Advertising Gimmick

It was during the early winter in late 1957.  I was stationed aboard the U. S. Naval Air Station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island.  One Friday afternoon I decided to visit my parents in northern New York for the weekend.  I started my 1949 Studebaker Land Cruiser and headed west and north.  At Sturbridge, Massachusetts I entered the under-construction Massachusetts Turnpike.  Heading westward I moved steadily along until I came to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, near the New York border.  That was the end of the Turnpike at that time.  The next forty miles of mostly dirt road was under consruction to the point where it attached to the recently completed New York Thruway.

Once I had entered the Thruway it was smooth sailing all the way to Utica, but a snow storm had been getting increasingly more substantial as I continued westward.  By the time I got to the New York Route 12 exit at Utica where I had intended to head north toward Watertown, it was snowing and blowing pretty good.  I, knowing there was an area between Utica and Watertown that collects more snow than most anywhere else in the state, opted to go on to Syracuse instead of northward.  Instead of going home I decided to visit my brother Bob, in Syracuse, for the weekend.  An hour or so later I was drinking coffee at his home.

Bob lived in Syracuse where he worked at the Seven-Up soft-drink bottling plant.  As the head mechanic for the plant, a part of Bob’s work consisted of greasing and oiling all of the machinery in the plant on Saturdays while the plant was shut down.  For lack of anything better to do, I went in to the plant with him that Saturday morning.  While there a salesman gave me a small present, a pair of dice with the Seven-Up logo painted on them.  They were green, but clear enough to see through, like a Seven-Up bottle.

Sunday was a bright and beautiful day, and during the afternoon I once more headed my car out onto the Thruway, but this time headed eastward.  A few hours later I was back in my quarters in Rhode Island.

That evening while in a recreation room with a few other guys I pulled the dice from my pocket and tossed them on a table where they came up seven.  Several more times I tossed the dice, each time coming up seven.  At some point one of the guys picked them up to study them to see if he could see why they always seemed to come up seven.  Although he could see right through them, they appeared completely normal so he gave up.  A few more of the guys also picked them up and looked them all over, but none could discover why they always came up seven.  All knew that somehow they were loaded, but no one could tell how it was done.

I kept those dice for quite some time before I lost them one night, and never did anyone discover that one die had nothing but fives on it, while the other was nothing but twos.  It was only possible for them to come up seven, a very nice advertisement for SEVEN-UP soft drink.