Raise Your Cans and Eat Some Cereal

Today I received some packages from my last adventure through Sportslots. I picked up quite a few inserts to add to my Cubs teams sets. Looking at some of the cards I picked up reminded me of how great it was being a kid in the eighties. (OK, late seventies too.) We had star wars. We had GI Joe. We had the Transformers and Go-Bots. We also had awesome stuff that came in our cereal boxes. I would spend a lot of time looking at the cereal boxes to decide which one I was going to eat that week. I didn't care what it tasted like, I only cared what the surprise inside was.

I ended up with a lot of little junky "surprises." One thing that was never junk were the 3-D cards from Kelloggs's. Looking at these was like a full hand slap to the face of nostalgia. These were better than the scratch-n-sniff stickers we got with our scholastic book orders. You have a strawberry-scented sticker? I have a Bill Buckner in amazing 3-D. Alas, as with most of my stuff from back then they are long gone. I am happy to be able to put these cards in the collection.

It seems like everything had baseball card promotions back then. I picked up these two Cubs cards from the 1981 Squirt set. I never had these cards back then. Nobody in my  family liked squirt except for me. There was no way they were going to buy any. We didn't buy soda then like we do now. We grew up on iced tea and Kool-aid. If we had bottles (yes, bottles) of soda in the house, it was a treat. Since these are cards I never would have had at the time, these are another great addition to the Cubs colllection.

So raise your cans, eat some cereal, and remember when companies were more than happy to market to kids, pester our parents, and get us to eat their junk. All for a baseball card.