Lee's Has Fleas And Color TVs!

Dad occasionally had to travel to various Banquet Foods plants scattered around Missouri. Once in a while Mom and Dad would pack up the entire family to go along on one of these trips.

We did some wonderful things on those trips; including a trip to one of Banquet's chicken processing plants.

I can still picture the chicken slaughtering operation and the various stations where the carcasses were gutted, plucked and cut into pieces. Almost all of the operations were done by hand in 1969, but I certainly don't have any recollection of the tour being gross or disturbing. In fact, it was one of the coolest things we ever did as a family! Somehow I doubt too many kids get to go on tours like that any more, but we did and it was awesome!

I was nearing my eighth birthday as we took the tour of the processing plant. I can remember that because we were in the hotel on July 16, 1969 - Mom's birthday - and we got to watch the Apollo 11 launch on the hotel's color television while we were on the trip. We stayed at Lee's Hotel several times through the years and it was always remembered by the lyrical line someone in the family - probably Debbie - came up with, "Lee's Has Fleas And Color TVs!"

Having color television was huge in 1969. We didn't have one at home, so it was a huge treat to get to watch a color television when we traveled. In fact, I didn't have a color television at all until I went away to college and started making a little money on the side by finding broken televisions, fixing them and selling them to other students in the Towers dorm complex at SEMO. Mom was convinced that watching a color television was certain to cause cancer where watching a black and white television was perfectly safe - as long as you sat far enough away from it. Far enough away in Mom's opinion would have required us all to have binoculars to watch the television, so it was an ongoing battle of just where we could sit when watching television.

In any case; Lee's had color TVs so it was awesome!

Now Lee's didn't really have fleas, as I recall, but on one of our trips they did have cockroaches! Getting up to use the bathroom overnight was an adventure. You might hear the crunch of a cockroach under your bare feet as you walked from the bed to the bathroom. You were virtually guaranteed to see them scurrying into the relative security of a dark corner when you turned on the bathroom light. Yes, Lee's was an adventure on that trip!

I distinctly remember Kim refusing to get out of bed in the dark. I'm quite sure she would have rather suffered through a bladder explosion than risk stepping on, or even merely seeing, a cockroach. Kim always was the prissy one in the family! I'm still not convinced that she wasn't somehow switched at birth in the hospital nursery because she is the only one who hated all of the fun things we did - camping, digging holes in the back yard, playing in lakes and rivers, going to camp, fishing, etc. etc. etc.

I'm sure Mom and Dad spoke to the hotel management and dealt with the cockroach issue, but I don't recall what ever happened. Having a cockroach problem is far more exciting to a nearly eight year old boy than having a cockroach problem cleared up! I suppose the lyrical description was born because it is rather hard to rhyme with cockroaches, so fleas were somehow substituted. To this day, "Lee's Has Fleas And Color TVs," still rings out whenever the topic of a business trip with Dad comes up.

Those were the days...