THE POWER OF WORDS

 

THE POWER OF WORDS

How a description of a soft drink earned a trip to Disneyland

Christopher Nyerges

[Classes and books by Nyerges: go to www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

 

Sometime around 1964, or so, my mother showed me an ad in the local newspaper.  You tell them why you like the  drink Orange Crush and you can win a trip to Disneyland.

“Why don’t you try it?” asked my mother.  “It’s just 50 words.”

My mother knew that I had an interest in writing so she naturally assumed that I would enjoy writing 50 words about a drink I never tasted in order to win a prize to the theme park that I found less than exciting.

“I’ve never even tried it,” I told my mother.  “I have no idea what it tastes like.” 
“Your father can get you a bottle at the store.  How about doing it, and I will mail it for you,” continued my mother.

I didn’t want to write 50 words about something I knew nothing about, but just to please my mother, and to practice my writing, I took my pencil and notepad and sat down to work. While the rest of the family was watching TV after dinner, I sat at the dining room table and began the painful process. 

“Crush is so good,” I started. “It makes me feel that I’m at the beach.”  I halted, and then wrote more fragments and sentences, trying to sound as if I knew what I was talking about. “It’s such a delicate flavor, well-balanced, and so creamy.”  I just kept at it and re-arranged a few sentences.  I was pretty sure I had 50 words.

My mother sat next to me to see how I was doing.  My brother came in and sat across the table and asked, “What’s that?”  My mother replied that we’d be going to Disneyland. I rolled my eyes in embarrassment.  Of course I didn’t’ think we’d be going to Disneyland, at least not because of this contest.

My mother began counting the words that I wrote in my notepad.  She counted twice. “That’s 51,” she informed me.  “It has to be 50 or less.  You have to take out a word.”

“Do you think they really care?” my brother asked.

I’m thinking that I won’t win anyway.  Here I was, writing about something I’d never tasted.

“Yes, I’m sure they care,” said my mother.  I read and re-read what I wrote and I found an adjective to delete.

“OK,” continued my mother, “now rewrite it on this 3x5 card, like it says in the instruction.”

So I carefully printed my carefully-crafted 50 words onto the 3x5 card and was done in 20 minutes.  My mother assured me that she would mail the entry on the following day. Once I was done, I went back to watching TV for the rest of the evening, probably Bonanza, and I never thought abut my 50 words again.

My day to day routine of my life continued and I had absolutely no thoughts about my 50 words, or Orange Crush.

Until a letter arrived at our home. My mother and older sister were jubilant.  I was a winner!  They shared this fact with the whole neighborhood.  Everyone else was excited but I was puzzled.  How could I possibly win.  I will be exposed as a fraud.  I was more confused than happy, and I’d still never had any Crush.

My family was far more excited than I was.  My mother read and re-read the letter. I was going to go to Disneyland on a Saturday in about a month. I could take two friends and one adult supervisor.  We were to meet at a local bus station and everyone would be driven by bus to Disneyland.  We would all get one free meal.  We had to agree that any photos taken of us could be used for Crush’s promotional purposes.  OK, it was starting to look like this was real.

It was agreed that my brother Richard, our neighbor Jeannie, and my mother would be accompanying me. I was still petrified that I would get on a bus and people would ask me about the soft drink Crush, and I would not know what to say.

My mother did most of the prep work, telling my brother and I what to wear, and how to behave, and that we should all stay together.

Finally, the day arrived and everyone but me was excited.  Yes, we were going to Disneyland, all expenses paid, but to me, Disneyland was the land where true excitement was always around the next horizon, with lots of rides and sense titillations, but very little of lasting value.  Yes, I liked Tom Sawyer’s Island, but I found most of the rest of it a very pointless retreat from reality.

I was very silent as we all boarded the bus to Anaheim, and I was silent as other children sang songs on the way to Disneyland.  My brother Richard seemed happy, and sang loudly with the other children. 

Finally, we arrived, and we did the usual Disneyland routine – Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s A Small World. 

I do recall that the food was great. I had a delicious sandwich with my favorite drink, root beer.  And I never spoke to another child who had anything to say about Crush.  We just all went our own ways, and then went home. I was curious if all these other “winners” actually drank and enjoyed a drink that I’d still never tasted.  It actually came as a great relief as the day wore on that no one really cared if I ever drank Crush.

Finally, we all boarded the bus, and my father picked us up at the bus depot somewhere near Pasadena.  Rick and Jeannie excitedly talked about what a fantastic time they had. My father asked me how I liked it, and I told him that I liked my sandwich.  My father laughed.   I supposed that he laughed because he figured I’d have something more interesting to report than my sandwich.

As the trip faded into a distant memory, no one ever asked me about the trip to Disneyland, and no one ever once asked me if I really liked Crush.  I didn’t realize it at the time that no one really cared whether or not I really liked Crush, and no one cared whether or not I’d won the trip under fraudulent pretenses.

Within a week, we were sent a thank you letter and a small case of Crush.  Everyone was very excited, and I finally drank my first Crush.  I drank it slowly, trying to savor each sip, trying to see if its flavor was similar to what I’d already described.  Yes, I liked it, especially on ice.  It was smooth, better than most sodas, though not better than straight orange juice.

As for my tastes in soda, I don’t drink them much, but I still prefer root beer and old-fashioned ginger beer.

In the years that followed, I became more aware of the power of words and their ability to shape reality and to move people to action.  I then made a promise to myself to never again lie in order to earn some material gain, whether it was Disneyland, money, or whatever.

 

Book Review: Neil Strauss’ EMERGENCYgoogle.com, pub-8623877305223293, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0

 

Review of Neil Strauss’ EMERGENCY

By Christopher Nyerges

[Nyerges is an educator, and author of such books as “Urban Survival Guide,” “How to Survive Anywhere,” “Foraging California,” “Self-Sufficient Home,” and others.  His website is www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com]

 

I recently gave a lecture based on the decline of western culture, referring to such books as Morris Berman’s book, “The Twilight of American Culture” and others.  One of the other books I used to broaden the perspective was “Emergency.”

“Emergency” is by Neil Strauss, published in 2009.   It’s a thick book, 418 pages long, where Strauss takes us along on his survival adventure.  He’s a man who became very concerned that America was going to hell in a handbasket, and he didn’t want to go down with the ship.  He shares the facts as he sees them, and he spends the beginning of the book describing how he can find safe haven elsewhere, out of the United Stated.  He takes us on his journey of off-shore banking, multiple passports, the logistics of actually getting out if there was an impending crisis.  This is a man who was convinced that the U.S. was the worst place to be in the world and he was trying whatever he could to find refuge elsewhere.  That’s the 25 cent version anyway.  And though all of his research was correct, he made a fascinating and eye-opening discovery in his world travels:  Wherever he went, there were people working just as hard to get INTO the U.S., as he was working to get out.  Everyone wanted to come here to the United States of America.   It made Strass start to re-think his whole survival plan.

He decided to take another look at the United States, and see if perhaps he should set his sights closer to home. 

Strauss takes us step by step in this journey, where he began to enroll in various sorts of survival classes here in the U.S., and describes his learning process.  He didn’t know it at the time, but he was learning how to live with less, and how to live with very little in the forest, or his own backyard for that matter.

Among the many classes he describes joining and doing his best to master, included Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School where he learned to make fire, make a lean-to and sleep in it, cold and rain notwithstanding.  Remember, this is not a how-to book, but an entertaining book where the author explains how pathetic he felt, how vulnerable he felt in the big mean world, but by taking classes and learning hands-on, he slowly became confident in his own abilities, and his likelihood of surviving a disaster.

We’re treated to a cast of characters who inhabit the “survival” world, such as firearms instructors, hard-core survivalists, the CERT training, and even me.  Yes, among the many classes that Neil Strauss attended in his personal training program included the classes that I teach through the School of Self-Reliance.  He described learning how to recognize wild foods, and how we created meals that we collected from the wild that day.  He describes how he learned to make an archery bow from me, and how we made fire with the bow and drill.  He even talks about how I eat poison oak to develop immunity – though I do not recommend it to others because our body chemistries are so different.

I barely remember Strauss at the many classes of mine he describes.  He didn’t say much.  In fact, I only learned about his book because a friend alerted me to the fact that I was described in it.  I guess I felt good that I could make someone else feel confident, and feel good about living in the United States, decline or not.

Strauss talks about how he enrolled in the CERT (Citizen Emergency Response Team) program, which is a nation-wide program to get civilians trained and ready for emergencies.  Strauss talks about the training, the gear that he learned to use, and how the training altered his state of mind regarding emergencies.  “Before I would run away from a problem or disaster, and now I was running to it,” he explained. 

Strauss also describes a self-imposed three-day survival experiment in his own home where he could use no refrigerator, no gas or electricity, and couldn’t use the flush toilet. Everything had to be from the food, water, and gear he stored, and this was no small feat considering he lived in a smallish urban home.

As I said, it’s not a how-to book, but it’s loaded with practical experiences that anyone can adapt and apply.  You can find copies on Amazon.