Meyer Goldberg President's Day Ad – Feb. 20, 1963

Happy Presidents' Day to all my readers – especially if you have the day off (I don't).

And in honor of the holiday, here's another one of those early 1960s store ads that reduce the Father of Our Country to a mere huckster, hawking food items in this case. It's an ad for the well-remembered Meyer Goldberg grocery store chain and ran in the Journal on February 20, 1963 – sixty years ago today.

Local grocery store chains like Meyer Goldberg are pretty much a rarity now. We have Apples in Lorain, Sheffield Lake and Elyria; that's one of the few examples I can think of. Marc's is another, but it's more regional, with 61 stores throughout Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Youngstown and Columbus, according to its website.

Anyway, the meat of the Meyer Goldberg sales ad is, er, meat. There's a nice, beefy line-up of round steak, club steak, chuck roast and sirloin steak. For pork lovers there's (if you'll pardon the expression) butt roast.

There are a few odd brand names in the ad. If you weren't insistent on Heinz Tomato Ketchup (I'm not), there was Snider's Catsup – which started out in Ohio and used to be a huge brand.

Another offbeat brand was Krunchee Potato Chips, which was based in Detroit, Michigan. Here's a vintage tin that's fairly easy to find online.

And don't be checking to see if Oreos were on sale. Meyer Goldberg had Hydrox - the original cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookie that predated Oreos by four years. Click here to visit the Wiki page to learn more about this cookie, which is often thought to be a rip-off of the more popular cookie made by Nabisco (part of Mondelez International).