Fortified Oat Flakes

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Fortified Oat Flakes
Originally uploaded by Waffle Whiffer

Many of my childhood memories have their root in Saturday morning. Lots of good (well, maybe not good, but memorable) television on Sat. AM. And this was the morning the officially marked disengagement from the school week. This is MY time, dang it.

Any good Saturday morning vegging in your PJ's in front of the boob tube should start with a nuritious breakfast. One of my faves from this time period that has disappeared from the store shelves is Post Fortified Oat Flakes. This was a totally basic cereal: no raisins, no nuts, no crunch berries, no marshmallows. Just basic flakes of oat with a touch of brown sugar flavor. One thing I definitely remember about this cereal is that it did NOT stay crunchy in milk. We're talking zero to mush in about 90 seconds.

But it was good, tasty, comfort-food mush.

Doing some Googling on this classic breakfast food does not yield a lot of useful information, but I do recall it was discontinued sometime in the 80's, but returned in a revamped package for a few years in the 90's. I cannot recall seeing this cereal on the store shelves in the last 10 years. Several discussion boards contain posts from folks who would like to see this cereal return, but so far Post has not listened.

I could not turn up any images of the box, but there was an image of a coupon for this cereal on Flickr. The poster of the image states late 60's/early '70's vintage. I can't authoritatively argue this, but I believe this was the late '70's version of the box. I seem to remember a box the pre-dates the one shown on this coupon which featured a guy playing tennis. I can't remember is this was a "name" tennis player or just some Joe Blow with a raquet. The '90's version of the box was mostly blue in color, as I recall.

At the time I wrote this, there was also a 16mm film copy of a TV spot for this cereal starring actor Van Johnson listed for sale on eBay.