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.
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.
Pork Loin TV dinner
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.
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.
Vintage flat grill
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.
There was a company in St. Paul, Minnesota called the Trudeau Candy Company. It began marketing a candy bar (I never found out when) called the Seven Up Bar. I have no idea how they managed to avoid being sued by a certain soft drink manufacturer.
Anyhow, in 1951, the Trudeau Candy Company was bought out by Pearson’s Candy Company. They continued to market the unique candy bar until 1979. Then it was gone.
The Seven Up bar was an incredible confection. It consisted of seven individual compartments coated in delicious milk chocolate. The seven compartments were stocked with the following fillings: cherry, coconut, caramel, fudge, jelly, maple, and Brazil nut.
It was incredible. Part of its appeal was that it wasn’t sold just anywhere. In my hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, dad had to drive to a certain store that sold the delicious treat to get one for mom. As I recall, it also had a premium price.
Under those circumstances, I didn’t get to eat that many of them. But the ones I DID eat were heaven. The jelly was the best part, and, of course, it would be saved for last.
I didn’t always remember where it was in the arrangement of cubicles, so a test bite might have to be performed.
Here’s to a unique, long-gone delight: the Seven Up Bar.
I just barely got in on this memory. We had a Meadow Gold milkman who would come by twice a week, delivering two-quart bottles of milk with a cardboard stopper. There would be a knock at the door, followed by a call of “Meadow Gold!” Mom would have left the empty bottle on the porch, and the milkman would replace it with a fully topped-off complement.
Milkmen originally delivered their product in pint or quart bottles daily. The reason was that homeowners had iceboxes before WWII. They kept food cool, but opening the door more than a few times a day meant the coolness would be more like lukewarmness.
That leads to another memory. Did anyone else out there grow up referring to their refrigerator as an icebox, courtesy of your parents’ lingo?
As the years wore on, iceboxes were replaced by refrigerators that became more and more affordable. By the 1960’s iceboxes were gone. But housewives who had never known anything but milk being delivered to their doors continued to patronize local dairies that would bring milk, eggs, cottage cheese, and other products directly to the home.
I’m not sure when Meadow Gold discontinued home deliveries. I know they stopped for us about 1967, but I’m not sure if it was because of being discontinued, or because my thrifty father decided it was too much of an expense. In researching this article, I discovered that at least one dairy in Longmont, Colorado was still making home deliveries of less-than-24-hour-old-milk in returnable glass bottles as recently as 1997.
The milkman’s regularity in making early morning deliveries led to such classic joke’s as Rodney Dangerfield’s “I’m depressed! I saw my kid and the milkman going to a father-and-son dinner!” A milkman or two might have been invited in for a cup of coffee by an amorous housewife, but in reality, I’m sure it was a rare occurrence.
Nowadays, milk comes in an ugly plastic gallon jug with a date stamped on it. You can still get food delivered to your doorstep, courtesy of the Schwann’s man. But the days of leaving returnable bottles on your porch, to have them replaced by the milkman, are long gone.
What a bargain. Plop down five cents on the counter, walk out of the store with not one, but TWO prizes. A delicious ooey-gooey chocolate caramel treat, and a whistle for after you were finished eating the sticky globules of delight!
Of course, I’m speaking about Milk Duds, and the slick little whistle the box made when you tore the tabs off of one end.
Milk Duds were a classic candy that closely resembled what you find in the bottom of a rabbit cage. Despite that rather unseemly resemblance, the confection has been a hit since the 1920’s.
I’m not sure who discovered that the box would create a miniature woodwind instrument. All I know is that my earliest memories of Milk Duds involve eating them as fast as possible (and that’s not very fast, with all that chewy caramel), pulling the waxed paper liner out of the box, ripping the flaps off one end, and blowing vigorously into the makeshift clarinet.
The sound would often annoy girls, yet another added bonus.
After a while, the cardboard would absorb enough of your saliva that you would toss your musical creation into the trash. But let’s do a little math:
Cost of the candy: five cents.
Cost of the instrument: no additional charge.
Getting to annoy your cousin Cynthia: priceless.
In 1937, Illini graduate student Michael Sveda was working on trying to synthesize an anti-fever medication. Like all health-conscious individuals of the era, he was having a smoke whilst working. Laying it on the table for a bit, he picked it up and was surprised that the tip tasted quite sweet. That taste prompted him to do more research and seek a patent.
Eventually, he sold the patent to DuPont, which sold it to Abbott Laboratories. Abbott saw commercial potential to using the product as a low-calorie sweetener. So they went through the laborious process of getting FDA approval, and obtained said certification in 1950.
Initially, Cyclamate was prescribed as a drug for the obese. In 1958, it received approval as a food additive. By 1960, a sweetener called Sweet*10 was a big hit in the US. It would make food, drinks, etc. sugary sweet with practically no calories!
What’s not to love?
Soon, Cyclamate was used for sweetening a host of products. Canned fruit, Jell-O, Funny Face drink mixes, and sugar-free candy were among the plethora of products that weight-conscious consumers, each having a sweet tooth, purchased by the boatload.
Moms loved it. The sugar rush that THEIR moms had long put up with from their children was now a thing of the past! Kids could drink a whole pitcher of sugar-free Kool-Aid and not be wired to the gills!
Not only that, but those same moms could enjoy a very sweet cup of coffee or glass of tea and not worry about the pounds that were being added to their frames.
Sweet 10 ad from 1961
In 1963, Coca-Cola introduced a Cyclamate-sweetened drink called Fresca. I loved it at first taste, and my mom was happy to see me taking in less sugar. Believe me, I was already wired enough!
Again, what’s not to love?
Enter FDA scientist Jacqueline Verrett. In 1969, she appeared on NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report with photographs of malformed chicks who had been injected with large quantities of Cyclamate. The images were shocking, and viewers were immediately filled with doubts about the safety of the low-calorie foods that they had been scarfing down.
A few days later, a study was released (from Abbott Laboratories themselves) that showed that eight out of 240 rats that had been fed the equivalent of 350 cans of soda a day had developed bladder cancer.
Interestingly, the study involved feeding the rats both Cyclamate AND saccharine. The results weren’t blamed on one sweetener over the other.
Anyhoo, the FDA reacted with a ban on Cyclamate on October 18, 1969. It completely caught the food industry off-guard.
Cyclamate-free Fresca and Tab. No, it doesn’t taste better.
Soft drink manufacturers scrambled to come up with another sugar-free solution. The most obvious, saccharine, left a bitter aftertaste that turned this life-long Fresca drinker into a Squirt fan. Funny Face started telling consumers that they would need to add sugar to their mixes (they did drop the price from 10 cents to a nickel for the trouble). Some added sugar (in smaller quantities) to their formerly Cyclamate-sweetened products. One bizarre example of spin was done by Coke with Tab. A TV commercial I remember well used a song to inform the public that Tab used sugar in order to taste better than it would have with saccharine. The tag line? “Tab tastes good enough for GUYS!”
I’ll bet Gloria Steinem loved that.
Nowadays, we have Splenda to sweeten our diet drinks with no discernable aftertaste in the US. Hooyah, I’m drinking Fresca again! But in many industrialized nations, Cyclamate is still used. And no, bladder cancer rates (or any other of the other bad stuff that Cyclamate was accused of causing) aren’t any higher than over here. The Cyclamate ban probably hurt the process of the banning of dangerous substances as a whole, simply because of the backlash that came from the public after learning of the truly astronomical amounts of the substance that test animals were given. Heck, Verrett’s baby chicks would have looked like crap if they had been force-fed that much WATER!
But, for better or worse, it happened. And it’s a memory that we Boomer kids can recall if we try, again, for better or worse.
It used to be that when you were in the mood for an all-day sucker, you had a choice to make. Sugar Daddy? Black Cow? Slo Poke?
Decisions, decisions . . .
As I recall, Slo Poke was the direct equal of the Sugar Daddy, the Black Cow being, basically, a Slo-Poke dipped in chocolate. I don’t mind telling you, it wasn’t much of a competition for me. I must have eaten at least a thousand Black Cows in the 60’s.
Holloway was the maker of Slo Pokes and Black Cows. I seem to remember a Pink Cow, too, but couldn’t tell you what it was. Maybe someone out there can?
Anyhow, the original companies got swallowed up by bigger boys, and eventually Clark ended up with the Holloway all-day suckers. In 1998, they discontinued the production of the long-lasting caramel goodies.
Sugar Daddy is now owned by Tootsie Roll, and yes, they’re still around. So even though Black Cow won the battle in the 60’s, as far as I’m concerned, Sugar Daddy won the war.
It’s possible that no other generation will be as enamored of the space program as were youthful Baby Boomers. Perhaps a manned mission to Mars might capture the imagination of the young as we were swept up by the race to the moon in the 1960’s. But then again it might not.
In our youth, the idea of man traveling to space and back was so new, so outrageous, and so compelling that it simply obsessed us.
In such a fertile environment, advertisers began selling us the same foods that astronauts consumed in space.
Now, the truth be known, no doubt the fellows with The Right Stuff would have preferred fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh country ham and eggs, and similar fare. But instead, they had to make do with very artificial alternatives, that blasted lack of gravity the culprit.
So they were all probably amused at how the public scarfed up Space Food Sticks.
Space Food Sticks, manufactured by Pillsbury, were the public’s equivalent of the semi-dehydrated, compressed rations that astronauts choked down to keep from starving. Presumably, by the time they were offered up for sale, they were more palatable than their original early incarnations. They DID represent an improvement over the yucky stuff astronauts had to suck out of tubes like toothpaste.
If it was up to our moms, they probably wouldn’t have sold very well. But Pillsbury knew what they were doing when they advertised them heavily on Saturday mornings. They knew that youthful demographic would begin hounding their parents to purchase the semi-tasty sticks.
That’s one thing for sure. Nobody bought them for their fresh flavor. 😉
It was a blast to grab a couple of sticks, put on your space helmet (mine doubled as a football helmet), and take imaginary space walks, so you could enjoy your Space Food Stick while watching the imaginary earth spin below you.
In 1966, when you were on a two-nickel-a-day budget, you had to be careful what you spent your money on.
Your soft drink options were these: Coke, Pepsi, 7up, RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, Fanta, Nehi, Grapette, or Orange Crush. These were all available for a dime. In other words, your ENTIRE BANKROLL.
But there was another option: Shasta. And it only cost a nickel.
At Moonwink Grocery, the ten cent pops were ice cold. But the more budget-friendly Shastas were located on an upper shelf in the far left side of the store. In other words, there were sold at room temperature.
But we didn’t care. In fact, we would often prepare the afternoon’s purchase by taking a couple of cans and stashing them in the dairy case out of sight, to be refreshingly cold by the time we ventured in around 2:00 PM. Mark, the store owner, was very tolerant of our sidestepping of his pop sales procedure.
My guess is that his hands were tied. The Big Boys in the soft drink game had probably forbidden him from selling budget Shasta cold alongside their products.
Shasta pop has a genuine connection to California’s Mount Shasta. They once marketed spring water from that location. The brand has been bought and sold repeatedly since being initially obtained by Sara Lee about the time I was buying it in the 60’s. It peaked in the 80’s, when those “I wanna pop” commercials were on.
Shasta’s greatest commercials, IMHO, were in the 70’s. They had immaculately animated ads with a brass band playing the familiar “Shasta! It has’ta be Shasta!” song in the background.
So here’s to a great tasting soda that was easy on a six-year-old kid’s budget.
