DEFINITELY
THE REAL THING
From the
chapter "The Gentlest Decade"
DEFINITELY
THE REAL THING
A
bottle of Coca Cola, correctly pronounced “CoCola,” (Koh
Koh´la) was another of life’s necessities that cost just
a nickel. It was
sold in a thick, six ounce glass bottle with the name of the
town where it was bottled embossed on the bottom.
Nothing in the world tastes like one of those
ice-cold six-ounce CoColas, nothing.
You could also return the bottle to the store and
receive a two cent refund, reducing the net price to three
cents, a bargain at half the price.
We made a pretty good living in the summer collecting
and returning empty CoCola bottles.
CoColas were so popular some of the neighborhood
stores sold small little cartons of six wax CoCola bottles
filled with cherry flavored syrup.
After you drank the syrup you could chew on the wax
bottle for a day or two, until the flavor was gone.
When
the price of a CoCola was raised a penny to six cents it
almost caused a revolution.
It was one thing to carry two or three nickels around
in your pocket, now you had to fool with keeping up with
worthless pennies. In
a fit of spite, we all hoped and prayed the cost of
readjusting all of the CoCola machines to accept the penny
was more than the additional revenue from the extra penny.
The company later introduced a taller, ten-ounce
version of the CoCola bottle.
We all agreed the taller version did not taste as
good as the original version.
Not only that, it cost a dime, and when you put a
handful of parched and salted Spanish peanuts down its neck
it didn’t fizz as much as the original.
That fact alone proved it was an inferior product.
The final insult was CoCola in a tin can, renamed
Coke. They just
couldn’t leave well enough alone.
The
CoCola was far and away the soft drink of choice in
South Georgia
. If you ordered a drink or a cold drink,
you were automatically served CoCola. Orange Crush was
allowed as an occasional fruit substitute for CoCola.
There were other brands of soft drinks, like NEHI,
but they were used sparingly, mostly by the lizards.
Kool-Aid®
came packaged in powdered form in small envelope-like
packets, and in liquid concentrated form in small bottles.
We, rather than actually making a pitcher of Kool-Aid®
from the concentrate, choose to eat the powder.
If you had a real tart flavor then the powder was
made slightly more palatable with the addition of a small
amount of sugar. The
rule of the day was to add the sugar to the powdered
concentrate in private, so everyone would think you were
tough enough to eat the extremely bitter lime-flavored
powder like a man: straight, with no dilution.
You had to be just a couple of bricks short of a full
load to sip the liquid concentrate.
It was unbelievably tart, and would turn your lips
and tongue purple, orange, or green, depending on the flavor
of the syrup. It
would also turn your mouth inside out, much like an unripe
persimmon would. Besides,
there was no way to hide the discoloration caused by sipping
the acidulous syrup, indicating to one and all your complete
lack of mental facilities and judgment.
Not only that, but it also caused incredible
heartburn.
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