Last year was a great year for 100th anniversaries. The National Park Service celebrated its centennial with free admission to parks on its birthday weekend. Regionally, the Eastern States Exposition (the Big E) commemorated its 1916 founding with special events and a hardcover pictorial history of the fair. Locally, Hanover’s Nugget Theater honored its century of movies by showing a great film from each decade of operation. All these places are still around, upholding and expanding on their original missions.

This year, there’s an interesting list of things that arrived on the world scene 100 years ago, including the Pulitzer Prize, Kikkoman Soy Sauce, the National Hockey League, Converse shoes, the Clark Bar and Moon Pies. These have all made their mark, but there are two more that deserve special recognition for their place in Americana: the Radio Flyer wagon and Girl Scout cookies. Both have special meaning to me.

The Radio Flyer models the American success story. According to a company history, Italian immigrant and cabinetmaker Antonio Pasin started selling wagons he made by night in his one-room workshop in Chicago in 1917. His Liberty Coaster Co. was named after the Statue of Liberty. In the 1920s, Pasin adopted the assembly line techniques of Henry Ford, which allowed him to mass produce the wagons. Metal stamping techniques helped him introduce the first steel wagon in the 1930s. In 1933, Pasin took his wagons to the Chicago World’s Fair, known as “A Century of Progress.” His 45-foot-tall “Coaster Boy” — a giant boy and his wagon — was one of the most popular exhibits at the fair.

Why was his wagon called the Radio Flyer? Because of Pasin’s fascination with the radio, invented by fellow Italian Guglielmo Marconi, and his fascination with flight.

Today, the third generation of Pasin’s family runs the company. His grandson, Robert Pasin, said in a TV interview that usually when you say “Radio Flyer” to someone, the first thing they do is smile, and the second thing they do is tell a story.

Here’s my story: I grew up in Pittsburgh, which is all hills. It was dangerous to race our wagons down the street, but it was perfectly safe to go down our driveway, especially if my friends and I turned at the end and landed in the grass. My wagon also doubled as an easy way for my dad, crippled by polio, to transport our garbage cans up to the curb on collection day.

We still have red wagons in our family. Our youngest daughter says she doesn’t remember much about turning 4 except that she got her red wagon. We’ve continued the tradition by buying new ones for our grandchildren.

This famous red wagon appears throughout American culture. It shows up in the beginning of the holiday classic A Christmas Story; it’s the subject of the 1992 film Radio Flyer; and it’s Calvin and Hobbes’ transportation to Mars in the comic book Weirdos from Another Planet. (When our grandson Calvin was born, we bought him a stuffed tiger. For his birthday, we got him a wagon. I don’t believe he has been to Mars yet.)

In 2003, Antonio Pasin became the 44th toy innovator to be inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame. His red wagon has become not only a well-known toy, but has proved to be a vehicle for imagination and outdoor play for generations.

Equally famous and ubiquitous in American culture is the Girl Scout cookie.

First sold as home-baked cookies by the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Okla., in 1917, the Girl Scout sugar cookie recipe and business plan was published in The American Girl magazine in 1922. A Scout history says that by 1936, home baking couldn’t meet the demand for cookies, so commercial bakers took over. In 1937, cookie sales reached coast to coast, and today raise hundreds of millions of dollars annually. A full 100 percent of money from cookie sales stays in local Scout councils, funding everything from trips to service projects to camps.

Cookie sales around here usually take place in late winter/early spring, which means that many times local troops are outside selling cookies — while trying to get their uniform sashes to fit around their snowsuits — although that could be changing. In 2014, consumers could buy cookies online for the first time, using the new digital cookie platform.

Girl Scout cookies aren’t as high-profile in literature or on screen as the Radio Flyer, but they are certainly well known.

When one of our sons was working with Youth With a Mission in rural Mexico, we sent him a box of Girl Scout cookies. He offered one to his group leader without telling him what it was. He didn’t have to. It only took one bite for the leader to exclaim, “Hey, these are real Thin Mints!”

Thin Mints are the best-selling Girl Scout cookie, but there are plenty of other choices, including some gluten-free flavors. There are even recipes for each type of cookies. The national cooking magazine Taste of Home hosts an annual Girl Scout Cookie Recipe contest. The winners are posted on the Girl Scout website. The 2016 grand prize-winning recipe, “Shortbread Toffee and Chocolate Bark with Toasted Almonds,” was from a woman in Colchester, Vt.

What happens to boxes of Girl Scout cookies that don’t sell? The Girl Scout website says that both the bakers and the councils have plans to distribute leftovers to food relief organizations like food pantries. From personal experience, I know that many boxes end up at Girl Scout camps, where I taught canoeing for years. Our standard dessert fare on river trips was leftover Girl Scout cookies. They can taste a little stale after being packed in a canoe, but are still satisfying when counselors get the munchies late at night and sneak into the camp kitchen after hours … or so I’m told.

For their 100th anniversary, the Girl Scouts brought out a new flavor of cookie — s’mores. The two bakeries that make Girl Scout cookies have different versions of the cookie, so it’s more like two new cookies. S’mores are the perfect flavor for a centennial celebration; the s’more is a Girl Scout tradition dating back to 1925.

Like the Radio Flyer, the mere mention of Girl Scout cookies can call up a smile and a story. One story passed on to me that made me smile was about couples passing the sale display in the Hanover Food Co-op this year. Many times the wife might say they weren’t interested, but the husband would sneak back around and buy a box.

It’s easier to celebrate the history of a place, like a national park, than it is to celebrate a thing like a wagon or a cookie. What’s an appropriate way to celebrate these long-standing American symbols? To me, it’s pretty obvious — the next time we take the grandchildren down the street in the wagon to the library, we’re breaking out the Thin Mints!

Margaret Drye lives in Plainfield.