One of the greatest pleasures of Cracker Jack collecting is that the mere mention of Cracker Jack evokes such pleasant memories to so many people, transporting them back to a simpler time and place.

A visitor to The Cracker Jack Box, Bill Voorhest, sent the image above along with this lyrical Cracker Jack memory:

These are the elements of a long ago memory. Around 1960. I was 6. A blue spaceman holding a rifle from a box of Cracker Jack and the ferry "Catskill." The ferry ran between Bridgeport, CT, and Port Jefferson, Long Island, NY, across Long Island Sound. We were underway in the middle of the sound. It was summer, a beautiful day.

I dropped the spacman on the deck, and he bounced to the very edge. A perilous situation high above the water. I was just able to retrieve him with my little fingers underneath the railing.

I remember the blue sky, the blue sea, and the blue spacman. I was with my grandparents, Nanny and Barney.

This is one of those memories that is indelibly stamped and has never ceased to surface now and then. A tiny drama against a huge elemental background. Wind, rushing water, engine noise, tar smell, sun.

At some later point I lost the spaceman. I haven't seen him in 40 years, til now.

Bill enclosed an image of the particular spaceman to which he refers in his email. He had just discovered it among the series of spacemen and aliens that had been featured in The Cracker Jack Box exactly two years earlier.