Yet again, as I cruse through the various ports of call found on these good old ‘Interwebs’, this site has afflicted me with a memory; this seems to happen on a recurring basis.

I can still see it playing out on the large screen cinema of my mind. There it is, that ‘King of the Hill style ranch house on good old Holder St. in Buena Park. I can still walk the floor plan if I close my eyes and let my inner self return to that very different age.

Salvo, I can still see that orange box standing on the laundry shelf above the Kenmore washer and dryer. That box of Salvo entered my life right around the same time I started seeing the commercials on the lone television in the living room. Yes, a different age; the television was mostly on in the evenings as we kids were encouraged to, “take that noise outside”, or as my Father had want to say, “make-it maggot”.

This was also around the time that the dime candy stores, really just quickie marts but, hey, we were kids, started selling these Huge Sweetarts. Oh yes, this piece of information does factor into the tale that follows.

So like any kid of that age, that orange box of Salvo got taken down from the shelf and thoroughly inspected. The box contained two plastic wrapped “tubes” of tablets. I can recall thinking to myself at the time, “Wow, how groovy is this”.

Well the novelty of the tablets quickly wore thin with my Mom. On one of her early uses of, or maybe even the first use of, she’d tossed the two tablets in the washer along with an arm load of clothes that had once been clean and hoped to be again. The result of that first effort with this mighty new and so “boss” product was a disaster. Everything was smeared with sticky white soap; I can still both see and smell the soap from the tablet that had left the mark of it’s passing across the back side of my jeans. Of course everything had to be done over, sans tablets.

This happening is the reason we’d only ever had one or maybe two boxs of this high tech product; you see, you had to let the washer fill and the tablets dissolve BEFORE you put the laundry in. This led to something my Mom used to refer to as, “Washing Water”. She’s start the process and then, rather than just stand around and wait, she’d start something else planning to return before the wash cycle started. Needless to say, that didn’t always happen. Once that box of Salvo was used up, Tide made it’s return to our happy little home.

Ah, but there is still one memory that is associated with that box of Salvo. I swear to you that I know better at the time, and it wasn’t Schwartz prompting me with his pugnacious voice saying, “I triple dog dare you”. It was that Sweetart that I’d spoken of before. I knew better, I was old enough to know and yet, I did it anyway. It was the most vile tasting thing I’d ever come across and to make matters worse, like a flash, as my tongue brushed against the smooth and crumbly edge, the surface of that tablet dissolved into the pores of my tongue. Everything tasted like crap for what felt like ages but couldn’t really have been more than a day or so.

Yes, this site just brings back such great memories.