Photo by Rick Geary

A guy in wingtips has to convince millions of kids Quaker Puffed Wheat isn’t just recycled bits of the Sun-Times.

Dear Matthew Alice:Some 40-plus years ago, when I was a youngster, a major cereal company sponsored a promotion offering one square inch of free land in Alaska with each purchase of a box of their breakfast food. As I recall, at one time I owned four square inches. However, through the years the deeds to my properties have disappeared. Even though I have no record, and 1 did not pay any property tax on these spreads, is the land still mine? If so, how do I find copies of my deeds? And who sponsored this stupid promotion, anyway?— Vic, Cab #77, on the road

Let’s see, four decades of appreciation on a plot of free land comes to — nothing, in this case. Sorry to say, even 40 years ago you weren’t a toddling tycoonlet. Throw the flag on the meter in the time machine, Vic, and we’ll careen back to 1955.

Somewhere in a Chicago ad agency, a guy in wingtips and a rep tie is cooking up a promotion for Quaker Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice. He knows it will have to be a doozy to convince millions of kids the cereal isn’t just recycled bits of the Sun-Times. His agency can kiss the Quaker account bye-bye if he doesn’t come up with something big. Then it hits him — the perfect tie-in with a Quaker-sponsored radio show, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

The ad execs and a team of lawyers hop a plane to the wastes of northwest Canada, to Dawson, in the Yukon Territory, headquarters for the fictional Mountie and his faithful dog King. A few miles from Dawson they find 19 acres on the banks of the Yukon River, ante up $1000 for the plot (without mineral rights), form the Klondike Big Inch Land Company (a subsidiary of Quaker), and fire up the promotional juggernaut. They print 21 million official-looking numbered deeds, stuff each in a cereal box, then sit back and wait.

One day the announcer on little Victor’s favorite radio show says he can own an inch of Preston’s beat for the price of some cereal. He chokes down four boxfuls and stuffs the deeds under his bed, with the mummified toad, old jam sandwiches, and his lucky rocks. In the end, Quaker unloads a jillion dollars’ worth of puffed stuff, the agency saves the account, they both go on to new hustles.

Deed holders, however, have longer memories. Well into the 1990s, doddering widows and pensioned-off schoolmarms are writing Quaker to ask about their real estate nest eggs. Quaker’s reply is that the deeds have “no intrinsic value.” Their worth was in the “romantic appeal” of the idea of Yukon land ownership. Truth is, Vic, you never did own anything except four boxes of that funky cereal. For financial and logistical reasons, Big Inch never registered the 21 million individual deeds, and the Canadian government seized the land in 1965 for nonpayment of a reported $37.20 in taxes. But, of course, Preston didn’t live in the Yukon anyway; the show was taped in Detroit. And King was just a sound effect. “On, Memorex! On, you huskies!”

Here’s one final aggravating irony. If you still had those deeds today, they’d be worth $40 or $50 each to a collector of’50s memorabilia.