Right off the bat, the illustration is wrong. Every box of Victory Garden contained sixteen crayons, not twelve. Only five hundred boxes were made, as prizes in a radio show giveaway contest in 1944. The radio show was Captain Audio and the Unhearables. Captain Audio was a sound-effects expert who solved crimes in his spare time. "You have to use sound thinking," he would say, followed by a loud
b-o-i-i-ng! or splat or yoggity-yoggity-yoggity. The Unhearables were his two sidekicks, who spoke so softly anybody listening to the radio would turn the volume all the way up, and then get blasted across the room when a commercial came on. The show was considered ahead of its time. |
The 16 crayons in a Victory Garden box were all named after garden vegetables. They were supposed to be:
but the new box-packing machine in the crayon factory kept putting two Rutabagas in each box and leaving out the Zucchini, something that would turn out to be very important many years later, as anybody who has read What We Found in the Sofa would know...
Mangelwurzel?
Really?
Mangelwurzel?
Really?