Bob

Batz

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November 5, 2007

Rushing to the Mailbox for the Secret Decoder Ring

There’s a really neat mail carrier who delivers bills (and sometimes good stuff) to my home six days a week. I was chatting with him the other day when something occurred to me.

When I was a kid growing up amid the auto plant smokestacks in Flint, Michigan, our mail carrier was my number one hero.

I worshipped him because he brought me a multitude of things I’d sent away for.

Sending away for stuff – everything from cap guns to secret code rings that usually turned your ring finger bright green after just one or two wearings – was a big deal for kids back in the mid-1950s.

In those days, comic books and radio shows like “The Lone Ranger” always broadcast things advertisements for things that appealed to children.

Of all the items offered for sale by the magazines and radio programs, secret code rings were my favorites.

Those rings were glorious things. Some had secret compartments. Others promised built-in flashlights and whistles. Another, as I recall it, made it possible for you to write messages in “invisible ink,” which, looking back on was pretty dumb because if you wrote a message in invisible ink nobody, including yourself, would be able to read it.

The best rings, however, were those that enabled you to “decode any and all secret messages,” even though the average kid back then probably had very few secret messages to decode.

The routine for acquiring those wonderful items via the U.S. Postal Service was always the same.

First you clipped the ad from the comic book, or wrote down the mailing address while listening to the radio show.

Then you slipped 50 cents or a buck into an envelope, addressed it and mailed it off to the company that was offering the item for sale.

That was actually the easy part of getting these prizes in the mail.

The hard part came once you sent off the money and had to endure the long wait until the items actually showed up in your mailbox.

Every day I’d rush home from Oak Street Elementary School and confront my mother.

“Did I get anything in the mail today?” I’d ask. If she shook her head, I was disappointed.

Now that I’m 67, I don’t anxiously await the arrival of the mail each day, but I still have one of those long-ago secret code rings stashed away in a drawer in the basement.

Some memories are worth hanging onto.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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