I came across an old pop bottle from the days of WWII when my dad ran a pop bottling plant in nearby Indianola because he couldn’t get new cars or parts for his Chevrolet dealership. The pop bottle reminded me of the fact that they were then returnable and reused many times, without paying a deposit. We sometimes put them to other uses before getting around to returning them. They came in sturdy wooden cases that held two dozen bottles; the cases were also reused many times, and we found other uses for them as well. We sometimes played with the bottles in the backyard to trap bumblebees in the flower bed. They served as containers to water houseplants, and with the help of a little sprinkler top from the dime store, Mother used one to dampen the laundry for ironing.
Then — and for a good many years afterward — a bottle of pop cost only a nickel, as did a good many other things that we pay a lot more for today. A cup of coffee with free refills, in any restaurant or cafe, was free with a meal, and only five cents otherwise. Ice cream cones were five cents per dip, as were Popsicles, fudge bars, Eskimo Pies, ice cream sandwiches, most candy bars, a roll of Lifesavers, chewing gum, soda fountain drinks — such as Green Rivers and cherry phosphates — and the small bag of popcorn at the movie theater. The dime stores (both Kresge’s and Ben Franklin) still had lots of things you could buy for a dime or less.
Speaking of movie popcorn, both theaters in my hometown were owned and operated by the same woman who kept prices low to keep the town’s young people wholesomely occupied with entertainment they could afford. One quarter would pay for a children’s ticket (through junior high), plus a bag of popcorn with a nickel left over for a treat at the drugstore soda fountain afterward. Older kids who were in high school were given a special pass that allowed them to get into the movie for a quarter — half the adult ticket price for Technicolor extravaganzas and musicals. Some movies, usually Westerns and other lower-rated films, cost only 35 cents for adults. A high school boy could take his girlfriend to a movie and treat her to popcorn, a box of Milk-Duds and a Coke and spend less than a dollar.
We went to the movies at least once a week, sometimes more often. There were matinees on Saturdays and Sundays at both theaters, and two showings of the same movie every weekday evening. Both the Marion and the Grand theaters had a different movie each day of the week. The schedules were published each week in both of the town’s newspapers and in the free Weekly Reminder, a shoppers’ guide that was mostly advertising.
If you were wondering about that pop bottling plant in Indianola, it was called Dorsey Beverage Company, and Dad ran it for only a few months during the war. The most patriotic person I’ve ever known, he enlisted in what was then the Army Air Corps, even though he was beyond draft age and had four children. They were practically begging for mechanics — especially airplane mechanics. At that time, before jet engines, airplane engines were more or less the same as automobile engines and Dad knew tractors, semis, and heavy equipment as well as cars and pickup trucks. As it turned out, after his basic training at Fort Bliss in Texas, he wasn’t trained as an airplane mechanic because he was colorblind and all the manuals and wiring, etc. were color-coded. He served for a few months as a company clerk and was given an early discharge. When he came home, he took over the bottling plant and moonlighted as a mechanic, keeping most of the Chevy’s in Knoxville running despite the shortage of parts.
Eventually, the bottling work was transferred to another plant, but they didn’t want the inventory, so Dad brought home a truckload of pop and stored it in our garage. That summer, Mother treated the neighborhood kids to all the warm pop they could drink.