Thanks for the memories of Wacky Plak & Stickies

I often get emails from readers who are overjoyed at stumbling onto a blog post that awakens a pleasant memory. That was the case for two emails I got recently. They pertained to whimsical creations from the 1960s, and the readers’ recollections of them were as vivid as the first time they experienced them.

Here’s the first:

“Back in the day – early 60s – my brother, Jim, had a wall on his side of the bedroom we shared covered with these. Thanks for the memory!”

This reader was referring to Wacky Plak postcards created by Jack Davis. Several of them were included a box lot of items I bought at auction a few year ago.

Davis was an illustrator for the wacky Mad magazine and for the Georgia Bulldogs (dawgs), the mascot of the University of Georgia, his alma mater. He also illustrated album covers, movie posters and comic books. In the 1970s, he created an illustration for the Jackson 5 Saturday morning animated cartoon. The illustration appeared on the September 1971 cover of Ebony magazine.

He designed the first Wacky Plak cards for Topps in 1959, and they were reissued in 1965. There were 88 cards in the set, and they offered wacky and funny utterings whose only wish was to bring a smile to your face.

I don’t remember the Wacky Plak cards, but I do recall the Rickie Tickie Stickies that piqued the memory of the second reader. I acquired several packages of the stickers at auction a few years earlier than the cards.

I never owned any of the stickers during their heyday, but I saw plenty of them. Who from the 1960s and 1970s doesn’t remember those ubiquitous Volkwagen Beetles with the “Flower Power” stickers plastered all over them. Those stickers will forever mark the hippie period.

This reader was overjoyed at seeing the stickers and reading about them:

“What an amazing find! I practically cried when I saw them — in the original package — Wow! My mom bought those exact ladybugs and flowers, from our local hippie store “The Third Gallery,” to put on our red VW bug in the 1960s.

“I still remember her bringing the packages home, and all of us kids got to place the stickers on the car. What a wonderful memory! You are so fortunate to have found them!!!! We loved the name, and used to sing out “Rickie Tickie Stickies” while we were riding around town in the car. Fun times. Thanks for sharing!”

These stickers were created by chance in the 1960s by a man named Don Kracke, who was working at an ad agency at the time. He saw some flowers hand-drawn on a Volkswagen bus and figured he could do better.

So he created his own flower designs and slapped them on the side of his Ford station wagon. The kids in the neighborhood liked them, so he had 3,000 of the stickers made in bright colors and started selling them. They became immensely popular with the so-called hippie or “flower children,” and made Kracke a millionaire. He expanded the designs beyond flowers.

Memories and history, what a joy. Do you have memories of Wacky Plak and Rickie Tickie Stickies? I’d love to hear about it.