Bottled in Meridian, Mississippi — A long-distance winner.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
I didn’t call them pop. I didn’t call them sodas. I called them Cokes. Cokes could be Pepsis, Fantas (remember those?), Orange Crush, or RC Colas. Tossed out windows, Coke bottles waited along dirt roads, gravel roads, and state highways. In trash bins. I’d spot one most anywhere. A boy’s treasure, a veritable fortune was waiting, ours for the taking.
I was an entrepreneur. A scavenger. A boy-businessman. I picked up soft drink bottles and cashed them in for their deposit. What a blessing. You see, a boy in the 1950s’ rural South didn’t have many economic opportunities. Outside of working for his dad, cutting grass, bagging groceries, and pumping gas, a boy had to get creative.
I sold Christmas cards from Thanksgiving on, but a year-round income could be had pickin’ up bottles. I didn’t need a business license. I didn’t need deep pockets. The upfront cost for this enterprise was minimal, a bag of some type, and a stick for dislodging bottles mired in dirt. I turned a profit right away. On a good day I could make a fistful of dollars. The jangle burned a hole in my pocket but I managed to hold some back for the proverbial rainy day.
Remembering now . . . Summertime and the pickin’ is easy. It’s hot and dusty. Just a bit of rain, and a red clay ditch will clog a bottle. That scourge of scourges, fire ants, have yet to cross I-20 in Georgia, so I fear not those invaders. A Southern sun tans me pretty good, shirtless as I am. If a storm blows in, well, the rain will feel pretty good. A 1957 Chevy speeds by . . . from its window a glassy-green bottle spins in sunlight . . . I rush to get it. Another nickel.
Getting bottles taught me a bit about life. Nothing is free, and, besides, work is good for you. I will confess that collecting bottles introduced me to stealing. One summer a fellow newly arrived from California joined me on my bottle hunt. When we sold our bottles to Goolsby’s Country Store, the clerk, Bill, told us to put our bottles in an empty crate out back. Well, stacks and stacks of crates of bottles waited out back. My friend suggested we empty a few crates, head into the woods, and return later with the bottles “we’d found.” And we did but I didn’t feel too good about it. Never did that again. And my bottle-pickin’ day faded too, because there’s this rule in life — nothing good lasts forever.
In the mid-1950s Royal Crown Cola introduced soft drinks in cans. Coca-Cola test-marketed cans in 1959. Plastic bottles appeared in the late 1970s. I never liked plastic bottles and still don’t. A Coke doesn’t taste right and it’s never cold. Life sure has gone downhill. Give me a glass Coke bottle with the bottling plant’s location on it. Back in the day we’d bet on who had the bottle from farthest away.
2026 — You won’t see youth combing the roadsides for bottles. That’s too bad. We were green in my day. The bottles we found went back to the bottler to be washed and refilled. No one pays a deposit for cans and plastic bottles, and those infernal plastic bottles take 450 years to break down. Even then they don’t decompose. They just fragment into tinier pieces of plastic. But, if you still want a Coke that slakes your thirst, get your hands on those tiny glass bottle six-packs. They go down good, but there’s no deposit to be had. But at least they’re not plastic.
