It’s been a while since I featured a vintage Sparkle grocery store ad with Sparky, the ever-happy, freckled advertising mascot, so here’s a Thanksgiving-themed one. It ran in the Lorain Journal on November 16, 1960.
“Lifer’s finest Fresh Frozen Young Tom Turkeys” are the big item on the full-page ad.
Lifer Turkey Farm was owned by Dwight & Florence Lifer, and was located in Knox County, Ohio near Danville. The turkey farm apparently was well-known enough to be the subject of a 1947 episode of an Ohio Bell-sponsored radio series on WTAM called “The Ohio Story.” (To read the radio script, click here.)
The per-pound turkey pricing in the Sparkle ad varied by size. Turkeys weighing twenty pounds and up were only 39 cents a pound; small turkeys weighing only six pounds (that’s a Tweety Bird) and up were 49 cents.
I don’t remember mom ever fixing a turkey for the Brady Thanksgiving dinner when I was a kid. For years, she fixed two birds – a duck and a capon. She remembers that it was a lot of work.
