A Quicky Addenda to WWII Years

When you start plowing through memories from the WWII years, as I did in the last post, funny things surface. Funny as in....awful!

A friend reminded me of those see-through bags (could they have been a forerunner to plastic?) of white lardish looking stuff that had an orange bubble embedded in it. You were meant to burst the bubble of dye, before opening the package, and knead the ghastly thing until it resembled butter. This was my first introduction to an obscenity called oleo margarine.

Speaking of bubbles, I remember when potato chips had little oil sacs (that were fun to nibble). Today, each chip is without blemish (and not nearly as interesting!).

And cereal....back then there were Rice Krispies (1928), Corn Flakes (1906), Wheaties, Shredded Wheat, Puffed Rice (literally shot from "guns" at the 1904 World's Fair) and "newcomers": Kix (1935) and Cheerios (1941). Maybe there were a few more I was not aware of, but I wanted to point out that by comparison, the contents of the football-field-long aisles in the supermarkets look like they were hatched in Bedlam.

The one thing these antique cereals had in common was color. It ranged from off-white to a healthy looking brown.

I started this note to correct my April 14 post. We did not have ration cards back then; they were ration books that were issued periodically and you tore out the stamps for the appropriate week or month and handed them over to the butcher, baker and candlestick maker.