Childhood WANT: Aunt Jane's Pickle Mobile

 

This one stayed in the box for fifty-five years. 

Pictured above is one thing that Cookie wanted more than anything when he was a three to four-year-old, an Aunt Jane's Pickle Mobile.  

In the mid-1960s was a company named Marx Toys and Marx Toys produced OK plastic toys. I mean, your parents wouldn't have found them at the FAO Swartz at Shaker Square.  Topps or Uncle Bill's, yes.  But never FAO Swartz quality. 

Anyhow, there was also a company called Aunt Jane's Pickles, and Aunt Jane's was kind of popular in the terms that Vlassic is today. Aunt Jane's was the number two selling pickle brand in the U.S.  And Aunt Jane's used radio and television commercials in heavy rotation to sell those pickles. And they were clever.  Clever like Stan Freberg clever. And they appealed to kids with their tongue-twisting mispronunciations of the word 'poockle'.  I mean "pickle".

And in some of the commercials, being "made the old fashioned way," some of the commercials featured brass era vehicles delivering pickles.

Into this comes the old advertising gimmick of a give-a-way.   In the mid-sixties, Aunt Jane's Pickles starting offering - for a nominal fee - a battery-powered, child-sized car shaped like the Mercer Runabout of the 1910s.  The car, built by Marx, wasn't green, but usually appeared in yellow or white and it had "Aunt Jane's Pickle Mobile" bumper sticker plaster on the hood. 

To a child, the idea of a car of your own that could move on its own was cool.  To a car happy kid like myself, it was intoxicating.  So much so that I can hear the jingle. 

Never mind that I had every pedal version of conveyance known to child kind.   Cookie coveted that Pickle Mobile.  More so, my cousin who lived a couple blocks away ALSO coveted it.  We agreed to nag our parents together.  

"We want a Pickle Mobile!" we said, sang, and screamed. 

And you know what? 

Our parents refused. 

"You don't need that."

"No, and stop singing that commercial jingle!"

We were thwarted.  I mean we wanted one, but our parents were totally within their rights.  And we did have more than most children.  And after time, the commercial stopped and was no longer on our top ten list of toys.  Eventually, we even forgot about the brand.

And can you imagine the mess created by that battery technology in the 1960s?  It would probably roll under its own power a hundred feet and then die. It was for the best and Shaker did not have smooth concrete sidewalks, but stone slabs that were laid smooth, but went this way and that as the ground either settled or heaved because of tree roots.  And Marx quality toy? The plastic would crack under a child's use. 

Eventually, Aunt Jane's Pickles disappeared as well.  Apparently, the Michigan based family-owned company was sold to Borden Foods, and like all of its varied food lines, Borden's shift in focus to chemicals in the 1970s allowed it to wither and die. 

The family behind Aunt Jane's, the Gielow's, however, wasn't out of the pickle business for long. They started up anew and continue to manufacture refrigerated pickles in Michigan.   

Still, every now and then the child in me remembers the jingle.  "...in an Aunt Jane's Pickle, Pickle Mobile..." and feels a pang of desire for the Pickle Mobile he never had.