A couple of nights ago my husband and I were driving home and we passed a Walgreens which he noted was ranked 8th in providing the most pharmaceuticals to people who make meth. Meth is a big problem here in Missouri. So we started talking about what it was that was the basis of meth. Was it cold medicine? Allergy medicine? Something like that that was once readily available to customers but was now kept behind the counter. This conversation then got me to thinking about the cold medicine Contac and it's fascinating Tiny Time Pills.
When I was a kid in the 60s Contac was the go-to over the counter medicine if you had a cold and they advertised heavily. It was a capsule with a blue bottom and a clear top and it was filled with candy-looking little sprinkles that were marketed as Tiny Time Pills. According to my kid analysis of this product when you took the capsule (was it made of plastic?) some of the pills dissolved right away and helped your cold symptoms right off, and some of them were smart pills that hung around in your system until the first ones wore off and then they did their thing. How this all happened was a matter of medical science far to complex for my grade-school mind, but I believed totally in the concept.
I did have two questions though. The first was, how did they fill up the capsule with the little pills? I envisioned someone (an Oompa Loompa?) filling up the blue bottom and then oh-so-very carefully stacking up the pills one on top of the other and then quickly slapping on the top. How did both halves come together each filled with pills without some falling out?Honestly, 45 years later I'm still not sure how that's accomplished. Second, was there any chance at all that the Tiny Time Pills were actually candy like the "pills" that came in the toy nursing kits which were popular with my crowd? I often felt adults were hiding candy from kids in sneaky ways.
My entire life I've loved candy but as a kid I was obsessed with it. My life revolved around Hershey Bars, licorice, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Pixie Stix. But I'd eat any kind of candy. Cheap candy (butterscotch disks), middle-of-the-road candy (Lemonheads, Hot Tamales), chocolate as noted above and "good" candy which in my family was See's Chocolates. I was highly supervised when there was a box of See's candy in the house and it was doled out sparingly. Bummer!
One time, when I was being watched after school by a neighbor, a bottle of Chalks Vitamins called out to me. Chalks were the kids vitamins of the 1960s and I *loved* them because they were highly sugarized and came in fruit flavors. These flippin' vitamins were candy as far as I was concerned and I looked forward to bolstering my health every morning. But it was afternoon at my neighbors and I was just hankering for something sugary. First I snuck one Chalks. Then another. Then another and another and another until I had eaten half a bottle. They were delicious too. I did worry I might get caught but the neighbor had three kids of her own so I would innocently shift the blame to them. Sure enough, after dinner the neighbor called my mom to report the missing Chalks. Her kids had denied involvement and all signs pointed to me. It was dangerous my mom said, to eat all those vitamins. Did I do it? No, I said. I did not. Even at nine I understood the notion of sticking to my story and stick I did. I never confessed. And, I never suffered any ill effects at all of eating half a bottle of Chalks Vitamins. None. Which leads me to the conclusion that there was nothing but sugar and flavor in those small square pillows of yumminess. They were candy! I was right!
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