[78-L] If Daddy is a Commie then you gotta turn him in..

[Geoffrey Wheeler]

I remember as a kid listening to “I was a Communist for the FBI” and 
wondering how I, too, could get on the payroll. I’m sure it slipped 
everyone’s attention, but the original theme for the program was 
supposed to be titled “Futuristic Jingoism” or “Jingoistic Futurism,” 
whichever had the most freudenshade to it. I couldn’t wait for the next 
program to air so I could learn about the new premium. The best was the 
“Red-Oh-Meter,” which helped detect if you had any reds under your bed 
(most everyone did in those days). At school when  Miss Brown, the 
personification of paranoia, made us hide from atomic blasts under our 
desks, I used to wonder If I had reds under my bed. It was the same 
fear pubescent boys have about dandruff. To get your very own 
“Red-Oh-Meter” all you had to do was send in a box top from Not a 
Commie (“The cereal with lip-smacking goodness in every bite”). The 
Meter itself worked on Space Age principals before anyone knew there 
was anything called “space.” Essentially, it was a wok that acted as a 
dish antenna that captured galvanic rays from the spin cycle of your 
washing machine. By directing the rays under the bed, the meter would 
tell you instantly if you had a red. With a push of the blue button, 
the red was gone and so was your laundry, a double benefit. I earned 
extra money to buy mint 78s by hiring myself out to red-sweep houses. 
I’d like to claim this was a “teachable moment” but all it did was 
harden my conviction that there were plenty of suckers on my 
neighborhood
Geoffrey Wheeler