All My Ancestors

This morning I was chatting with a friend whose great-uncle had died. She was remembering that when she used to visit this aunt and uncle down in Haskell, Texas, that they always gave her Dr. Pepper, in a glass bottle. For a person of her age (read: young), I suppose a glass bottle was a novelty.

Her story made me think about going over to visit my own great aunt and uncle–we went into their house through the back door. On the back porch (though it was completely enclosed it was still called “the porch”), there was Aunt Eva’s kiln where she fired the china she painted, and a small sink for Uncle George to “wash up” when he came in from the field. And under that little sink usually sat a six-pack of small glass bottles of Dr. Pepper. There was a pantry on further down the way, but the Dr. Pepper didn’t belong in the pantry. It sat out there in plain sight for me to long for. Sometimes I got lucky and was offered one of the drinks–I couldn’t ask for one, y’know, it just wasn’t proper.

This would have been the 1950s and a time when soft drink consumption was way lower than it is now. In fact, we just didn’t drink pop, that I recall. It was a real treat when I’d go to South Dakota for the summers to stay with my maternal grandmother–she owned a country store that actually had pop in the refrigerator. I wasn’t really supposed to drink without paying, but Granny didn’t monitor me, or the inventory, too closely. The cowboys would come in at noon to buy their lunches–a can of vienna sausages or a sliced bologna sandwich, and buy some pop. But that’s the only time I can remember drinking pop as a child–sometimes I’d buy one while in the bus room after school, but not often.

I also remembered my brother and I going up and down the road in front of our house, inspecting the bar ditches for pop bottles. Seems like we could redeem them for 2 cents–it may have only been 1, but it was a way for us to earn some spending money. I have no memory of what we spent it on–but we worked very diligently to gather those bottles. Then began the campaign to get some adult to take us to town so we could cash them in, usually at Bryan’s grocery store.

In high school, in the Texas panhandle, anyway, Dr. Pepper was the drink of choice. I remember having a tower of empty waxed paper cups almost reaching the ceiling in my bedroom–I somehow decided it would be a good thing to save them. But we went faithfully through the Dixie Dog drive-in to keep ourselves well-oiled with the Texas elixir. Later, in college, I drank DDP–Diet Dr. Pepper. We had a favorite convenience store at 23rd and Meridian in Oklahoma City where we bought our drinks–one friend always had Tab, but most of us drank DDP. And the backseat floorboards in our cars clanked with the empties.

I was recently on an overseas flight when a young middle-easterner requested a Dr. Pibb from the flight attendant serving drinks. She asked him to repeat his request and they finally determined that he meant Dr. Pepper–he’d confused it with the Mr. Pibb Dr. Pepper knock-off. She laughed and said she was out but thought there might be one more in the back. Sure enough, she later brought him a can of Dr. Pepper and told him to take it with him. He was thrilled.

Dr. Pepper started in Texas and it’s still very popular there. It is my husband’s drink of choice, but then again, he always orders sweet tea at a restaurant. Maybe it’s his Texas roots–all that sweetness.