There's A Prize! In 1966

 

Our 12 ounce glasses used for drinking milk in the kitchen came from the grocery store.  They first contained peanut butter.  Labels suggested this was food were pealed off before they were stored on a shelf.  There were tall ones and short ones.  Both has stubby stems and points all over their surface.  They were heavy and essentially free.  We ate a lot of peanut butter.  Still do.  But nothing is free anymore. 

We had liver for dinner when it was on sale. At some point it became possible to suggest other types of meat.  You just go out and get a job delivering weekly editions of the local paper and use the proceeds to bribe the mother to buy something else. Chicken was good. Steak was better. Lobster was unknown. 

The editor of the local rag ran a contest requiring observational skills.  There were intentional mispellings of words throughout the pages and they could be organized into messages.  Eat your liver and grow strong.  Mother figured that one out.  Someone must have been complaining at the office about the meat they had last night. There was a five dollar prize.  A great sum in those days for a 10 year old boy.  Or his mother. 

January was the coldest month.  He had to get out in the early am to deliver the news and he was too sick to complete the task.  The ice on the streets was too thick and his bicycle tire tread was too thin.  The peanut butter glass mold would have been useful but nobody had an idea for producing free rubber tires.  The job ended when mother put her foot down. Health was more important than chicken. Liver, twice a week, was fine.

Weeks, then months went by and it was time for a family vacation. The station wagon has six bulbs on the back end underneath a bird wing.  It was an Impala.  You could sit back there and watch people trying to drive their cars.  Nobody seemed to care about speed.  Certainly not father.  We flew to Niagara Falls. The boat took us for a near look at the water coming down from above.  Then we went back to the Impala and had sandwiches.  Fluffanutter was peanut butter and marshmellows compressed between two pieces of lifeless, white bread.  There was no liver.  We made a deal.  No complaining in the car and we could live without it for the couple weeks. 

There was a carrier on top of the station wagon for all the eats and the camping gear for six of us.  Dad, apparently, had not adequately tied it down.  It flew off the back of the Impala and landed on the open highway.  Fortunately, there was no one there at the time. 

When we returned home in a few days it was suggested I try to get my old job back while the weather was warm and school was not an issue.  Several weeks after that the paper yielded a message I found interesting.  Fly me to the moon and spread my peanut butter too.  That was the year Frank Sinatra married Maureen Sullivan's daughter, the Peyton Place person.  Somebody's baby.  Figure it out.  There's a prize.