this is just to cool
I would have died if I saw this coming down the street!!!
the police had to arrest over 400 wild space cadet kids so that this quiet Middle American neighborhood shot could be taken
it’s Ricky Walker day!!!
this is the club house
Way back in the early 1950’s an awesome TV show aired and it was called “Space Patrol”!!!! This was one exciting sci-fi program, full of campy and adolescent space adventures that took place in a beautiful retro styled rocket ship called the Tara V!!! Ralston Purina was one of the big sponsors of the show and to advertise the weekly Television adventures, the Ralston group made traveling rocket ships for kids of all ages to walk thru. The rockets would tour the Country side exciting children from ages 1 to 94. One day the ultimate Ralston contest took place and the grand prize was to win one of these traveling rockets for your own club house!!! Kids all over the country entered the contest in hopes of winning this sacred space ship. A young boy by the name of Ricky Walker would be the one to win this MAJOR AWARD, and as far as everyone was concerned, Ricky was the luckiest kid in the world,,, In later years Ricky was tracked down to be interviewed about the greatest day in kidom and to everyone’s surprise he declined the offer,,,,,,,,, A little more research into the issue showed that Ricky sold the ship when he was a bit older and as far as the neighbor kids went they all said he was a selfish creep and hogged the prize to himself. He was rarely seen playing in it… When I read about young Ricky further I had to say, WHAT!!!! This Ding Dong won the greatest prize a kid could EVER want, and you sold it!!!! Then you don’t even want to talk about it!!! Well to me that says the wrong kid won,, After reading all the accounts of this historical event I was left wishing that all the Scott Farkus’s and neighborhood bullies had ago with Ricky Walker everyday on the way home from school,, Clearly Young Ricky was the wrong one but looking back at all these pix I can’t even imagine a show offering such a prize in the world we live in today,,, For more on this awesome show from the early days of “THE SPACE PATROL” go to
http://www.solarguard.com/tchome.htm and have a good time in the past!
Eavesdropping with Johnny 
Great contest. The kid in me would have been in hog heaven. But the adult in me asks “what do we do with it now?” I can just imagine this bad boy sitting in someone’s driveway or backyard, slowly mouldering over time.
if you still owned now you would be a millionaire!
Man o Man I would have loved to have won that. Though my dad would have had to sell it.
As he was in the airforce so we moved around alot, in and out of the UK. Trying to get it ship out to Gib, would have had a few problems. LOL
But Even if I did have it now to answer Don question what to do with it. take it on tour or even make your own B style movie. LOL
you could have had your dad take it to work and had it fit with a couple of Pratt & Whitney’s and flown it from base to base, to base!!!
That is so cool. Imagine seeing a rocket coming down the street on a flatbed towards your house. 😀
ooooooh-waaaaa that would have been unimaginable!
Now if only it would take off. 😉
Ricky Walker could be a millionaire by now if he’d charged interested kids and grownups a nickel to sit in it. And he’d have a priceless collector’s item if he’d kept it and preserved it in good condition.
But, I suppose he didn’t want his life defined by a prize he won as a kid. Sometimes the best stuff is won by those not really caring about winning, I’ve seen in before and it’s sad for those that really would like to win.
Any word on if it still survives?
I believe the whereabouts of this are unknown but there is some restoration of the others going on… Check out that web address at the end of the post and I am sure there is more to those stories to be found there. had i won it I would have made a million b movies with my super 8
Look what I won, Ma!
What on Earth would you do with this thing? It’s very cool the first couple of weeks, but then Dad has to repair stuff and find a place to store it, and it begins to cost money. But I guess the studio or the Silvercup Bread marketeers were glad to be rid of the thing 😉
But still… if you still had it to this very day, and in good condition.. that would pay back for all of that, most likely.
I lived in the desert with three other highway Patrol families in a million acre backyard,,,, my house would be the perfect place for a prize of such awesome magnitude,,, Little Billy Becham next door though would have shot it with his BB gun!
I guess it would be kind of like winning an elephant or some animal… great at first, but the economic realities and other considerations would mean it got shipped to the zoo before too long… or dropped off in another neighborhood.
Loved your reference to the Old Man’s “major award!”
Ahhh yes that is a favorite flick in the Eaves home!!!
Man! This beats the pants off the washer and fridge cardboard boxes that I used to make my spaceships out of when I was a kid! (Probably a lot roomier inside too. LOL) Seriously, Ricky Walker should have been pummeled in his private parts for not still having this thing!
I so hope he lived in Scott Farkus’s neighborhood!!!
Uncle! Uncle!!
Ah, the good ol’ days when any kid could enter a contest and win cool stuff. Now they usually get something dumb like a friggin’ DVD or something. That’s a cool little tidbit you posted. If I’d won that as a kid, my parents would never have seen me because I’d have always been out in the big rocket in the backyard. 😀
I wonder if it had air???? had i won that in Arizona asa kid I would have died from the heat the first day,,, our car in the summer would get as high as 160 parked in the sun.
Oh I can see you playing with this in your desert backyard (me ex desert backyard, too, sniff). You and Rod would have had somewhere besides his dad’s garage to make some cool movies, too!!!
Boy, Rickie Walker was king for a day! It would be interesting to see where they put it…do ya think it had a Clubhouse: Boys Only sign on the door?
correction, it would say Clubhouse: no GIRLS allowed (sheesh)
After reading the story I don’t think he played in it at all,,, the Wrong kid won this one
Ah, the innocent days early tv space operas. When single stage rockets ruled the skies and the best spacesuits had goldfish bowls for helmets. You gotta love it.
Seriously, summer temperatures in the ship would not have stopped me from playing in it as a kid; I would have simply added it to the scenario and said “we’re orbiting too close to the sun!” The whole “kids in a spaceship” idea, besides what I played in my cardboard boxes, was the subject of a much-loved book I had, “Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet.”
To illustrate my heat-resistant mania: when I was a young teen I spent several hours a day one summer up in the attic of the home we lived in, in Georgia. The temp must have been a hundred and five, but I was on a mission to harvest movie ads and genre articles from the stacks of old newspapers I had found up there. The results of my sweat were a large stack of clipped items that are now finding their way into my blogs, especially “Held Over!” at http://www.HeldOverMovies.blogspot.com.
We kids will do anything for our love of Trek, sci-fi and monsters.
I forgot how awesome your blog is!!! i just put you in my blogrole!!!
I was happy to see Top Hat on your blog page…growing up, that was more my style! Nice blog!!
Oh see, that’s the last anyone would ever see of me if I won that rig, eh. Be it as a kid, or the taller kid I am now.
Mom:Where’s your brother?
Brother: Last I saw of ‘im, he went into the rocket, and no one’s seen ‘im since…
Well, he’s has to come out to eat at some point.
Brother: Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on that if I were you, Mom.
LLP,
deg
That is damn cool. I’d be happy to have one now. Mount it to the top of my house or cut in half and have the front coming out of one part of the house and the back coming out of another. I wouldn’t mind having that truck it came on either.
Hey John,
I remember going into this or a very similar rocket attraction. Seems that there was a screen at the front to simulate flight and it vibrated or raised up on some hydrolics to simulate g-forces.
David
There’s some history about the ‘Ralston Rockets’ in the book Blast Off! Rockets, Robots, Ray Guns, and Rarities from the Golden Age of Space Toys. They were built by the Standard Carriage Company of Los Angeles in 1952, and weighed in at five tons! Apparently, the Walker family sold Ricky’s rocket to a carnival a couple of years after he won it. The other of the two ships built was last seen in 1985, in Gent, NY, rusting in peace. An ignoble end for Space Patrol Battle Cruiser Terra IV, I’m sure we’d agree…
John! I wanted this spaceship more than I wanted to see a naked lady! Thanks for digging the stuff out, what memories of Saturday morning Republic serials!
John, I did leave the movie dissapointed. The Roddenberry filling is missing from this pie!
You did know of this as a kid???? I saw it for the first time in Mike Okuda’s CD set “Brain in a Box” there was this little photo in the book that came inside.Now there is a great web site dedicated to both Space Patrol and the Ralston rocket,,, and I agree about the naked lady part!!! I knew you would be disappointing with the film, You are what’s left of the old republic and Star trek is still pure in your Veins. There will be a lot of disappointing fans who now what this should be, but it’s no different from the shows we worked on with the arrogant and blatant disregard to the original!!! being on them jades you in a way and I think it comes down to what you eat,,, i like everything except Scalloped potatoes while you only eat what is true and good for you!!! Your the best buddy, Miss Ya!
The web site “In Search of the Ralson Rocket” has pictures of what the rocket looked like in 1985:
http://www.solarguard.com/rrsearchpic3.htm
It looked pretty moldy and rusted twenty-five years ago.
You can actually get the video of one of these things being delivered.
I’ve seen it and it’s well worth checking out. 🙂
It was “Space Patrol Day” in this little town and the film footage is very clear.
http://cgi.ebay.com/SPACE-PATROL-TV-SHOWS-R-Rocket-Contest-Prize-Delivery_W0QQitemZ160350021403QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUS_DVD_HD_DVD_Blu_ray?hash=item25559b271b&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12%7C66%3A2%7C39%3A1%7C72%3A1205%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50
Thanks Mark i just went over and Bought it!!! can’t wait for this one to arrive!
Man alive! I really wanted that space ship when I was a kid. But I had to settle for making our back porch into one!! Really, I had pretty much forgotten it until I stumbled onto this site. What great pictures. Memories!!
glad you found the blog thru this one!! always fun to share these stories with folks and fans alike!
Johnny, I own the 16MM footage of the Ralston Rocket giveaway in which I made frame blow ups for Ed Pippin over at Solarguard. I also let Scott Moon of Planet X Magazine transfer the footage for a DVD collage of 50’s scifi shorts called “Adventures In Space” The footage runs about 3 minutes and does not contain a soundtrack so for the DVD we over layed the radio ads for the Ralston Rocket contest from various Space Patrol radio broadcasts. I recently uploaded the footage to Facebook for a short time!
I was a regular viewer of Space Patrol and remember entering this contest and dreaming about winning the ultimate prize.