Cokes & Smiles



Join me as I stroll back to my childhood days in Tampa, Florida. It was a hot summer day and I had saved up a nickle so I could walk down to the Super Test Gas Station and buy myself a nice cold coke out of the machine. On days when I had some extra money I bought some salted peanuts to gently tap down into my coke. The best coca-cola's in the world came out of that machine, the taste was sweeter, the glass was greener, the bottle was colder then any I've ever had since. We got excited to see what state's name was going to be on the bottom of that bottle. If you got one from way up North it was a big thrill.....who would have thought I'd end up living in a place further away than any bottle I ever got....



In May, 1886, Coca Cola was invented by Doctor John Pemberton a pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia. John Pemberton concocted the Coca Cola formula in a three legged brass kettle in his backyard. The name was a suggestion given by John Pemberton's bookkeeper Frank Robinson.


Being a bookkeeper, Frank Robinson also had excellent penmanship. It was he who first scripted "Coca Cola" into the flowing letters which has become the famous logo of today.
The soft drink was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886.

About nine servings of the soft drink were sold each day. Sales for that first year added up to a total of about $50. The funny thing was that it cost John Pemberton over $70 in expanses, so the first year of sales were a loss.
Until 1905, the soft drink, marketed as a tonic, contained extracts of cocaine as well as the caffeine-rich kola nut.

By the late 1890s, Coca-Cola was one of America's most popular fountain drinks. With another Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Griggs Candler, at the helm, the Coca-Cola Company increased syrup sales by over 4000% between 1890 and 1900. Advertising, was an important factor in Pemberton and Candler's success and by the turn of the century, the drink was sold across the United States and Canada. Around the same time, the company began selling syrup to independent bottling companies licensed to sell the drink. Even today, the US soft drink industry is organized on this principle.
Until the 1960s, both small town and big city dwellers enjoyed carbonated beverages at the local soda fountain or ice cream saloon. Often housed in the drug store, the soda fountain counter served as a meeting place for people of all ages. Often combined with lunch counters, the soda fountain declined in popularity as commercial ice cream, bottled soft drinks, and fast food restaurants came to the fore.

On April 23, 1985, the trade secret "New Coke" formula was released. Today, products of the Coca Cola Company are consumed at the rate of more than one billion drinks per day.


There is even an urban legend surrounding Coca-cola and Santa Claus. The story goes something like this: The rumor was that in order to boost sales that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus, as we know him, they dressed Santa in red and white, the company colors and used him in all of their advertising. The truth is we had Santa dressed in red and white long before Coca-cola used him


All this isn't to say that Coca-Cola didn't have anything to do with cementing that image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness. The Santa image may have been standardized before Coca-Cola adopted it for their advertisements, but Coca-Cola had a great deal to do with establishing Santa Claus as a ubiquitous Christmas figure in America at a time when the holiday was still making the transition from a religious observance to a largely secular and highly commercial celebration. In an era before color television (or commercial television of any kind), color films, and the widespread use of color in newspapers, it was Coca-Cola's magazine advertisements, billboards, and point-of-sale store displays that exposed nearly everyone in America to the modern Santa Claus image. Coca-Cola certainly helped make Santa Claus one of the most popular men in America, but they didn't invent him.



I wanted this song to go along because it inspired me to choose this topic, enjoy...


"I Was County When County Wasn't Cool"




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