Page A4 The Joan De Arc Crusader / Monday, July 4, 2005
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The Sunderland pool parties
by J. Bueker
The unqualified highlight of the summer season during the early Bueker years on Joan De Arc Avenue was the trek across the desert to Los Angeles for the annual pool party at the home of GMC regional manager Ben Sunderland and his family. My father saw the Sunderland pool party as an attractively economical alternative to a real family summer vacation, like the trips to Disneyland that many of our friends enjoyed at this time of the year. For the price of gas, an overnight stay or two at a cheap motel, and a few restaurant meals, he could hobnob with his work colleagues and treat his family to a pleasant afternoon at the upper middle class home of his boss. Thus for several summers in the mid-‘60s, this is precisely what we did.
The Sunderland
home was located in a nice suburban area of Los Angeles, and was actually a very
interesting place to visit. There was a beautiful antique player piano in the
living room that we enjoyed playing with, and an entire room of the house was
devoted to a first rate model train
set
with all the trimmings. I can’t remember whether we ever actually saw the train
in action, but the room in which it was contained was itself sufficiently
impressive to create a lasting memory.
Upon our arrival at the Sunderland home, brother Charles and I would be ushered off into the bedroom of the Sunderland’s son for the purpose of changing into our swimsuits. As I recall, this kid had all of the coolest and most expensive toys and models of the time in his room, many about which the Bueker boys could only dream. He also had his own personal TV set, the absolute height of childhood opulence in the ‘60s.
After changing, we went immediately to the backyard, which contained the impressive swimming pool with diving board. Under the shaded patio there would be a very large metal tub filled with ice cold cans of Del Monte brand soda pop, of which we were permitted to drink our fill. There was an abundance of grilled hamburgers and hot dogs as well, and then would ensue several hours of playing in the pool with the other children of GMC employees, while the adults sipped cocktails and came in for an occasional dip themselves. All in all, a very pleasant bash indeed.
Unsurprisingly, the last Sunderland pool party in 1968 is the one I remember best. The aforementioned Sunderland boy was becoming increasingly obnoxious as he entered puberty, and I can remember him making several attempts to push me into the pool against my will that day. At length he dove into the pool nearly on top of me, which caused me to sink beneath the waves and then panic a bit. I surfaced long enough to call for help, at which point I was rescued by John Rath, who thankfully was standing nearby and was apparently only mildly intoxicated. Mr. Rath valiantly jumped into the pool and guided me safely to the edge in the shallow end. Father Carl was a little bemused by this incident, but of course grateful for his friend’s intervention.
Later that afternoon, the Sunderland lad decided to make amends for his boorish behavior. Whether this was by his design or at the direction of his parents, I know not, but the result was memorable. Back in his room, I was admiring his extensive collection of Mad magazines, when I came upon an issue that particularly caught my eye. It was the “Worst from Mad” annual from 1965, which featured a bonus insert of the famous Mad zeppelin that one could construct and hang from one’s ceiling. When I expressed my exceptional infatuation with this issue, it was given me as a gift by the repentant youngster. I can still remember spending the trip home to Phoenix reading my new treasure from cover to cover. I cannot remember whether Charles and I hung the zeppelin up in our room on Joan De Arc, but I strongly suspect that we did.
As the ‘60s approached their end, the Sunderland marriage sadly dissolved, and Ben was reassigned to a location in the Midwest. Since there was no longer a free company event for us to attend in southern California, the Bueker summer vacations on the coast came to an abrupt end. One of the following summers, mother and father actually took Charles and me to a McDonald’s for a Big Mac and then for a swim at the public pool at Washington High School, calling this our vacation. Good times.
Charles and I always looked forward to the Sunderland pool parties with eager anticipation. In contrast sisters Sue and Barbie, who were experiencing the throes of adolescence during this period, had the distinct sense of being way too cool for attendance at such a blatantly family-oriented event. Nonetheless, I like to think that we would all enjoy just one more can of Del Monte soda pop, and one more quick swim beneath the hazy Los Angeles summer sky.
Were Fizzies really worthwhile?
By J. Bueker
Kids on Joan
De Arc in the 1960s could choose from a pretty good selection of cool drinks to
quaff during the warmer months of the year. Besides the various and sundry
brands of pop available, there were Kool-Aid and Funny Face instant drink mixes,
Tip Top brand frozen juice concentrates, Hi-C, Hawaiian Punch, and even those
miniature six packs of wax bottles filled with colored sugar water that were
sold at
Woolworth’s. Fizzies, however, were a decidedly unique beverage “treat” in just
about every respect.
Fizzies were originally developed by the Emerson Drug Company in the 1950s when the researchers there were working on a product similar to their highly successful Bromo Seltzer brand antacid. The idea of creating a fun kind of “instant soda pop” began to evolve, and after much hard work and testing, a formula with just the right combination of artificial fruit flavoring, artificial sweetener, citric acid, and sodium bicarbonate finally emerged. The ingredients were fused into a magical tablet that when dropped into water would turn into an instant, sparkling, effervescent fruit drink. Yet another triumph of American science during the height of the Cold War.
Fizzies came in foil packages containing 8 tablets each in grape, cherry, orange, punch, berry, lemon lime, root beer, and cola flavors. The original price for a package was 19 cents, almost twice the cost of a package of Kool-Aid or Funny Face. The novelty and fun of creating your own, “fresh” glass of soda pop was the main attraction with Fizzies, because it most certainly was not the actual flavor of the product that accounted for its success. Fizzies in fact tasted pretty crappy, and were without a doubt a far inferior drink to even the cheapest real soda. It was rather the enjoyment that one derived from dropping a tablet into water and watching it turn into something resembling pop that made Fizzies a popular item with kids.
We experimented with Fizzies on Joan De Arc for a time in the mid-‘60s, but they never really caught on at our house. A consensus quickly developed that the Fizzies experience was akin to drinking a glass of artificially flavored, colored, and sweetened Alka-Seltzer, except without the beneficial pain killing effects. We tended to prefer Freckle Face Strawberry and Goofy Grape at 3219.
In the early ‘60s, vitamin C was added to Fizzies to make them seem a bit less impoverished of nutritional content. They sold fairly well throughout the decade until the FDA banned cyclamates in 1968. Not long after, the Emerson Drug Company went belly up and Fizzies disappeared from store shelves. In the mid-‘90s, they reappeared as a trademark of the Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, the makers of Smith Brothers cough drops and Chiclets gum. The new incarnation of the drink tablets was sweetened using Nutri-Sweet, but was mercifully short-lived. Fizzies disappeared altogether in 2001, and now await their next resurrection for a new generation of unsuspecting children.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA
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