By Patrick Robinson

Since I’m now old I can share childhood memories that, because of how life goes, will resonate with a decreasing number of people but perhaps that’s why they are worth sharing.

When I attended Hazel Valley Elementary School in the late 1950’s I would walk home from school and often stop at the Carter gas station on 126th SW. and head for the pop machine. It was a “slider” type cooler that kept the bottles in cold water, in a dispenser you had to slide your glass bottle through to a little gate to get out. WOW was it cold. I believe that sensation of drinking genuinely ice cold coca cola from a glass bottle is what built that company’s universal sense memory. Once you had that experience you wanted it again. 

There was a candy machine which had Dots, Necco wafers, the usual Snickers, Milky Way and Look bars but also the unusual and prized Seven Up bar. It had nothing to do with the lemon lime soda. It was like a box of candy in a bar. Seven different flavors in one bar. Coconut, butterscotch caramel, buttercream, fudge, Brazil nut, cherry cream, and orange jelly. They would change the flavors from time to time so it was always a sweet surprise. The Pearson candy company stopped making them in 1979.

I was a bit of a loner as a child, preferring to read books in my room but sometimes I would venture into the nearby woods to make dams in small streams, find some “spreading wood ferns” (yes I had to look that up) and break them apart for “fern fights”.. which you might think were semi violent events but actually involved finding the fern with the sturdiest branches then breaking off the extra parts, locking them like hooks in a pulling contest with your opponent to see which one broke first. I usually lost. But winning was glorious.

I was always eager to please and one time in fifth grade just to impress a girl I told her I could eat a whole box of raisins. What she didn’t know was that I meant the BOX too. Which I actually did. It wasn’t good. And oddly, she remained wildly unimpressed. Thus began my long career of doing things to impress girls that never worked. Girls really ARE smarter than me.

Not pictured: Fern and box of raisins.