Victory, fame, adulation, just ten cents away
BY NICK SALTARELLI Special to the VOICE
Allow me to take you back in time to the mid 1960s—the Middle Ages to those of you who weren’t there, and famously unremembered by some who actually were—when iPods and digital music weren’t even so much as a Flower Child’s pipe dream. The British Invasion was in full swing, Rock ‘n’ Roll was undisputed king, and if you wanted that glorious sound beside you on the beach there was a solitary option: the transistor radio. But you had to be very cool, and better off than most, to actually own one.
Transistor radios. High school kids had them, but not all high school kids. Only the very coolest. Certainly no kid at St. Mary’s elementary school had his very own. To be a mere Eighth Grader with a transistor radio? Now that would be beyond cool.
Grade 8 is an awkward time of change in a lanky boy’s life. Nose too big for your face, joints aching from having grown like a weed over the previous year, and face and nether regions blossoming with the dubious dividends of later puberty. You needed all the help you could get, and you’re just now noticing that some of the girls in your class aren’t nearly as icky as they used to be, though most had somehow grown half a head taller. The very coolest girls would probably even flirt with the boy who had his very own transistor radio. More importantly, a transistor radio would make you especially cool with the guys. Can you imagine being that one groovy kid at recess in your paisley shirt and button-fly bell-bottoms, penny-loafered feet keeping time to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five? The very definition of ultra-cool. Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.
It was at the very beginning of the summer of 1965, against the backdrop of that impossible dream, when the Humpty Dumpty potato chip company announced its Lucky Letters Contest. Ten thousand dollars’ worth of transistor radios to be won! Something like 200 transistor radios up for grabs. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say it fired-up the imaginations of most of the school-aged boys in the ‘hood. A real chance to win a radio. A unique opportunity to become the coolest of the cool. And not just any transistor radio but a SIX-Transistor Radio!
For the benefit of those readers who aren’t so long in the tooth as your narrator, let me inject some perspective into the conversation. So you understand, a six-transistor radio was incredibly lust-worthy back in 1965. Solid State. None of that old-fashioned vacuum tube stuff. Six ultra-modern transistors mated through a printed circuit and multicoloured wires to diodes and capacitors and batteries and a whole lot of other neat new-age electronic stuff, all shoehorned into a compact package not much bigger than your average brick. But it’s those transistors that make it a Transistor Radio, after all. Six transistors. By comparison, your standard iPhone needs two billion and, taken in a temporal context then and now, is just nowhere near as cool, man.
A Lucky Letter card was packed into every ten-cent bag of Humpty Dumpty potato chips. All you had to do was collect twelve upper case letters spelling out HUMPTY DUMPTY. That’s all. Twelve lucky letters. HUMPTY in red and DUMPTY in blue. Hit it just right and a buck twenty’ll get you a transistor radio that would otherwise set you back at least 50 clams at Kresge’s on the south side of Main Street in downtown Welland. Fifty dollars would buy a Catholic family’s groceries for a week, a lot of money even for an adult. For a kid, a king’s ransom. A buck twenty was only a couple, maybe three, weeks’ allowance. The game was on!
A few weeks into it, rummaging down to the bottom of the bag while breaking as few chips as possible, you’d often find a lucky letter you already had, but that was part of the plan. All it took was cooperation. Leverage. You knew six kids who knew another six kids who’d play along. Then 30, 40 kids in our neighbourhood just east of the Canal and even beyond; friends, brothers, sisters and cousins, trading their doubles and triples. You’d trade your duplicate red P for that blue M you needed. We had it all figured out. Before you knew it, at least one of us, maybe two, would score all 12 lucky letters and join the ranks of the elite. The plan was flawless.
I ate a boatload of potato chips that long, hot summer. Everybody did. Only plain chips were available those days, copiously endowed with salt that made you crave eating more. I suppose there were a lot of kids retaining water, along with spoiled supper appetites and pockets crammed full of grease- stained lucky letter cards where once there were pennies, nickels and dimes.
As the summer wore on and the September 15 contest deadline drew ever nearer it seemed most everyone had three or four complete collections of red HUMPTY and blue UMPTY lucky letters. But nobody had the key to victory, the magic consonant, the maddeningly elusive Blue D.
As the dog days of summer waned toward the dawn of the new school year, optimism morphed into a resigned hope. Time was running out. Scoring The Blue D became the holy grail, for which finding a dime to buy another bag of Humpty Dumpty potato chips took on an ever greater priority. It had to be out there, that blue D. A couple of hundred blue Ds, in fact. They were all still out there. Had to be. All you had to do is find one of them tucked inside a lucky, ten-cent bag of chips. Just one more bag, you’d tell yourself. This can be The One.
But it wasn’t. Or the bag after that, or the one still after.
By the end of summer holidays, you’d find unfinished bags of Humpty Dumpty potato chips in the trash bin outside the confectionary store at the corner of Lincoln and Garner, along with the odd crumpled and tossed Lucky Letter card. You’d pick it out and smooth out the wrinkles for a look. Just in case.
Nobody got lucky, and I figure collectively all those kids had spent the equivalent cost of multiple transistor radios with no more to show for it than chapped lips and extra zits. In mid-September I stuffed all those greasy not-so-lucky letter cards into an envelope, plastered on a six-cent stamp and mailed it in to Humpty Dumpty’s contest HQ in Winnipeg. Hey, it was worth a shot. Maybe when they saw how very hard I’d tried, how I’d spent all those dimes and scarfed down all those greasy, salt-encrusted potato chips they’d be impressed. Or maybe take pity. Give me something. Turned out I was right.
A month later there arrived a bright yellow envelope addressed in my name, that familiar bow-tied egghead smiling in the corner. With great expectation I tore it open.
Inside there was a coupon—for a free ten-cent bag of Humpty Dumpty potato chips. ♦
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