Eye on the prizes in the Kellogg's cereal boxes

I guess they still put prizes in cereal boxes, but nothing like the keen stuff we used to get: rings, decoders and a combination compass/magnifying glass that glowed in the dark.

In the early days they didn’t separate the prize from the cereal. Your radioactive compass was right in there with the food.

Sometimes it was the box that was the prize. Cheerios had an entire western town with cutout figures of the Lone Ranger and Tonto that you built by cutting and gluing the colorful images from the box. My buildings tended to be on the ramshackle side as I did not realize at the time that glue was needed. I just stuffed tab A into slot B and expected everything to hold.

The rule in my house was that you had to finish the cereal before you could take the prize out. In the case of the western town, this was self-enforcing as otherwise you would have all that loose cereal.

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Sometimes you had to send away for the prize, like my Tom Mix secret message ring. It had a secret compartment into which a message could be inserted.

I was never able to realize the potential here, as you needed to be one of those people that can inscribe verse on the head of a pin in order to write small enough on the tiny piece of paper that would fit in there. Eventually I just stuffed a blank scrap inside and pretended it was a secret message, then sat back to enjoy my ring.

The only problem was I had not realized that if no one is trying to wring the secret out of you, not much happens. I walked around, smug with my secret for about one day.

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On to the next thing, the Diving Frog Man. They gave you this little plastic Navy frogman with one impossibly large foot. The foot was a conical chamber that you packed with baking soda (not supplied) and the item would plunge to the bottom of your sink or bath tub, foot first from the weight of the packed baking soda, then it would react with the water and the man would rise to the surface, release a bubble from his foot, and then repeat the performance until all the reactant was exhausted.

Basically, this was a chemically activated bobber, not a realistic Navy combat unit, as I had been led to expect.

These “prizes� taught me a valuable lesson at an early age about advertising. I learned to lower my expectations. So whenever I am lured by the siren call of a “free prize,� I just remember the wise words of my Dad, “That’s how they getcha.�

Bill Abrams resides (and laments over his prizes) in Pine Plains.