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From the original "When in Doubt, Use Parsley" by Gloria Coughlin
January 28, 1967
Did you know that Admiral Byrd took Grape Nuts cereal on his second trip to Little America? The fact that Grape Nuts helped finance his trip by sponsoring his weekly broadcasts from Little America had absolutely nothing to do with it. He only took them along because they are low in fat, high in energy, have a nutty flavor and crunchy texture. (Hot oatmeal in the Arctic! So who needs it?)
Did you know that if you buy 40 boxes of Alpha Bits, you will have a complete set of "Lovable Truly's Fun 'n Game Series"? Your children will also have at least 50 kilograms of vitamin B, niacin, iron phosphorous and calcium. Since B.H.A. is added to Alpha-Bits to preserve freshness, you will also have some pretty fresh kids.
One ounce of cheerios gives you 23% Thiamine, 5% of Niacin, 12% iron and if that isn't enough, it also gives you "Muscle Building Go Power." All that for forty-three cents.
If your youngster tells you that he's going to put a "tiger in his tank", don't get shook. That's the cereal set's jargon for eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
About now, you must know that in our house we read cereal boxes. We not only read about it--we eat it, sleep on it, walk on it, and feed it to our cat. I buy nine boxes of cereal a week. They eat five boxes and I sweep up four.
Mothers thought they had trouble thirty years ago because their children had to have "Wheaties: The Breakfast of Champions", and walked around singing "Wave the Flag For Hudson High Boys." The cereals on the market today make Jack Armstrong look like a piker.
Reading cereal boxes gets to be a compulsion. Take note sometime. If you happen to sit down to have a cup of coffee and there's a cereal box on the table, what do you do? You read!
I've got a son who has been beating a path to the mail box for three weeks waiting for his Captain Crunch membership card. He is convinced that when it comes, we will pack his duffel bag and he's off to sea to join the pirates. Little does he know that if all I had to do to send him off to sea is send a dollar and three box tops, he'd have been long gone.
The prizes that they pack in cereal boxes are the most sadistic form of torture ever devised by man. First of all, they put a picture of a skin diver on the back of the box. He looks like he's six feet tall and could only be made of pure flesh and blood. The next problem you have to contend with is, who gets the skin diver? Some people keep a calendar for important dates, doctors' appointments, etc, but in our house we keep a calendar so that we can keep track of who got the last skin diver. Since the prize is always at the bottom of the box, every time you turn your back, a grimy hand reaches down into the box of cereal, searching for the prize. Fifteen minutes after they find it, you hear a grinding noise when you're running the vacuum cleaner and invariably you just ground up the crummy skin diver.
I shouldn't belittle the children. I just found out that they don't really shoot puffed rice out of a cannon. Don't sneer at me, I'll bet that there are a lot of you who have been wondering for years how they gather it all up after the big blow.
We all have secret ambitions. Mine is really very simple. Some day I am going into a grocery store, and pick out about 30 boxes of assorted cereals. I'll throw them on the floor and stamp the riboflavin, snap, crackle, and pop right out of them. All the while I'm stamping, I'll be singing at the top of my lungs, "Wave the Flag For Hudson High Boys."