Tank Trap

I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. And when they were all over, there were a lot of the same advertisements at the back. Some of them encouraged me to sell Grit, a weekly newspaper that sold back in the day for just twenty cents a copy. "You," I was informed, "keep seven cents profit." I won't lie to you. I thought about it. Briefly. My father had a paper route. And that was daily. This was only going to be once a week. Seven cents a copy. If I sold one hundred copies, that would be seven dollars a week.
This was not the opportunity for which I was willing to give up a day each week. Then again, there was that other ad that I saw with great frequency: The Look You Want When You Want It. They were offering sideburns, mustaches, van dykes, for the look I wanted when I wanted it. And if I wanted all three, I could swing a deal for just five dollars. And six to eight weeks for delivery. Which would be another forty to fifty dollars of profit from my potential hundred subscribers to Grit.
Living the high life.
So I did not take that job working distribution for Grit. But I did keep looking at those ads. One in particular. It promoted a game called Tank Trap, and another called Cannonball. The art was even more alluring to me than the facial hair. Exploding tanks, army men, bazookas, machine guns. That would be endless afternoons of fun. And I was reasonably certain that I could talk my younger brother into pitching in for the exploding bridges and cannons of the Civil War play set. A dollar fifty for each, with just an extra dollar for more exploding bridges. And tanks.
But we held off on that. My brother and I sent away for the original set. Both of them. And we waited. Less than two months later, we got our package. When I opened it up, I was disappointed. The army men were nothing special, and the exploding tanks? Two chunks of plastic held together with rubber bands. Pressing on each end allowed the rubber band to snap the ends together to make them "explode." The same trick was used for the bridges in my brother's game.
And I wish that I had picked the goatee instead.