When it opened for business in 1960, Commonwealth Edison’s Dresden Atomic Power Station became the first privately-owned nuclear power generating station in the nation. The facility was – and still is today – located on the Illinois River just south of Morris and was named for the old crossroads post office village of Dresden.

The plant was a technological marvel, and I remember Verne Killian inviting me to go down to visit it with a bunch of his fellow Oswego Lions Club members the year it opened when I was a freshman in high school.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s, nuclear power was going to be the nation’s economic salvation. Nuclear power plants, we were told as kids, were going to make the generation of electrical power so cheap that electric meters would join buggy whips on the historical dust heap of once-common items no longer needed. The ComEd guy conducting our tour wasn’t quite that optimistic, but he suggested that Dresden and the other nuclear generating plants planned by other utility companies across the U.S. would make power extremely cheap.

That claim was drummed into the heads of us and our parents along with all the other products and ideas being sold in commercials on our brand new television sets. Anyone who grew up during that era will likely never forget the annoying little cartoon bird, named “Little Bill” singing that catchy jingle: “Electricity costs less today, you know, than it did 25 years ago! A little birdie told me so – Little Bill!”

Thanks to financial manipulations, ComEd no longer owns its own generating plants. That capability was spun off into a company named Exelon – another one of those corporate names that sound like a brand of asthma inhaler. The nation’s nuclear generating capacity, of course, is shrinking these days, and we unfortunately never got to the point where ComEd crews were going house to house removing electric meters. Instead, coal plants still predominate, spewing their greenhouse gases and, ironically, emitting more radiation than nuclear plants do, thanks to trace radioactive elements in the coal they burn.

So Little Bill and the whole concept of too-cheap-to-bill electricity is long gone. But the bird’s catchy jingle (which is now rattling around in my head, probably for the rest of the day) is not the only advertising ploy progress has dumped into history’s dustbin.

Remember Esso Gasoline’s “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” campaign? Back in the ’60s, the company even manufactured little tiger tails customers hooked to the side of their gas tank filler door so it looked like they might really have a tiger lurking in their tank.

And while we’re on the topic of gasoline, the guys out there might remember the Sunoco stations with gas pumps that had dials allowing customers to select the octane level they wanted. Guys who went street racing usually filled up with 260 octane, the highest the dials allowed (today’s regular gas is 87 octane), the next best thing to jet fuel.

Nor should we forget all those cereal ads aimed at kids. Back then, sugar was considered necessary to give kids sufficient energy to get through the day – lots of sugar.

Tony the Tiger used to plead with us to eat Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes. Then sugar came into disrepute, and marketing required downplaying its presence. So Tony's flakes became simply Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. We are not told exactly what they are frosted with, the company apparently betting that if they don't mention the word "sugar" we won't figure out what's in all that frosting.

Same goes for Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops. Wild Bill Hickok and his sidekick Jingles Jones hawked the cereal on their Western TV series because, as the jingle went, “Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops: Sugar Pops are tops!” And they were good, too. But we can’t buy Sugar Pops nowadays, although we can buy boxes of Corn Pops, which, except for excising the word “sugar,” are pretty much identical.

Remember Sugar Smacks? That was the puffed wheat cereal coated with a sugar glaze. Sugar having gotten a bad rap, the company decided to change the subject by touting the cereal’s sweetness while also wrapping themselves in “natural” food cloak by morphing Sugar Smacks into Honey Smacks. It’s a well-known “fact” that “natural” sugars are much better for us than bad old refined sugars. Which is pretty much hogwash (chemically, sugar is sugar), but giving consumers what they think they want is a grand old American business tradition.

In other cases, new technology did away with perfectly good advertising ideas. Take Gillette Blue Blades for instance. Originally, the company’s razor blades were simple high-carbon steel. But then someone got the bright idea of bluing them like gun barrels to keep them from rusting so easily. Gillette Blue Blades were an advertising staple of prizefight broadcasts on the radio and early television. But then the technology became available to make razor blades out of stainless steel, so then we were treated to Wilkinson Sword Blades – an exciting macho product name if there ever was one.

In other cases, changing the way services are provided has eliminated advertising campaigns, not to mention whole brands. Cities Service gasoline stations, for instance, would look pretty silly in this day and age of no service but self-service. And remember “The Man who Wears the Star, the Big Bright Texaco Star?” The motto was popular in the days when guys at gas stations wore crisp uniforms and would actually dash out like an Indy pit crew to fill your gas tank, wash your windows, check your oil and water, and provide...well...service at a service station. We were told we could “Trust the Man who Wears the Star,” and lots of us did.

Old advertising slogans and ad campaigns can tell us a lot about recent history, and about the times in which they were hatched, just as today’s slogans and ad campaigns tell us a lot about how our world has changed.

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