The Opel Kapitän’s Wafers Have A Surprising Secret: Cold Start

First, I’m finally out of the hospital, and boy does it feel good. No wires all over me, no one shoving needles into my stomach at 4 am, no doctors shaking me awake at 6:10 am and then telling me Very Important Things I somehow need to remember! And I had a shower! It felt so good. So good. I still have that one tube from my arm still but I’m out of that room, finally. To celebrate, let’s talk about two types of captains, the Opel variety and the Lance variety, and I’d like to note that this is the first Cold Start that will include microscopy.

First, let me explain what I’m doing here: I’ve long held this belief about a particular kind of snack cracker from the legendary snack cracker synod (and fellow North Carolinians) Lance, the one that advises humanity to “not go ’round hungry,” a belief that one of the ingredients in a particular kind of cracker was artificial. Today I intend to find out if this is true.

The crackers are of the “Captain’s Wafers” variety, and knowing that we are, fundamentally, a car blog, and not a snack cracker blog (that’s going to come later, called Cruncher as part of our growing blog-network) so as a clumsy way of tying this all together, let’s also take a moment to appreciate this 1958 Opel Kapitän brochure!

First, I don’t think we can discuss this brochure and not mention that the main woman model in it looks remarkably like a stylish Oompa-Loompa:

Just for reference, here’s an Oompa-Loompa, one of the workers from Bill Wonka’s famous confectionary factory:

Here’s another look at the Oompa-Loompic model:

Sure, the color scheme is a bit different, but you can’t deny there’s a definite oompaloompishness going on here. It’s less pronounced on the cover, which sets up the Hollywood movie set theme for the brochure:

The Kapitän was a pretty conventional car, mechanically, not taking any unusual risks, and had styling very influenced by American cars of the era. One detail I especially like are the way the turn indicators/sidelights are handled, with a pair of lenses, a frontal round one for the indicator and then a corner, wrap-around sidelight that may be an indicator repeater? I’m not sure, never having seen this in action, but I hope so.

If so, that would make the Opel Kapitän a solid decade ahead of the curve, lighting-wise, since side markers were not required (in the US) until 1968. This image, by the way, is from another 1958 Kapitän brochure, one that features illustrations instead of those odd colorized photos:

They’re beautiful illustrations, and I especially like all the attention this brochure gives to lighting features:

Look at this downright celebration of reverse lights! And – oh those must be foglamps, not indicators! Those lenses looked more like plastic indicator lenses than foglamps, but perhaps I was wrong! And also the little don’t-smack-into-me lamps on the doors!

Oh, and then there’s this reminder of the joys of trunk lighting as well, in a way that suggests a shower. Also, I check out that little girl and her doll, breaking the fourth wall there and looking right at us. Hello, Ilsa!

Okay, enough about that sort of Kapitän; it’s time to discuss the other captain, the one with the wafers.

Okay, so the Captain’s Wafers with cream cheese and chives have always sort of fascinated me. Cream cheese and chives seems like such an ambitious choice for a vending machine snack! And, opening up the crackers, I was able to accept the sorta dry texture of the cream cheese – it has to be shelf-stable and all that (is it dehydrated? How is this done?) – but I always thought the chives were just little dots of green dye.

In fact, I just told Jay Lamm, the man behind the 24 Hours of Lemons, this very same thing, with full, unearned confidence, when I was judging at the Lemons race in South Carolina recently. But I started to wonder – what if I was wrong? Is there any way those could actually be chives? It says “chives” in the ingredients, so, maybe?

There was only one way to know: pull out the cheap USB microscope!

Huh. Those do not just look like bits of green dye! They definitely seem… vegetative! Let’s look deeper:

Holy shit. Those are chives! Tiny, tiny fragments of chives, perhaps the dust created when full chives are cut into bits, but I do believe those are real chives.

Uh, this changes everything. There is still good out in the world, people. For a buck or whatever at some lonely rest stop off the highway, you can get a little cellophane packet full of crackers, some sort of strangely en-toughened cream cheese, and actual, genuine chives. What a world we live in.

So, I apologize, Lance, for maligning you and suggesting your chives were just blots of green dye. I was wrong. By way of apology, please enjoy this fantastic Southern Culture on the Skids song that references the Lance organization and their fine products multiple times:

Really, we never stop learning.