MarcyThen: When Kellogg’s gave me a bike I couldn’t ride. But didn’t care.

In the fall of 1973, when I was 4 years old my mother saw an ad on the back of a Kellogg cereal box asking for children to send in drawings of Kellogg Characters for a competition. I sat down that morning and drew (and I remember this very clearly) the Apple Jack’s kids eating out of a bowl of cereal. I remember struggling with the spoon and getting it to curve just right. My mom may or may not have helped me with that part just a tiny tiny bit. But you can’t hold me to that fact. So one day, several months later, we received a certified letter in the mail saying my drawing had won FIRST PLACE (there must have been several ‘first places’ now that I think about it. I mean I was good- but not THAT good.) but for some reason we only had about 24 hours to get a notary to validate my identity so that they could send me the first place prize. Which the letter said was a brand new Huffy bike. Now I was 5 years old by the time I found out I was a winner, and I was not even able to ride a bike- and yet I was still pretty darn excited. My mom rushed me down to a real-estate office which had a notary. She produced my birth certificate and my smiling face and a lady stamped the page. Then the lady asked me for my signature on that paper- and boy did I feel like a super star that day. After that we went home and waited for the bike to come. (I am cloudy here; it either was shipped to my house or to a nearby store where we had to go pick it up once notified…) But the day the bike finally came I was over come with joy. It was a boys bike (which thrilled me to no end) It was black and green and it had a racing plate with a number 4 on it- which I decided right then and there was my favorite number for ever. My dad carefully adjusted the seat, and then lifted me up to sit on my prize. And then he laughed. See this bike was WAY to big for a little 5 year old girl. Especially a little 5 year old girl who didn’t even know how to ride a bike yet. So my dad hung the bike from a hook on the ceiling in our garage. Until one day, several weeks later, my brother (who was about 9 years old and exactly totally perfect for the bike) asked my dad if HE could ride it. And my dad who was working on a carburetor on his garage work bench looked over to me and said “well, that would be up to Marcy. After all it is HER BIKE”. I was so thrilled to be given the power I didn’t say anything. So my brother began asking me “can I? Huh? Huh?” and I came up with a solution that I thought was pretty good for both of us; “Yes you can ride it Stevie. But you have to do wheelies for me okay?” He eagerly agreed. After all he was known as the ‘Wheelie King’ of our neighborhood. So I remember sitting in my driveway watching my brother go back and forth up and down our street doing ‘wheelies’ for me. It was my job to count the seconds he stayed up. And after every one he would look at me and say ‘how long was that one?’

It was just as good, maybe better- than riding that bike myself.

Vintage cereal boxes being re-issued! Learn all about it  here.

(photo note: that is not me or anyone I know in the photo. But that is THE EXACT BIKE I won. And I will not even tell you how much time wasted it took to find a photo on the net. Or how big I smiled when I saw that bike again…isn’t it awesome?)

Tagged as: Angleo and Vincis