One of the many things from the past that I miss are cool cereal box toys. In those days, they were also called prizes. We always picked the cereal in the store that had a "Free Inside" message on the box.  It didn't matter what the "Free Inside" thing was, just that it had something free inside. We couldn't wait to get home and tear open the box to get the free prize inside. Our parents always told us, "Take it as it comes out of the box". The interpretation of this was to wait until whoever had the prize come out of the box when filling their cereal bowl, then it was their prize to claim. Yeah right, we never obeyed this suggestion! In reality, as soon as we got home from the supermarket, we would grab the box out of the grocery bag and tear it open to grab the prize. In this venture, it was first come first serve, which met the survival of the quickest. The ideal way to solve this problem was to buy 2 cereal boxes containing free prizes. We had two methods of extracting the free prize from the box. The first and most fun and challenging was to just probe with our hand through the open box of cereal until we found the prize. It was always a great moment when we felt it and yelled, I got it! The easiest cereal to hand probe was Rice Krispies. Of course, a kid probing a full box of cereal always caused the inevitable mess of cereal all over the table and floor. Hey, we didn't care as long as we got the prize! The second method was for small prizes or hard to hand probe cereals like those little shredded wheat squares. We then just poured all the contents into a big bowl then fished out the prize. It wasn't quite as exciting as finally feeling it with our fingers as in the first method, but nevertheless the purpose was accomplished.

 

Kellogg's cereals always had the best prizes. My all time favorite were skin divers that had a compartment on one foot that you filled with baking soda. After putting them in water, they would sink to the bottom, then float up to the surface, and sink again. They seemed to continue to do this until we finally took them out of the sink. They also had baking soda powered submarines that did the same thing. For 25 cents and two box tops from any Kellogg's cereal, you cold send away for large sized baking soda divers, which I did. I enclosed the 2 box tops and the filled out the cardboard form clipped from the box with my name and address and tossed in a quarter. Sometimes, mail order cereal toys would cost 35 cents, so I tossed in 3 dimes and a nickel. I never remember adding any additional postage to the no doubt over weight envelope. It took an average of 6 weeks for cereal order stuff to arrive in the mail, which was an eternity in "kid time". However, when the time was up and finally getting it in the mail made a very exciting day for indeed! When you are a kid, it is exciting to get any mail addressed to you, but even more exciting when the mail is a package for you!

 

Next to the baking soda divers and submarines, my favorite free things were little metal state license plates, which came in Wheaties. It took a while of anxious waiting to finally get an Ohio plate! That made for a really exciting and banner day. We would wire these to the spring on the back of our bike seats. It was so good to finally remove the California license plate from my bike seat and put on the Ohio plate!

 

Some other favorite prizes were cat's eye marbles that came inside Kellogg's stuff. They were in a small plastic bag and I think there were 3 to a bag if I recall correctly. Pretty good prizes I figured. These were really exciting to dig out of the box especially if you had lost most of your marbles in marble games at school. Small plastic jet planes were cool too. I actually found a few of them in an old jar I inherited from my grandmother Ollie! Boy did they ever bring back some great memories.

 

One of the coolest prizes of all were actual records that could be played on your record player! They were on the back of the box, and you could cut them out. The one thing I learned was to make sure the middle hole was cut out right in the center. If it wasn't, the record would turn off center and goof up the sound. The record material was some kind of plastic coated cereal box cardboard as near as I can recall. I think the records all contained kid's songs.

 

Alas, I never see any free prizes in cereal these days. How I long for the good old days when you got really cool stuff from cereal boxes!