The Slice: Breakfast cereal and gender identity

The Slice asked about favorite childhood breakfast cereals.

Dave Payne recalled growing up in Montana with three Cheerios-eating sisters. He couldn’t stand them. (Cheerios that is, not his sisters.) “They were girly food.”

So what did young Dave eat? “Wheaties. Breakfast of champions! Hu rah!”

Back in the ’60s, MAD magazine once referred to Wheaties as “Breakfast of chimps … also a mild detergent,” but that’s another story.

Collecting stuff for future art projects: Here’s one from Linda Karr, who lives up in Newport.

“My husband Robert, who is a watercolorist, has been collecting wasps’ nests for several years – nests from a couple of inches in diameter to one nearly 2 feet across built around a tree branch (this one was a ‘gift’ from an acquaintance). These are stored in his art studio on open shelves (or in boxes if I have my way – out of sight, out of mind).”

Old business: Mark Lawrence saw the question about having lived in two cities with significant disparity in elevation.

“In the mid to late ’80s I lived in Lake City, Colo., elevation 8,661 feet. Hinsdale County had a year round population of about 200. For many years it was the least populated county in the country. After I left there I ended up in Houston, Texas, elevation 80 feet. Harris County had a population at the time of about 2,900,000. … I damn near choked on all the air and all the people down there.”

Rex Reed shared this. “Born and raised in Klamath Falls, Oregon, elevation 4,099 feet. Met and married my wife (Barb) in Redwood City, Calif., elevation 20 feet, and now living here in Spokane, elevation 1,843 feet. Sort of like the three bears story with Spokane being just right.”

Speaking of bears, here’s one more story of stuffed animals readers have held onto long past childhood.

“I still have a Teddy bear that was made from a fur coat that my mother had,” wrote Marilyn Ray. “We lived in Albion, Wash., and I was 1 1/2 years old. A neighbor asked my mother if she could have her old fur coat to make her daughter a bear and she would make me one. That was over 75 years ago and who knows how old the coat was at that time. I don’t think the bear ever had a name but could definitely be called Scruffy now and is also missing an eye.”

Today’s Slice question: Have the snow forts you built long ago gotten grander and more impressive in your memory as the years go by?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. “Spokanthrax” has appeared in The Slice 21 times over the years.