Thursday, November 24, 2005

BELCH!

(Run originally 6/14/04 on our old site)

Anita Hart Fuller

Tom, that was a beautiful tribute and challenge to us all that you posted. And so appropriate following the death of Mil or Milly (Taylor), as I called her.

Now to illustrate what a small world it is we live in, and thanks to JoAnn for letting us know a little about the mini-reunion of Emil and John Ellerbe. Bob and I were soooo sorry we couldn't be there! Anyway, one of Emil's sons is married to Jamie and Jim Christian's daughters. And when our son, Chris, was at the U. of Ark. he would bring the daughters home to Searcy with him, when he'd be visiting my mother. The daughters are twins: one was a majorette in the UofA band (that's how Chris knew her), and the other a cheerleader, I THINK, but that may be wrong.

Jim Robbins and his wife, Bobbie Jean Harrison Robbins, were also invited to go, but couldn't. Jim was manager of the Coca Cola bottling plant in Searcy for years, and Bobbie Jean's stepfather, Oran West, was THE manager for many years before Jim. We bought their home here in Greers Ferry and we have a ceiling fan from the plant here in our sun room. It was installed in the plant in 1936, the year Bob and I - and Mildred - and many others, of course, were born. And Jim(my Dean) Greer told me at the reunion that he has the last Coke bottle that was on the assembly line when it closed down. His Dad worked there and got it; Jim inherited it when his dad died.

Tom Pry

I have some interesting memories of that Coke® plant. It was fascinating to just stand there and watch those bottles rolling through the small plant on Arch Street, just off the Square, through the big plate glass window.

My strongest memory of Coca-Cola, though, was of the bottles, not the plant. Young people today are, for the most part, not aware of this but, for many years, when the glass plant made up an order of bottles for a plant, the city name and state were molded into the bottom of the bottle.

So, as young men will do, we’d all throw a nickel or quarter into a pot, and then each buy a Coke. The guy with the bottle that came from farthest away got the pot. It was remarkable how some of those bottles would travel: Los Angeles, New York, Maine, Boston … a geography lesson with gas.


HAVE A COKE WITH YOUR THANKSGIVING DINNER – AND HAVE A
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

From 1961

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