Grape Nuts Ewell Gibbons 1974

I remember Grape nuts cereal was like eating gravel! >:P

Okay. Anyone remember who did a Grape-nuts commercial and called it "The simple cereal"? I'm trying to find one of those commercials here on Youtube. No luck so far.
By the way, back when I used to eat it, I thought it was too hard, so I would let it sit in the milk for a few minutes before eating it. That made it better. I didn't want it to sit too long and get soggy though.

Will Rogers sr did that commercial around 1978.

Gibbons is considered a saint ("St. Euell") by the Gardeners in Margaret Atwood's book, The Year of the Flood.

Anyone remember when Grape Nuts first came out? If memory serves me correct, people laughed at the cereal because it was so dang hard and almost impossible to eat. Later on (and I mean just a few months later) they changed it so that the pieces were smaller and a little bit easier to bite. That's what I remember, anyway.

Heard he choked on a hickory nut.

Imagine if you WERE out on a picnic & he stumbled out of the bushes like in this commercial. He would look like some alcoholic.... with some oddball story to tell about his box of cereal.

Euell Theophilus Gibbons was the name.

View on wikipedia for a younger photo.

He died not long after this commercial.

After high school, I worked at a Fedco Department store in Van Nuys, CA.

We had a "garden shop" out in the parking lot where the pesticides and fertilizers and plants were sold so they didn't stink up the main store.

One day, on the house paging system loud speaker, one of the store employees very seriously and very professionally paged "Mr. Ewel Gibbons, Mr. Ewel Gibbons, your order is now ready in the garden shop."

Everyone, employees and customers, laughed.

Heh - I was watching this and wondering if that's what prompted me to eat various grasses when I was a kid. I bet it was! (I never got sick from any of them though...)