Here’s another ad that was a permanent fixture of comic books in the 1980’s.  I myself was never interested in joining the advertised “Olympic Sales Club;” nor did I want to “GO, GO, GO WITH CAPTAIN “O”!” [sic].

I found this ad pretty patronizing, with its generic champion hugging his demographically diverse charges in the upper left-hand corner.  What kind of superhero was “Captain O” supposed to be, anyway?  Was he the protector of the company?  The guardian of the kids who went door to door selling its wares? The hero of … salespeople generally?  To me, this was really just an example of adults pandering to kids as though they were idiots.

But ads like this fueled a lot of conversation among grade-school boys.  It really made it seem like you could earn some cool prizes for selling only a moderate amount of greeting cards or stationary.  (The radio-controlled cars and planes were what all the boys eyed most eagerly.)

And 80’s kids often prided ourselves on our sales skills.  Most of us had sold things door-to-door for school-related fundraisers — it was just a very common practice at the time, even if it seems needlessly dangerous to me as an adult.  When I was in second and third grade at Catholic school, we annually sold candy bars door-to-door.  If memory serves, we weren’t even required to do that for any particular fundraising purpose, like a school trip or a sports team.  I think it we were just turning a profit for the school, in addition to what our parents were paying them in tuition.

I also remember seeing ads in my older comics that recruited kids to sell “Grit,” which was some sort of periodical that was oddly billed as a “family newspaper.”  But I think that was primarily a 1970’s thing, and was just before my time.