Remember ‘Pogs’? Little cardboard discs that kids played with.
I rarely buy milk. Usually I only buy it if I need it as an ingredient. So when I buy it, I like to buy it in glass quart bottles and it comes from a local dairy. In the early-2000s in L.A. the bottles had foil/paper caps secured with a cardboard disc – or ‘pog’, if you will. Nowadays the glass milk bottles have plastic caps that are much better for closing the milk bottle than putting the wrapper on and pushing in the disc.
But I kind of miss the old-fashionedness of the foil/paper caps with the cardboard disc.
Huh. I wonder if my husband would like Army pogs? He was in the Air Force, and generally wants Air Force memoribilia. He has a ten cent banknote, which he regards as something special.
I usually buy him a silver coin or two for all gift occasions. They aren’t legal tender, but they’re nearly pure silver, and he loves them.
I was an adult when pogs really hit the mainland, and while some of them were interesting-looking, I didn’t really want to start collecting yet another set of THINGS. I have enough THINGS as it is, although if I come across an owl collectible that I don’t have, I’m likely to buy it and love it.
OH! Is anyone old enough to remember when pop bottles (and maybe beer bottles, too, I don’t know) were always metal, and had cork liners in them? I used to love to peel out the liners, and make things with them.
I also remember when the inner wrappers of chewing gum had a sheet of thin metal coating the paper. My friends and I used to peel the metal away from the paper, and take pride in being able to get it off in one sheet, without any holes or tears. I think that we were in junior high when we did this. We saved the outer gum wrappers, too, and made chains out of them.
I called them Army pogs but actually they are issued by AAFES, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service. The pogs they have here in Iraq and also in Afganistan have both Army and Air Force themes.
One summer when I was a kid - probably early 1990s - the proprietor of a comic book shop talked me into spending all my money on pogs instead of comics. I even bought a heavy brass slammer that I thought was extremely cool at the time, as it was shaped like a mouth and said “bite me”. He told me that they were all the rage and I’d better have lots of them because all the kids at school would be playing and I wouldn’t want to be left out. In retrospect, the old fox worked me over. He must’ve been having a hard time unloading them. I turned out to be the only kid at school who had ever heard of pogs.
Some kids at my sister’s school tried to bring them back. It mostly only went over well with the Magic the Gathering and D&D crowd, though. Oh, and in band, where people get bored on trips.
I was too old to play with pogs, but when I was a kid we had a milkman who delivered milk from a local dairy, and the bottles were all glass with foil/pog tops, only of course we didn’t call them pogs. The best part of having those bottles was that fairly often, during dinner, the milk would warm up just enough to produce sufficient pressure to pop the foil lid off the bottle. It would go pop and fly across the table.
