By Tom Carlson

Throughout my childhood, I was exposed to references to something called “Sand of The Month Club” — A simple joke where one man in the early ’80s, “Bob Butterfield,” amassed a volume of recipients of envelopes filled with sand. So I decided to sit down with my dad and call Bob to get the story. 

The Year was 1980-something…. 

My dad, Eric Carlson, was Bob’s roommate at Florida Institute of Technology and met Bob through the cross country running team. Early into sharing an apartment, Eric found Bob with a mason jar of sand. Eric recounts, “he was carefully pouring it into envelopes, one at a time, typing out a letter, and then addressing the envelope, and going to the post office and mailing it. So I just asked him, what was that? And he looked at me with a smile on his face and he said it's Sand of The Month Club — as if I’m supposed to know, as if everybody knew…” This cool attitude of normalcy kept true when I called Bob to talk about his club. When asked about the motivations he simply described it as a way to keep in touch with family and friends by sending a little bit of sunny Florida back to them. Through my hour speaking with him Bob never once let on that Sand of The Month Club was a joke or humorous in any way. This stoic outlook is part of what I believe makes the venture so funny.

Amassing Members 

One of the most interesting features of the Sand of The Month Club was that you couldn’t join. You had to be nominated by someone else. Much like a glitter-bomb today. Any one person who knew someone who knew Bob might open an envelope only to find their living room now covered in sand. Eric Carlson illustrates, “One day Bob comes in with a larger envelope and in it is one of his envelopes all torn to shreds with a letter from the U.S. Postal Service asking him to stop putting sand in envelopes because as it runs through the machine, they occasionally tear it up and cause the machines to halt, causing damage.” At that point, Bob started sending sand in little bags that he acquired from a flea market. One recipient recounted that it might not have been the best idea to be mailing little bags filled with fine white powder all over the world. 

Getting the Sand

Sand of The Month Club grew quickly. Eric Carlson told me of whole weekends where Bob would stay up writing letters including information about the sand, where it was from, and how they got it. One summer, when Bob went back to Indiana, he even had an intern fill in for him and collect sand to mail on his behalf. 

Eric: “I even had my first college roommate, who lived in the Bahamas, come back with a jar of pink sand — that was a hit — and we tried to get the black lava sand from Hawaii but I think it’s illegal to remove so I’m not sure if we ever got any."

When talking to Bob he actually recounted the same excitement about getting the pink sand. Nearly 40 years later, these two individuals who have long been out of contact are still treasuring such a simple memory as though it were a monumental moment in their lives. “Bob kept doing it as long as I can remember, he was always gathering sand wherever we went. We went up and down all the coast of Florida. I one time drove home to New Hampshire, went out to Hampton Beach and got him a jar of sand from there. We got sand from Cape Cod, Myrtle Beach, New Jersey, the West Coast — people would even mail him sand so he could turn around and mail it back to the other members.” Though it may sound like an apocryphal exaggeration, I truly do believe that Bob was ahead of his time in what he was doing with Sand of The Month. Hear me out…. think memes. 

Sending Sand was Analog Meme-ing,

Memes are funny because of their quantity. It used to be that the image became funny due to clever text, but around the point where we got “Doge,” memes began to be less about their content and more about their format. A recognizable image could have any text and the viewer would still find the humor because of the familiarity. We’ve gotten to a point where quantity is all the matters. One can be clever in their meme creation and amass a large following — however, someone could post a picture of their front lawn labeled [top text] [bottom text] and be found with the same reaction because of the recognizability of the format. 

The more people who became part of The Sand of The Month Club, the funnier the simple gesture became. Much like eating tide pods simply being a silly joke became funnier as it broke into the local news. Virality over content became the key to internet-humor and somehow Bob managed to crack this code long before the medium was in any way accessible. 

Thoughts from Bob, 

When asked about why he stopped Bob couldn’t come up with an answer. He even mentioned that he might like to do it again and the first thing that came to mind was how much easier the internet would make it to manage contacts and be able to print letters to send in bags of sand. This puzzled me. In the early ’80s Bob used sand to connect to friends back home and ended up doing something so emulative of internet humor, yet now he has easy access to both contacts and internet humor but still insists on sand. Bob just wants to send sand to his friends, in the same way, with just a little less time writing letters.

Tom is a culture writer for La Tonique.