Of Picnics and Chick-nics

The Brady picnic basket today

There's something very nostalgic about picnics – pleasant memories of simpler times, of days spent at a park having fun and enjoying great food.

We went on quite a few picnics in the 1960s, usually as part of a day of swimming. Mom would pack a picnic lunch and we'd head out to East Harbor State Park, or perhaps Findley State Park. (Lakeview Park didn't have much of a beach back then.) The basket always contained the things needed to eat outside, such as a plastic tablecloth, paper plates, the thumbtacks to hold everything in place on the table, plastic silverware, a brush to clean the table, etc. Everything else (sandwiches, pop, etc.) fit nicely in our huge Coleman cooler. 

Food just seemed to taste better outside. Of course, you had to keep the potato salad out of the sun.

Anyway, the Brady picnic basket saw a lot of action over the years. It was pressed back into service decades later when the Texas Bradys (including my young nephews) came to Ohio for their annual visit. 

Once in a while, rather than pack sandwiches in a cooler, it was easier to just pick up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to bring along. And that's the same theme of this full-page Manners ad, which ran in the Journal back on July 1, 1963. The idea was to pick up a convenient Country Cousin Chicken Chick-nic pack, which came with chicken, dinner rolls and six cans of Coke. It was a pretty good deal.

It's interesting that the burger-loving Manners Big Boy mascot was featured on the box of chicken. Or was that his lookalike country cousin?