Fun in the Snow!

During "rest" in the evening, as well as after school, we would get a candy bar or, sometimes, a popsicle. Sometimes we had a choice and we would line up at the canteen; other times we all got the same thing.

In those days, candy bars, as well as full-size cereal boxes (not the single-serve cereal boxes they gave us at breakfast) often had offers whereby you could collect wrappers, or sometimes just part of the wrapper, and send them in for little toy items. The candy bars we got at Linton Hall Military School often had such offers, and I remember that after we got our candy (they were called "lunches" possibly as a way for the administration to conceal the fact that we were getting billed for candy on our sundries account) there was a nun, whose name I don't remember, who would collect those wrappers so that she could order free items. I wasn't too happy with the concept; since our parents were paying for the candy, the wrappers -- and the valuable prizes we could get for them -- should have been ours, not hers. I also wondered what a grown woman was doing with the numerous little toys she was getting.

Turns out that my suspicions had been unfounded. One day, when we returned to our dorm, we saw that on each of our beds there was a red plastic object, about three feet long. Here's what it looked like:

Called a Sno-Fling, or Snofling, it's a snowball maker/thrower that works by pushing the wide end onto snow, and flicking it to throw a snowball. And we actually got to use it (just once, I believe) at a snow battle at Linton Hall Military School. We were told to take it home on the following weekend, and I did get a little enjoyment out of it at home. Years later it landed in our attic (I remember seeing it there when I was a teen) and probably eventually got either thrown away or donated. I believe that there is a photo in one of the Linton Hall yearbooks where you can see a couple of them if you look closely in one of the photos.

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Copyright 2012 by "Linton Hall Cadet."
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