Month: November 2019

OK Boomer–Remember These?

sara-lee“Can Barb make Grandma’s special pound cake?”

The request was from my nephew Brad, asking that Barb prepare a dessert for a family gathering. It was a cake that my mom used to make for similar occasions, a Sara Lee Pound Cake cut into 3 layers, with a raspberry sauce between the layers and chocolate frosting on the sides and top. Barb and I probed our memories and with the help of Google, we were able to create a reasonable facsimile. It turned out pretty tasty; we sent Brad and his wife Breanne, a pound cake connoisseur, home with half of it.

Sara Lee Pound Cake-something I grew up with but hadn’t thought about (or purchased) in years. It made me think of other consumer products that have vanished from my forebrain. I know some (maybe most) of these products still exist. They have just passed away from me.

Products From My Past

How Many Are They Still Out There?

  1. Sara Lee wasn’t just Pound Cake. Their Orange and Chocolate Cakes in their aluminum pans both had frostings perfect for licking off the cardboard top
  2. Salerno Butter Cookies with a hole in the middle were fun, but the Chocolate Chip Cookies were my fav’s. I doubt they contained much real chocolate.
  3. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle and Green Pea Soups. Dinner wasn’t dinner without one of these. Sadly, the Green Pea soup was probably my leading source of vegetables.
  4. Gillette Double-Edged Razor Blades. No safety features, no special coatings, no double or triple or quadruple blades. You paid your money and you scraped your face.
  5. Nestle’s Quik. It didn’t teach me to spell, but it did teach me to love chocolate milk. Even as a kid I was a Never-Boscoer.
  6. Kellog’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. A little research shows the word “sugar” hasn’t been part of the name since 1983. Does that make them any more nutritious?
  7. Prell Shampoo. The shampoo made famous with a sinking pearl, since matched by sinking sales.
  8. Pepsodent Toothpaste. You’d wonder where the yellow went, now I wonder where Pepsodent went. I think it has long been Crested.
  9. Mercury Comet. We had a Comet, my future brother-in-law had a Comet, my friend had a Comet.  I think that accounted for 90% of the sales in the Chicago market. It was a Ford Maverick with a little (very little) class.
  10. Salada Tea Bags. Each box had a baseball player coin. My dad drank enough tea form me to collect a full team of All-Stars.

And this wasn’t a product, but a practice that kept our apartment well lit

  • Free light bulbs for electric bills. Was this just a Commonwealth Edison program? Bring your “paid” electric bill to a hardware store and get 10 free light bulbs. Incandescent of course.

Maybe I could still find most of these products on the shelves, or order from Amazon. But times and tastes have changed. My soups are now gourmet, my cereal sugar-free, and my shampoo salon quality. But, hey, it’s fun to remember. And forget about politics* for awhile!

The above is the opinion of the author and not UroPartners LLC.

*A few recent blogs if you DO want politics:

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