In the early 1960's someone working for General Foods decided to put little rectangles with pictures of major league baseball players on the backs of boxes of Post Cereals. Its effect on my family indicates that bit of marketing was sheer genius. Not only did it make me and my brother lifelong cereal eaters, it got me hooked on baseball.
Had fate not influenced my mother to buy the precise packages of Post Toasties she did I could have ended up a fan of the Red Sox, Dodgers, or -gasp- Yankees, but because she had an uncanny knack for bringing home boxes with at least one Detroit Tiger on the back I began rooting for the Motor City's American League team. Today I sometimes forget which days of the week my children have soccer practices, but those two-and-a-half-inch by three-and-a-half-inch cardboard images of Rocky Colavito, Jake Wood, Dick Brown, Bill Bruton, Don Mossi, and Chico Fernandez are still burned into my memory. Hey, it could have been worse: had she purchased boxes featuring numerous members of the Milwaukee Braves, Washington Senators, or Kansas City Athletics I'd have been stuck rooting for a defunct team a few years later. Who knows what that would've done to my psyche?
Cereal box baseball cards disappeared after 1963, but fortunately one of Post's competitors came up with a reasonable alternative shortly thereafter: trading cards of U. S. presidents. Each specially marked box had four different commanders-in-chief on its back, and since America's 36th president (Lyndon Johnson) was in office at the time, anyone who could consume the contents of nine different boxes of Cheerios could get himself a complete set of President trading cards (yes, there were two Grover Clevelands). I was nine or ten at the time, the age at which a child's mind for better or worse absorbs absolutely everything it's exposed to. Reading those trading cards indelibly etched all kinds of presidential minutiae into my brain. I knew that Andrew Jackson was the 7th chief executive, Andrew Johnson the 17th, and William Howard Taft the 27th. I learned Franklin Pierce was America's only head of state from New Hampshire; that Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy had all been assassinated; that Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman each became president due to the death of his predecessor; and that William Henry Harrison's presidency lasted a mere 30 days. And while possessing bits of trivia is of little value to anyone not appearing as a contestant on Jeopardy!, it's likely knowing James K. Polk died just 103 days after leaving office in 1853 or Herbert Hoover's birthplace was Iowa is, in the grand scheme of things, a tad more significant than owning the knowledge that Norm Cash slugged 41 homers in 1961, the same year he hit a league-leading .361.
My youngest child, who is all of four years old, still gets stunned when heasks me (about once a day) which video games were my favorites when I was his age and I respond that I didn't have any BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T EXIST! I know I've got no shot at interesting him in trading cards of any kind. But my oldest is going on ten, the same age I was when I started noticing (and retaining) things like both presidents during the 1870's had beards. So when I saw a box of U.S. President Flash Cards at a local store not long ago I purchased them for a very reasonable one dollar. And what value I got! For one thing, there are eight more cards to this set (Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Bushes I and II didn't qualify as presidents in 1966) than there were in the one I meticulously cut off the cereal boxes more than four decades ago.
And while the likenesses on these cards aren't the same as the ones on my childhood set (although the Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams pictures are pretty close), there's a wealth of information on them. Who knew Martin Van Buren, who grew up speaking Dutch, was the only president to learn English as a second language? Or that both of James Madison's vice-presidents died in office? Or that John Tyler fathered 15 children, Theodore Roosevelt doubled the number of America's National Parks, and Dwight Eisenhower was the first resident to campaign on television?
Trading cards are still a great way to learn about many subjects, including American History. Now if I can only figure out how to pry my children away from the computer long enough for them to look at them!
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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