Pam’s Pictorama Post: Oh for the days when you got a Sunday paper which had such cool things to uncover and collect! I write this as I prepare to head to see my mom on this Sunday morning, in New Jersey, although she no longer resides in the Butler ancestral home, is still resident nearby. I have written about our local newspaper purveyor and the role it played in collecting our Sunday papers in the years before we began having them delivered. (That post about Wiseman’s can be found here.) The feeling induced in childhood about Sunday morning lasts a lifetime, although somehow the (no longer terribly fat) Sunday New York Times seems like a sad substitute when I think about it these days.
Sunday afternoon and evening had a bad rap as a kid – it tended to stretch a bit toward boredom in a way that Saturday somehow did not. Sunday morning though was an excellent breakfast (pancakes! bagels!) and the Sunday comics. (Okay, Sunday afternoons were occasionally occupied by some really wonderful discoveries of old films on television, but let’s face it, you had to get through all that religious programming in the morning which utterly confounded me.) Hard to beat the memory of post-breakfast sitting on Dad’s lap and reading Peanuts and Nancy together.
In my adult life I have become a very real fan of daily comic strips – decidedly preferring them to their longer, flashier Sunday counterparts – their very dailiness telling the tale of their time. However, as a kid I admit that the daily strips seemed like dry runs for the Sunday fiesta. As a child of the 1960’s and early ’70’s I missed the heyday of comics supplements, but we had two (now defunct) local papers that carried a comics supplement. I loved them and can only imagine the enthusiasm that the weekly installation of Lucky Bucks must have been met.
I gather at the time of Lucky Bucks the Sunday supplement featured all sorts of things a kid could avail themselves of such as mini-film strips, games, and puzzles. There is a book available dedicated to the topic of Lucky Bucks in particular, but the brief lowdown is that Lucky Bucks were promoted in the Sunday Funny primarily in the 1930’s, with ’32-’34 being prime years. (Interesting to imagine a country in the clutch of a worldwide Depression whose children are clipping fake money from the newspaper. At the time, newspapers were a lifeline for jobs and information and people continued to buy them to the extent they could.)
Felix was one of those heavily featured, but Popeye/Thimble Theater, Mickey Mouse, Barney Google and even the likes of Blondie were among those available and collected. So widely were these collected that despite their undeniably fragile nature as newsprint which has been snipped out and perhaps even exchanged as kid currency, they are still widely available as collectibles today. I show some Popeye and Thimble Theater currency above and below. Popeye had the big bucks! See a fiver below.
I like the bills that have things written on the bottom: Walking the Blues; Felix the Sentinel (he’s still interested in mice here – something I think of more from the early cartoons when he is inventive, but still more feline); and No Rest for the Wicked. I wonder if kids valued some more than others, like trading cards.
I have seen these Lucky Bucks offered on ebay for years and finally decided to add a selection to my collection. Meanwhile, I haven’t read much of Felix in the comics; he lives in cartoons for me. However, as I head off to Jersey this morning I am thinking about Sunday morning breakfast, a trip to Wiseman’s and some Sunday funnies, and it might be time to take a look at some of those Felix comic strips at last too.
Pam's Pictorama 