I’d Like to Sell the World Some Seeds

Miss Jackson was one in a seemingly endless army of satisfied sales-children happily selling seeds to friends, family and neighbors and reaping the rewards of CASH-money or really BOSS prizes.

The seed company must have done all right with these advertisements because they ran in comics for decades. I always wonder about the kids pictured in the ads. Were they for real? Were these kids actual sales dynamos selling neighbors and church groups seeds by the ton? I’d like to hear a modern day testimonial from one of these seed salesmen.

These ads ran for as long as I read comics as a kid in the 1970s, but they must have dried up sometime after that. I wonder why. Was it that comics dropped out of sight at newsstands and convenience stores in favor of being sold directly to comic specialty shops?

Did the kids get lazy favoring time wasters emerging in the 1980s such as video games and music videos over entrepreneurialism?

Or did their parents get paranoid about letting their children go door-to-door trying to talk strangers into buying seeds. STRANGER DANGER! All the kid wanted to do was sell his way to a really nifty tape recorder or chemistry set, and now his most recent class picture is featured on a special missing persons episode of Dateline. It was the worst thing a parent could imagine. NOPE! The kids are staying home!

Come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a paper boy?

The seed ad appeared in Navy Gobs ‘n’ Gals featuring Sad Sack published by Harvey Comics in 1973.

It was a terrible comic, and I don’t imagine that my brother John who I wrote about last week would have purchased it. We knew it was bad even back then. It made Beetle Bailey seem like high literature in comparison. I’m not sure how this wound up in my collection.