Choo-Choo Charlie

Again for a moment or two, let's go back to early television.  Do you remember the candy called, Good n' Plenty?  It's still around.  It was not my personal favorite candy.  Good n' Plenty is licorice in candy coated shells of pink and white.  You can still find it in a Walgreens in the $1boxes of candy.  Yes, it was only 5 cents when I was a child (a million years ago).

Now that you are trying to picture the candy, stretch your memory to remember the commercial.  It was a black and white cartoon.  The only color in the commercial was the pink and white candy pellets.  The main character was Choo-Choo Charlie who closely resembled Charlie Brown. Well, Choo-Choo Charlie was engineer who shook his box of Good N' Plenty to make the sound of a train chugging down the tracks.

As a child and still as a mature adult, when I think about trains, picture the commercial as well as hear the song in my head.  Skip ahead two generations to the present.  My Coco is now 2.5 years of age. Her frame of reference for trains is the series of Thomas the Train. Can you believe that until Coco came along I never heard of Thomas and his train crew?  (Guess television was my babysitter.)

Coco is quite familiar with this entire train crew:  Gordon, Percy, and Thomas, etc.  Every time she sees a train pass by, she points, smiles and says "Thomas"!  So as a potty training reward,  on a bright sunny Saturday morning, the entire family boarded Thomas and rode the train to another suburb approximately 30 minutes away.  As we passed trains, in complete awe, Coco called out the names of the other train crew members.  Her face held great awe and wonder.

Those moments held great awe, wonder and joy for me as well.



Choo-Choo Charlie & Thomas the Train