The good old days?

I found something out today that I don't think I remembered or took note of when I was a kid. When I was young, the cigarette companies were sponsors on all sorts of television shows. Did you realize that Winston was a sponsor of 'The Flintstones'? Go on youtube and plug in Winston commercials. I watched a commercial that they ran on 'The Flintstones' in which Barney and Fred avoid working for their wives by sitting in the back of their house and smoking Winston cigarettes. That's a little hard to fathom. In fact, if you watched the credits of the show back then, you would find a Winston's sign showing in Bedrock during the running of the credits.

Its hard to imagine a kid's cartoon being sponsored by a tobacco company. I guess they really wanted us to smoke at an early age. No wonder kids back then sometimes started smoking when they were ten or eleven.

Of course, as Jeff Foxworthy says in one of his routines, the first memory he had was standing in the front seat of his dad's car and making screeching noises when his dad made a hard turn in the car. He was talking about that memory when he realized how odd it sounded to talk about standing up in the front seat of the car.

That was clearly a time when we were on our own, with our kids standing up loose in the car and the tobacco companies selling cigarettes to them on cartoons.

I suppose some people would call those the good old days. I figure Brown & Williamson and R J Reynolds and a few others probably thought so.