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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