My first recollection of God’s greatest gift to us all, soda, was back in the late 60’s and it came to us in 16 ounce returnable bottles. It seems funny now that at any convenience store you go into a 32 ounce is probably the smallest size you can get. My mom would pop open (see what I did there with pop?) two 16 ounce bottles to quench the thirst of her five children. When you factor in ice, carbonization, fizz, the pull from the North Pole that meant each of us received about 1.5 ounces of soda. But it was the best day of the week.
We mainly drank RC Cola if I remember right. It was kinda Coke and Pepsi’s runt little brother. And back then there were two prices for soda. A price for if you returned your last 8 pack of bottles or if you didn’t. I remember lugging the old bottles in and placing them in the cart for my mom. There were some stores that used kind of an honor system and let you place them in a bin outside before coming in. Those stores are all out of business now.
All vending machines back then had bottles as well. And as they got older most of them would stick open so you could clear out that whole row if you wanted to. The vending machine owners would sometimes try to thwart the taking of all the bottles in that row by putting orange soda in them. It sometimes worked. If we were really thirsty we would sometimes just take a cup and a bottle opener and just take what gravity let out of the sideways laying bottle.
I remember Olson’s cleaners would set their soda in the back of the building right by an open window. They kept the windows open because the building would be so hot because the method of cleaning used comprised of taking chemicals no longer allowed to be produced and heating them to the temperature of the sun to get the clothes cleaned. Ray King and I pinched a couple of bottles from there once and due to the extreme heat and from sitting next to those chemicals the soda no longer was carbonated and came out of the bottle like some 50 weight motor oil. We drank it anyway. From that day on I can no longer see out of my left eye nor hear out of my left ear but the hair on my left arm and leg grows an inch a day.
Eventually soda moved to cans and then to plastic bottles because there was plenty of room in the oceans and the landfills. And to be honest. Soda tastes way better in a can. And you could take a can back then and chuck it up on the slanted roof of Lovekamp’s Floor Coverings and it would roll back down and either explode then or you could then pop the top and watch it shoot out all over your friends. That is what you did in the 70’s. There were no video games.
Like most Americans. Patriotic Americans that is. I probably drink too much of it. I have moved on from RC Cola to Mountain Dew though. Mountain Dew is the most delicious thing ever created. I believe it was Jesus who said that a day without Mountain Dew is like a day without sunshine. I may have that wrong but I know he didn’t say it about Mello Yellow.
Stuff that Probably Happened 