My pants and shirt were thick with dust. We had been working our way through the narrow basement shelves of the old drugstore for days, carefully boxing each item as it came to light.
It was amazing what the old druggist had saved over the years - stacks of advertising posters dating from the teens and '20s, for example. There were coffee cans and catalogs, crystal banana split dishes and long, tarnished silver spoons and ice-cream scoops. There were tiny tins of patent medicines and Alka-Seltzer bottles so old they looked more like fragile test tubes with tiny, folded papers of instructions containing minute Victorian print tucked inside.In the cellar, behind huge hand-turned ice-cream freezers and half-hidden in musty sawdust, were a cluster of fragile die-cut cardboard candy posters. Printed from lithographic stones, they had been lying there since the turn of the century.
It was some time before we had worked ourselves to the back of the basement. In a distant corner, next to the coal chute and the furnace, we came across a cumbersome apparatus with hose attachments and pressure gauges - totally Rube Goldbergian in appearance. It took awhile to figure out what it was - that is, until we studied where the other end of the hoses went. Then it made complete sense.
Located directly under the soda fountain upstairs, the contraption's arteries were connected to the soda fountain nozzles. This strange machine was the heart of the soda fountain - the carbonator - the device that created carbonated water for ice-cream sodas and carbonated drinks.
Besides old standbys like root beer and Coca-Cola, a yellowed catalog for confectionery supplies off one of the shelves gave a list of soft drink concentrates available in January 1925. Some of the more exotic were: Birch Beer, Lemon Sour, Orange Blood, Tame and Wild Cherry, Grenadine, Celery Phosphate, Cherry Red Heart, Ironport, Orange Cider, Sarsaparilla and True Mexican Vanilla.
Quite a selection, but, when you think about it, not outdone by today's tastes. Someday someone perusing the remnants of the complicated soft-drink sections of our own current mini-marts will find the selections of our own time to sound just as strange to them as those we look back on: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Hi-C, Red Cream Soda, Dr. Pepper, Diet Coke, Classic Coke - the list goes on.
In our time we have raised the consumption of carbonated drinks to an art: Big Gulp, Thirst-Buster, the 57 Ounce Macho Quencher Combo - enough liquid to sink a cruise ship. And the prices: 69, 79, 89 cents - a dollar. No small potatoes for plastic cups filled with sugar water. What fools we may look like 80 years from now - especially if they see the soda prices posted in any typical movie lobby. The amount of ice, alone, which we pump out of those rumbling cement-mixer-size ice tanks to cool our soda water and chew and suck on, will be enough to boggle the mind of researchers down the road.
But there may be an end in sight. I have heard that some doctors are claiming carbonated drinks are bad for the body. Something about gall bladders or the like. Maybe so. Next time I sip a Hires, just for good measure, I'm going to close my eyes and savor the intoxicating pin prickles in my mouth while I can.
Within 10 years the stuff may be banned from the shelves. We always seem, with such things, to go from one extreme to another. Black-market Circle K's and 7-Eleven's may someday be run like the speak-easies of Prohibition days. The Mafia may end up with a corner on Barq's Root Beer and Orange Crush.
Who knows. My ancient carbonator may come back into its own. Like a backyard still, I could make a quick bundle down the road if I play my cards right, that is, before SDA (Soft Drinks Anonymous) comes into its own.