[chopper]

(1) Spoolies. These were little martini-glass shaped hair curlers, made out of soft rubber. The ladies separated a lock of hair, wrapped it around the “stem” of the Spoolie, and then folded the “bowl” part down over the lock. After a couple of hours, the Spoolie was removed, leaving a “spit curl”. A talented young lady could convert herself into a poodle in little over three hours.

(2) Round television picture tubes. Original tubes were round rather than rectangular. Before the glass industry figured out how to make rectangular tubes, the viewing display was made to look rectangular by placing a mask over the front of the round tube.

(3) Instant Color Television. In the prehistoric past, when all televisions were monochrome, these little plastic sheets were sold to add color to the sets. The sheet was the size of the television screen, with the top 1/3 tinted blue, the middle 1/3 left clear, and the bottom 1/3 tinted either green or brown. The operating theory here was that they were used primarily during the cowboy shows, which concentrated primarily on outside scenery. The ICT would be placed over the picture tube, where it would stick due to static attraction and would provide tint to the picture. Incidentally, these were sold for both round and rectangular picture tubes.

(4) PEZ dispensers.

(5) Romper Room, the forerunner of Sesame Street. This was mainly a Midwest phenomena, as it apparently originated out of a Chicago television station. A lot of the kids I went to school with learned to read before attending kindergarten by watching Romper Room.

(6) Fanner-50 cap pistols.

(7) I don’t remember what they were called, but the drug stores used to sell little wax bottles of colored sugar water. The wax bottles were about an inch and a half tall. The procedure was to bite off the top of the bottle, drink the syrup inside, then chew the wax bottle like gum.