Time for a Retromercial

Here's a list of items I remember fondly from the 1970's.

Pop Rocks

We had a taste of this product right before the rumors

started. You know the ones, where some kid ate a couple packages and

his stomach exploded? I still have trouble eating them because of that urban legend. Backyard kid talk is pretty heavy stuff.

Breck Shampoo

Who didn't want mega-miles of golden,

waving hair? All possible with one fabulous bottle of amber-colored Breck Shampoo! Prell was freakishly green, stinky, and it left your hair heavy and dull. Head and Shoulders just made your dandruff worse, and Ooh lala Vidal Sassoon cost too darn much. Breck fit somewhere in the middle. Pure liquid gold.

RC Cola

Little metal tabs were everywhere. In the ditch, the gravel road, the baseball park, the beach at Paola Lake. Why? Because we were havin' fun drinking our super sweet and spicy RC Cola! The can design is hauntingly familiar to the red white and blue of the Pepsi logo, but whatevva. It was good stuff. Bubble Up, RC, Dr Pepper . . . they all say 1970's picnic to me.

Palmolive

We actually did it. We dipped out hands in Palmolive. We grabbed a little bowl from the cabinet, squeezed in some of the green

goo and then dipped. And waited. After a few minutes, Mom would walk in the kitchen and start yelling about how much it cost to buy one

little thing of soap, and we'd scatter and run to the backyard, hands dripping with slime. A whole hose-full of hot summer water later, and the verdict was in: Palmolive didn't make your hands softer. It just made them . . . really clean.

Hamm's Beer

"From the land of sky-blue waters . . ." All of us kids sitting around the tube on Super Bowl Sunday saw how cute the ads were, and we often sang the little jingle that sounded akin to an old Indian chant, "Hamm's the beer refreshing, Hamm's the beer refreshing, Hamm's . . ." Someday when we were old enough to drink, this was the exact beer we were going to buy. We'd drink it every day, every night, at dinner, at the park, at the movies—all over the place. Because that bear was too cute and he needed our support to help him beat all those mean woodland animals that kept making his life a living hell. This is for you old Hamm's bear, gulp.