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Pedri announces $1 million state grant for 911 emergency radio project

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Service set for Saturday at GAR for local music legend Melvin Wynn

<p>It&#8217;s a few decades ago and you open up a box of Duz detergent. Of course, you got powder to wash your clothing with.</p><p>But you got something else as well &#8211; a nicely patterned drinking glass.</p><p>If that seems odd today (and Duz has not been around in a long time), it wasn&#8217;t odd at all back in the 1940s and 1950s. You could almost outfit your home with the stuff they used to pack in soaps and other products as premiums to get you to run out and buy some more.</p><p>Today, if you buy a container of detergent you get &#8211; well &#8211; detergent. The heady days of extras galore are history, along with 15-minute afternoon radio dramas.</p><p>If the householder of about 1950 needed kitchen towels, just pick up a box of Breeze laundry product. Accompanying dishcloths could be found in competitor Silver Dust.</p><p>I have no idea how they did it, but Bonus detergent actually managed to pack a bath towel in a box. Holiday coming up? Buy Surf and get Christmas decorations.</p><p>It wasn&#8217;t just washday that drew the extras. Again, this is hard to believe today, but two brands of hot oat cereal contained drinking glasses. Another, called Carnival Oats &#8211; and I&#8217;m not kidding about this &#8211; put china ware in their package.</p><p>Sometimes the packaging itself was an &#8220;extra.&#8221; There was a 1950s brand of peanut butter called Big Top in stemmed glass jars that could become dessert dishes. Jelly nearly always came in glass containers that, once the jelly was gone, could go into your cupboard as conversation starter drinking glasses, maybe with Fred Flintstone&#8217;s picture on them.</p><p>You couldn&#8217;t escape these little side benefits years ago. Go into a movie theater on &#8220;dish night&#8221; and for a low price you could go home with a gravy server or turkey platter or teacup and saucer. Lasting into the 1970s were banks rewarding new depositors with the fabled toaster.</p><p>Youth was nowhere safe from marketing. If you bought bubble gum, you got a baseball card (which pretty much obligated you to buy more and top your friends) or a mini-comic strip. Run down to the corner grocery for a Dixie cup of ice cream and inside the lid was a neat photo of the dashing Stewart Granger or the beauteous Elizabeth Taylor or one of the other top movie stars of the day.</p><p>Cereals favored by children were forever packing toy soldiers or some other little prize with the flakes and puffs. Some of the gifts were &#8211; well &#8211; odd. Every safety organization in the country would swoop down on the cereal maker of today if, as one did eons ago, it were to put a bunch of marbles in the box.</p><p>Generally, though, the kids had to send away for something. A couple of Chex box tops and, I think, about 25 cents once got me a really neat plastic Space Patrol ray gun that fired bursts of cornstarch. If you bought a Popsicle you were exhorted to save the wet, sticky wrapper until you had enough for the gift you wanted.</p><p>Marbles in cereal? Christmas decorations in detergent? We like to think we&#8217;re more sophisticated than that today.</p><p>But maybe we&#8217;ve lost something. Admit it: have you ever eased the burden of laundry day by realizing that you&#8217;ve just completed your set of glassware or bathroom towels and now you can live like the folks in Downton Abbey?</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Tom Mooney Mug</div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/web1_TOM_MOONEY.jpg</photo0><caption0>Tom Mooney Mug</caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Tom Mooney</p><p>For Times Leader</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history columnist. Reach him at tommooney42@gmail.com.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Remember When: Little extras came with soap and cereal