How about a nice bowl of cereal?

I miss cereal.

Oh, I’m not totally cereal-bereft. I can—and do—still eat oatmeal, both because it’s good for my increasingly old body with its malfunctioning parts, and because it’s good.

No, the cereal I’m talking about is the boxed kind, the Honey Smacks and the Golden Crisp, and the Frosted Flakes.

Because part of the aforementioned malfunctioning of various parts is that for some reason this old body decided milk will now throw the plumbing system into serious, China Syndrome meltdown. So, goodbye bowl of cereal before bed. So long bowl of cereal for breakfast. Bye-bye bowl of cereal for mid-afternoon snack.

And it’s hard, because I enjoyed a lifelong love affair with the stuff.

I was lured to shredded wheat thanks to Straight Arrow’s tips on wilderness survival.

One of my earliest cereal memories is eating Nabisco shredded wheat, and looking forward to uncovering the pieces of cardboard that divided the three layers of shredded wheat biscuits in those rectangular boxes. That’s because there was neat stuff to read on those dividers.

Starting in 1949, the National Biscuit Company began printing “Straight Arrow’s secrets of Indian lore and know-how” on the dividers, which imparted all sorts of useful information, some of which still sticks in my mind to this day. The idea was that the innovative and inventive Indian, Straight Arrow, would explain how to survive in the wilderness as a way to get kids interested in eating shredded wheat. Because, let’s fact it. Shredded wheat is not a very interesting cereal, although it’s pretty healthy.

Straight Arrow could survive in the wilderness with practically no modern help at all. For a 6 year-old, it was an eye-opening introduction to living off the land.

So Nabisco not only sponsored the “Straight Arrow” radio program, starting in 1949, but they also contracted with Fred L. Meagher to created the illustrated cards. I don’t know about other little kids, but they certainly hooked me.

For instance, birch bark canoes were not white like the outside of the bark but were brown like the inner layer of the bark when it was peeled off birch trees. Why? Because when birch bark dries, it naturally curls with the white outer bark inside the curl. The brilliant Ojibwa marine architects who invented birch bark canoes took advantage of the natural curl of the sheets of bark they peeled off paper birch trees to fit the bark onto the canoes’ cedar frames.

Another card insisted that when finding himself in the wilderness, a person could survive if all he had was an ax, because with a good ax and the necessary survival skills you can manufacture about anything, from one of those birch bark canoes noted above to the paddles for the canoe to a cozy bark lodge for shelter from the storm.

But shredded wheat was far from the only cereal that got my gastronomical juices flowing, although as a rule, gastronomy took a backseat to cereals sponsored by my favorite TV shows.

Sugar Jets were hawked by one of my TV heroes, Jet Jackson, but each one of the things was like a little bomb dropped in my digestive tract.

Captain Midnight, for instance, was one of my favorites. It was sponsored by Ovaltine, which for some reason my mother absolutely refused to buy. But then in 1958, Captain Midnight’s name suddenly changed to Jet Jackson, and the Ovaltine sponsorship disappeared in favor of Sugar Jets Cereal. So I absolutely had to have a box of Jets in order to get the box top, but, it turned out, Jets did not agree with my digestive system at all.

So it was back to Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops (“Sugar Pops are tops!), Post Sugar Crisp and their Kellogg’s cousin, Sugar Smacks, and Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes (“They’re grrrrreat!”). Sugar Corn Pops were a big favorite because they were the main sponsor of “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok,” one my favorite TV westerns. Favorite because Wild Bill wore his twin six-shooters butt first, which was his gimmick. The Lone Ranger had his mask, silver bullets, and black two-gun rig; Hopalong Cassidy dressed in all black that showed off nicely against his white horse, Topper; and Red Ryder had his lever-action carbine, of which I got the Daisy BB gun version when I was 9 years-old. But Wild Bill and his sidekick, Jingle Jones (who was from East Sedalia) was arguably my favorite, and thus the reason I ate so many boxes of Sugar Corn Pops.

First Captain Video and then Roy and Dale beckoned me with the sirens’ call to Sugar Crisp cereal.

Post Sugar Crisp was a sponsor yet another favorite cowboy TV show, “The Roy Rogers Show,” which was a sort of surrealistic time-warped show. Almost everyone rode horses, including Roy (Trigger) and Dale Evans (Buttermilk), except Roy’s sidekick Pat Brady, who drove a 1946 Jeep that had been accessorized with armor plating and which he named Nellybelle.

Cowboys weren’t the only kids’ TV personalities hawking cereal, either. I was introduced to science fiction, a lifelong love, by watching “Captain Video and his Video Rangers,” which also got me sort of hooked on Post Sugar Crisp, thanks to Post’s sponsorship of the show even before Roy and Dale and Pat showed up on TV. It was my first introduction to a robot, the show’s TOBOR character (“robot” spelled backwards) and it frankly scared the beejebus out of me.

But all that was then, and this is now. Sugar Crisp, Sugar Corn Pops, Sugar Frosted Flakes, and the rest of those carbohydrate-packed cereals are actually still around, although in deference to today’s healthy eating aspirations, Sugar Crisps are now Honey Crisps, Sugar Corn Pops are just Corn Pops, and Sugar Frosted Flakes are merely Frosted Flakes.

I sometimes visit the cereal isle at the grocery store, when I can ditch my wife, who hates shopping with the heat of a thousand suns, so that for at least a few minutes I can relive the old days when digestion and metabolism were kinder processes in my much younger body. And at least I can sort of make do with my daily morning bowl of oatmeal, on which I’ve found my sugarless creamer makes a passable substitute for the milk I so enjoyed on all those cereals of decades past.

But I still miss cereal.

Bob Rung made a lasting, positive difference

My friend Bob Rung died last week.

Friends and acquaintances dying is getting to be all too common these days, with me having spent 70 summers on this here Earth.

Many of my friends are passionate people, and all are interesting. But only a few have made the kind of lasting impression on his community and region due to his passion that Bob Rung did.

Fishing for smallmouth bass on the Fox River of Illinois draws thousands of anglers to the Fox Valley and also provides an excellent recreation source for area residents. (Photo courtesy of the Illinois-Wisconsin Fishing Blog)

His first and greatest passion was fishing, something to which he had devoted (as near as I could tell) his entire adult life, and most of his childhood, too. His family moved to the sprawling Boulder Hill subdivision between Montgomery and Oswego when he and his siblings were children, and there he grew up within walking distance of the Fox River.

He honed his skills and learned on his own how to manufacture the lures and equipment best-suited to tracking down the wily smallmouth bass, northern pike, walleyes, and other gamefish that were so rare when we were kids.

We went through high school together although he, being a Boulder Hill kid, wasn’t someone I hung around with. But he walked into the gym with the rest of us on graduation night in May 1964 after which so many of us went our own ways.

And for Bob, like so many of my male classmates, that meant being shipped off to the jungles and rivers and mountains of Vietnam, where he put his training as a U.S. Army medic to work, getting wounded himself along the way. When he came home he decided to put his love of animals in general and fish in particular to use and in the fall of 1971 he and a partner bought the Oswego Fish & Hobby Shop at 25 Jefferson Street, across the street from the Oswego Public Library in the Wilhelm Building.

But his first love was still the Fox River and fishing and he eventually decided to see if he could make a career out of it, which he managed to do by becoming a college-educated fisheries biologist working for the Illinois Department of Conservation.

And that’s where Bob and I met again. He knew that I had a pretty strong interest in the Fox River, too, especially in our local environmental hero who called himself “The Fox.” So when I needed some technical background for stories I was doing on the river or its tributaries, Bob was my go-to source.

Like me, he really hated the dams that dot the river from Dayton just above Ottawa near the river’s mouth to the series of dams that create the Chain O’Lakes up north. I did a number of articles about the Yorkville dam and how good it would be for the health of the river to get rid of it, and Bob helped by supplying me with good sources for research on the harm dams do to the streams they block.

Bob was also a major source of expert information and oversight after the Flood of 1996 badly damaged the dams along Waubonsie Creek, and the Oswegoland Park District decided to remove all the ones it had access to. The dams had been built over a span of more than a century, one to provide deep enough water for an ice harvesting operation, one to back up water to fill the water hazards at Fox Bend Golf Course, and the others for varying reasons. The problem was, the dams prevented fish from swimming upstream to spawn and that had a negative impact on the diversity of life in the Fox River. So Bob strongly advocated for their removal, something we were able to help push along down at the newspaper. Today, fish can easily swim upstream to spawn, something that has had an extremely positive impact on the Fox River.

Friends of the Fox River organize an American Water Willow planting project in the summer of 2015. Bob Rung championed planting water willows up and down the Fox River’s banks to stabilize them and to provide enhanced habitat for fish. (Friends of the Fox River photo)

In addition, Bob was fascinated with improving the entire ecology of the river basin to enhance the environment for fish. To that end, he got both me and Jim Phillips—that aforementioned furry crusader doing business as “The Fox”—interested in his campaign to plant American Water Willows up and down the river’s banks. A low-growing tough-stemmed plant, it grows in colonies that stabilize stream banks, which is a good thing in and of itself. But in addition, the plants’ leaves, stems, and flowers also provide browse for deer, and its rhizomes provide tasty meals for beavers and muskrats. In addition, the plants’ water-covered roots and rhizomes provide cover newly hatched gamefish minnows and a fine habitat for invertebrates that fish and other creatures feed on.

Bob Rung tosses a long-nosed gar back in the water in this 2012 photo from the Kankakee Daily Journal.

Over the years, he got organizations ranging from the Illinois Smallmouth Bass Alliance to the Friends of the Fox River to plant thousands of water willows along the rivershed’s stream banks. I once kidded him that he’d become the Johnny Appleseed of water willow propagation, and after a moment of silence he said he wouldn’t mind being called that.

Bob’s passion was the Fox River and he was one of those lucky individuals who was able to do important things that not only satisfied his own keen interests, but also left a continuing legacy for generations to come. On the Fox River below Montgomery, everyone who stalks fighting smallmouth bass and trophy muskies, who enjoys quiet canoe rides through a genetically rich and diverse riverscape, or who just likes to sit and appreciate the river’s beauty and serenity owes Bob Rung a vote of thanks for what he accomplished for the rest of us.

 

The days when the Rawleigh man came to call…

Back not all that many years ago, grocery stores were places where you went to buy mostly staples–flour, dried beans, rice, sugar, salt, meat, perhaps canned fruit. You didn’t have to go to the store for the other things, from bread to milk to vitamins to ice cream, since they were brought to your door by the bread, milk, and sundry companies.

Out on the farm, for instance, we got our bread from the Omar Bread man, milk came from our cow, Daisy; ice cream came from the ice cream man; and spices, vitamins and useful potions and ointments came from the Rawleigh man. All my mother had to do was to be home during the day (which, being a farm wife, she was) and the stuff was delivered right to our door.

There were also a number of other door-to-door salesmen that worked rural areas. Down at the Little White School Museum, we have copies of a series of diaries written by a farm family in the first decade of the 20th Century. One of the diarists, the farm wife who lived near the Kane-Kendall border in the Hinckley-Little Rock-Plano area, noted on a bi-weekly basis that the “tea man” had been to the farm. It could have been the National Tea Company representative or the Jewel Tea Company man; she didn’t say. It would have been interesting if she would have listed what she bought from the tea man, who usually provided a variety of products from coffee and tea to other sundry items.

Every Rawleigh family had at least one round, blue tin of Raleigh’s Ointment on hand for those minor scrapes, scuffs, and bruises.

We didn’t order from the tea man when I lived on the farm, but some neighbors did. We did, however, order from the Rawleigh man. You were, my sister once reminded me, either a Rawleigh famil’y or a Watkins family. It was sort of like farmers and their cars. My dad was a Chevy man (he’d had a Model T in 1919, and vowed never to own another of Henry Ford’s products), but his friend and fishing buddy Howard Gengler was a Ford man, and they used to kid each other unmercifully.

And our extended family were all Rawleigh people, too. Every so often, the Rawleigh man would arrive in our farm driveway in what I later learned was called a panel truck with the Rawleigh logo painted in gold on the side. In our kitchen, he would open his multi-layered case and display the most fascinating variety of things ranging from bottles of vanilla extract to Rawleigh’s ointment and salve to vitamins. And best of all, there was always a small packet of gum for me.

Many years later, we went to a relative’s wedding and my mother saw someone sitting at the next table that she knew, but couldn’t immediately place. Turned out to be the Rawleigh man. Why, she asked, was he there?

“I’ve been their Rawleigh man for years,” he explained, and for him that’s all there was to it.

Omar Bread we got; pastries not so much since my mother was an excellent baker. And we got quite a bit of bread, too, because unlike my grandmother, my mother could not abide stale bread.

Our bread man delivered Omar Bread, but my grandmother, who lived about three miles down the road, signed up with the Peter Wheat Bread man instead. She made the most wonderful homemade bread, but my grandfather liked the store-bought variety better, so the bread man delivered. The best thing was the bread man also carried a variety of sweet rolls and donuts in the big metal basket he used to lug from his truck to the house. We didn’t get many of those treats, both because my father was battling diabetes and my mother could out-bake any bread company, but my grandmother did. She loved those “boughten” cinnamon rolls. Even stale, they tasted just fine (and they usually were stale because Grandma didn’t throw anything out; you ate it until it was gone).

Walt Kelly, later of “Pogo” fame, drew the Peter Wheat comics and other books. While not the most interesting to read, they were fine for a youngster looking for any literary port in a storm.

The best thing about Grandma’s Peter Wheat Bread man, though, was that he dropped off colorful Peter Wheat comic books. Granted, they weren’t the most interesting comic books, but for me, a kid who spent an inordinate amount of time reading, they were an absolute treat.

We had a very productive Guernsey cow (the aforementioned Daisy) for milk. After she was sold off we picked up our milk in glass jugs at The Fruit Juice House, one of the local fruit juice and dairy products chains’ stores on what was then the Lincoln Highway on Aurora’s far east side. And every once in a great while, we’d get one of those delicious Fruit Juice House malts.

My grandparents, though, had no cow and so bought their milk in dark brown bottles from the Lockwood Dairy man who drove the farm neighborhood route from the firm’s headquarters in Plainfield. Although my grandparents didn’t have a cow, Grandma was as good at making butter from the cream our cow, Daisy, produced, as she was at baking bread. Freshly baked bread with freshly churned, salted, and worked butter might not have been heaven, but it was awfully close. Daisy’s excess milk, sans cream, was taken over to Aunt Bess McMicken, who magically turned it into truly excellent cottage cheese.

Later, when we moved to town, Oatman’s milk was delivered to our door from their dairy in Aurora. Besides milk, cottage cheese, cream, and other dairy products were brought to our door by our milkman.

The delivery of bread, milk, and other such stuff was a regular feature of life in the Midwest’s small towns and rural areas from the 1930s through the 1960s before economics and the advent of “convenience” stores killed off such house-to-house service.

And in the case of the big tea companies, house-to-house and farm-to-farm deliveries started long before motor vehicles were invented to make the rounds. Some house-to-house delivery services are apparently making a comeback, especially milk deliveries. We haven’t seen a bread man making the rounds though, but the Schwanz Ice Cream man does travel routes around town making home deliveries as the company has for decades.

Basically, though, getting groceries and other products is on your own these days without the interface of a company representative extolling the virtues of, say, Rawleigh liniment or Watkins’ salve, in the comfort of our own homes. Not many of us are home during the day nowadays anyway, so it probably wouldn’t be a money-maker for aspiring door-to-door tea men and women. It’s hard to tell if this difference is better or worse than the way things used to be—but a person has to admit it definitely is a difference.