I have not seen this commercial but may I suggest a probably context for it. 
Black people from the WW II era back were always looking for a practical way 
OUT of the South to other parts of the country.  Assuming the figures in 
this commercial are over 60, then the commercial makes good sense.  The US 
military was a common road out of the South to the North or the West.  I 
taught thousands of Marines who had enlisted (or in a few instances were 
drafted) during the Vietnam era in the South, who mustered out at El Toro 
Marine Air Station or Camp Pendleton, to buy homes in So Cal and use the GI 
bill to attend college.  Generally these young men had no intention of 
taking themselves or their families back South ever again save to visit kin.

Fast forward a couple of decades.  From the decade of the 1960s forward the 
data from the US Census Bureau indicates that the black migration to the 
South is considerably greater than the migration from the US South.  For 
starters, Aunt Hattie and most of her kids and grandkids still live in 
_________ (say, Tidewater or Southside, Virginia), and Uncle Robert and his 
live in the next county.  Great-grandfather Joe is buried in the local 
churchyard, while cousin Baye still has 150 acres of prime farmland:  the 
fields she leases but the small orchard and kitchen garden she keeps for her 
own needs.

You don't need Brigadoon if your utopia is real and waiting for you, full of 
kin and a life remembered by the oldest in your family.

Moreover, these migrants are practical working people.  They bring savings, 
pensions, and the sales proceeds from real estate from high wage states in 
the North, Midwest, and West.  They can buy houses and land for a song, the 
cost of all but heavy mfg goods is much cheaper than they could imagine, and 
the social tensions that marked the era of Jim Crow are fundamentally 
transformed (one hopes, for good.)

They find church communities with traditions calling all the way back to 
Emancipation.  Their sleep is broken occasionally by the firing of hunting 
rifles, but not by automatic weapons fire and the searchlights of police 
helicopters.  Neighbors still bring over fish from their last trip to the 
lake, overflow corn and berries from their gardens, and the occasional 
haunch of deer (and sometimes these neighbors are white.  They didn't have 
white neighbors in Cleveland, southeast San Diego, or Brooklyn.)

I have a pretty good imagination but I am not imagining all of this.  I am 
remembering what I saw in Virginia when I was doing research there in the 
1990s and the stories I hear about my own in-laws who have moved in the last 
year from the West back to the South from whence they came.

So, I assert that a black couple say 65-70, watching this commercial would 
fully understand what the man meant when he said that he would take any 
ticket to get out of Virginia (THEN!!)  They would see little connection 
between that sentiment say in the 1950s (when my in-laws migrated with all 
their children from Louisiana) and their life in the South NOW.  And in 
reading the commercial that way, they would be good historians.  History, 
after all, is the tracing of the causal and particular route from then to 
now, with a strongly held grasp of the differences and similarities between 
then and now.

Better to save our indignation for something more significant.  I have 
already taken my wife to both northern and southern Virginia.  A child 
refugee from the bad times in the deep South, a New Yorker who has spent a 
lot of time in the cities of East and Western Europe, she is enthusiastic 
about my idea of retiring to small town Virginia when we are retired and too 
frail for City life.  I dare say that the Civil Rights Movement improved 
life in the South not only for black people but for white people, too. 
Southerners are perhaps at long last free to just be human beings.  This is 
a society we would be happy to grow old within.

Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ray Bonis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: OT: New Quaker Oats ad: "Ticket out of Virginia"


> If Oatmeal can get me a ticket out of Virginia from time to time, I'll 
> start buying it.
> A real outrage for lovers of Virginia might be the war in Iraq and the 
> growing number of Virginians (106) who have been killed there. The total 
> number of American service men and women killed is approaching 4,000 with 
> at least 50,000 Iraqis killed, according to the Los Angeles times).  A 
> letter to Sen. Warner expressing your opinion on the war can't hurt.  His 
> web site:
>
> http://www.senate.gov/~warner/
>
> His email (form):
>
> http://www.senate.gov/~warner/contact/contactme.cfm
>
> The Library of Virginia is keeping a list of Virginians killed in Iraq 
> (and in other wars) here:
>
> http://www.lva.lib.va.us/whatwehave/mil/vmd/index.asp
>
>
> RLB6 wrote:
>>
>> I am seeking the assistance of others who love Virginia to make our 
>> voices
>> heard at the Quaker Company.  A new Quaker Oatmeal commercial features an
>> attractive, older African-American couple who love to bowl and stay 
>> healthy
>> by eating Quaker Oatmeal.  It's a cute ad, but it inexcusably begins with 
>> an
>> insult to the Commonwealth and people of Virginia.  As they talk about 
>> how
>> they met, he jokes that she was just "looking for a ticket out of 
>> Virginia."
>> Unbelievable.
>
>
> -- 
> Ray Bonis
> Special Collections and Archives
> VCU Libraries
> 804-828-1108