Back here on Easter Sunday, I flashed back to a memory from my childhood. The local chain of May Company department stores did a promotion with Bugs Bunny. You could call a special phone number they advertised — and you could dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial nineteen more times to get through and hear a recorded message from Bugs Bunny telling you to come in to your nearest May Company where he'd have a special Easter gift for you and another message.
Dialing a phone number to hear a recorded message from anyone was a big deal when I was a wee laddie. That it was a message from was my dear and beloved friend Bugs Bunny was a special thrill. So I dialed and dialed and dialed and…well, you can read the whole story here and you probably already did.
When I posted the memory here the other day, I kinda hoped some reader of this site would dig up the newspaper ad for it and, sure enough, David Grudt did. He found this ad in The Los Angeles Times for Wednesday, April 6th, 1960 (when I was eight) and it apparently also ran the year earlier (when I was seven). I'm pretty sure I called in both years and that I got my parents to take me to the department store in '59.
Apparently, the downtown May Company — to which we did not go — also had a little display of "live easter animals." I'm guessing two chickens, a baby goat and some kind of lamb. That wouldn't have mattered to me. I just wanted to get as up-close and personal with Bugs Bunny as I could. (Possibly Interesting Fact: Twelve years later, I was writing the Bugs Bunny comic book. And a decade or two after that, I was voice-directing Mel Blanc doing Bugs' voice for a TV special I wrote and co-produced.)
I also recalled a similar promotion with Fred Flintstone but David was unable to find anything in the online newspaper archives about that. But thank you for what you did find, David. And I must say that the phone number, which I dialed ad infinitum 63 years ago, looked awfully familiar.