Nows and Forevers

Listening to old time radio shows you come up against old-timey brands that came and went long before you were on the scene.

Sal Hepatica, Fletcher’s Castoria, Lux, to name just a few. This week I came across another long-gone brand, Pep Cereal.

Pep sponsored “The Adventures of Superman,” which ran on the Mutual Broadcasting System in the 1940s. I had never heard of it, even though it was made by “Kellogg’s of Battle Creek,” which I had heard from.

So of course I had to look it up.

“You’ve never tasted anything quite like this delightful cereal,” read an ad I found while Googling.

I will never know, of course. They stopped making it in the 1970s, which I was definitely and under-12 cereal consumer but never saw a box nor tried it. Maybe my parents, who were young when this Superman episode was first on in the 1940s?

“Not really,” my father said when I asked him.
Guess he wasn’t a Superman fan.

But even if Pep is long gone, some vestiges survive: Namely the pins and paper airplane models that came in every box, thanks to eBay.

The Superman announcer would interrupt the action every once in a while to talk about Pep, and to tell kids to collect all the pins. It being the summer and early fall of 1945, at the end of World War II, the pins there were the insignias of various Army Air Corps, Navy and Marine Corps air units.

You can find some antique boxes, a lot of pins, and, amazingly, the paper airplanes. Thanks to eBay.