Summertime

It feels like summer is arriving early in Northeast Florida and we are still three weeks away from the Summer solstice. The current heat wave reminds me of the summers of my youth growing up pre-WWII when no one had air conditioning. We kids would chase the iceman down the street and when he stopped to deliver a cake of ice for the grocer's cooler we would hop on his tailgate and scrounge a few slivers of ice to suck on.  If you could redeem a soda bottle for a nickel you could feast on a bottle of carbonated soda which was not really quenching. Now the coke in the little green bottles was only six ounces and only adults drank those. It was around that time that Pepsi-Cola appeared on the local scene with a twelve ounce bottle for the same nickel. It became a "no brainer". Pepsi began marketing aggressively and started using sky writing with the name outlined against the azure blue sky. And their jingle appeared on the radio "Pepsi Cola hits the spot - twelve full ounces - that's a lot! Twice as much for a nickel, too - Pepsi Cola is the drink for you." It was Madison Avenue in full throttle.
One summer my parents decided to make and bottle root beer in the cellar. They collected bottles, bought the root beer extract made by Hires and also the yeast. The bottle caps had those cork inserts and they obtained a gadget to affix the caps. When the elixir was mixed in a vat and the bottles filled they were placed in a dark recess in the cellar to "age" for a few weeks. At the appointed time they filled the ice cube trays with the dark beverage to freeze the cubes which we consumed while sitting on the stoop at dusk waiting for the fireflies to appear and lighting some "punk" to keep the mosquitoes away. WWII was just around the corner and life changed after that.
tjs
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