

Finally, with the wind building up and blowing ashes and such all over the yard, your pile of briquets was ready to be spread out and the grate placed over it, so those burgers could begin their transformation into delightfully delicious treats to be eaten off of paper plates.

There were better grills like Weber Kettles back then, but most suburbanites and small-town dwellers simply purchased the inexpensive flat grills year after year.

Nowadays, I cook on a gas grill (with a spare bottle ready to spring into action) that has a vinyl cover to keep it dry from the elements. I take advantage of the heat that gathers in the upper confines of the enclosure to slowly bake thick steaks, making them delectably perfect, slightly pink in the middle. And my top secret marinade in the fridge makes them taste like heaven on earth.

But while I tend my grill, which is durable enough to last for years, I sometimes let my mind wander back to dad making some pretty darned good tasting meals on inexpensive sheet-metal contrivances that were purchased every spring.