Probably as a remnant of a Valentine’s party, someone at the Optic left a box of chocolate-covered cherries in the break room for all us hard-working staffers to enjoy. They vanished the same day — no thanks to me.

Here’s why:

I grew up — as did many of you — in an era when visits to doctors were rare. My first visit was for what I thought was a hearing loss.

The physician, a Dr. Blanchard, who worked out of his home on Seventh or Eighth Street, peeked into my ears and determined they were plugged. He mentioned that people who take tub baths, as opposed to showers, often suffer from stuffed up ears. Apparently running water entering the ear helps keep it clean.

He had his nurse apply something that looked like a cake decorator filled with warm water to each ear. She flushed lots of stuff, even what felt like a cartridge in a bare tree.

I could hear again. I dutifully paid five dollars, which I had earned selling Optics, and was paid in full. Did anyone have insurance then, and had the “co-pay” even been invented?

Observing what got flushed out of my ears, and realizing the world was a more “ruidoso” than to what I’d become accustomed, I wondered whether the doc might refund my money and restore my quieter condition. Suddenly fans, radios, cars and people seemed noisier.

Growing up in Las Vegas exposed many of us to time-tested home remedies. I’ve expounded about the ointments, liniments and other preparations but have not written about the desire of every mother, grandmother and great-grandmother to “clean out the system,” no matter what the ailment.

If your child has a headache, try Fletcher’s Castoria. If Missie has a tummy ache, let’s get to the seat of the problem with castor oil.

For a two-week period during elementary school at Immaculate Conception, I stayed home nursing a severe cold. (I don’t call it a bad cold because that would imply there’s such a thing as a good cold.) In the days of ice boxes rather than refrigerators, Mom would prepare a watered-down concoction of orange juice, sugar and something thick and yucky at the base of the glass.

“What is that stuff at the bottom, Mom?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ll get rid of it.” What she did instead was to hide the drink from my sight, give it a quick stirring, so the secret thick, yucky ingredient remained suspended and invisible. “Now drink up!”

And the treat? Well, that was castor oil, fundimental for a boy on the run.

The next day I vowed not to fall for that trick again. I skimmed off only the orange juice from the glass, leaving the castor oil at the bottom. I’d pulled one over on her. I would no longer be the butt of her machinations.

But the next day she was ready. “Daddy bought me some chocolate- covered cherries for Easter. Would you like some, Hijito?” She insisted I have at least two candies.

The first one went down the hatch, and before I attacked the second, I noticed a tiny hole in the candy, about the size of a hypodermic needle. Aha! Mom had used a syringe to draw out all the sweet liquid from the cherry cordial candy, and with a reverse motion replaced it all with castor oil.

Castor oil, is tasteless. But that’s not the taste that’s the problem. It’s the chalky, can’t-get-rid-of-it feel of the potion, like swallowing a dozen raw egg yolks.

To moms of the middle decades, grandmothers of the teens and twenties, and great-grandmothers of the turn of the century, there was only one malady. If you said you didn’t feel good, the only diagnosis is something abdominal, something which could be cured only with a purgative.

If you had an upset stomach, she’d eliminate all other symptoms and conclude that only castor oil would clear it up. If you wrenched your neck while wrestling, she’d flush away all thoughts save that only a laxative could do the trick. Oh, you cut your knee climbing that tree? These prunes ought to help.

Walking past that box of candy left at the Optic reminded me of the treatment-is-worse-than-the-aliment regimen we underwent. In our youth, castor oil was the only really active ingredient in our medicine chests.

Ya know, all those boxes of aspirin, iodine, merthiolate and band- aids? They were just painted on the back of the medicine chest — to make it look well-stocked.

Well, being laid up for two weeks with a cold was cathartic, an abdominal experience that eventually made a fourth-grader extrude confidence, among other things.