From SLH : I have several green quart red/white ACL "Happy 7" "Since 1918" bottles for offer. The back of the bottle says, "5-cents Deposit on this Bottle at the Store" above "Made from sugar, lithiated lemon, lime, citric, carbonated water" and then, "Bottled by Happy Seven Co. Wilkes Barre, PA". E-mail if interested.

From Bill, Findlay, Ohio : I am looking for two Ohio amber Coca-Cola straight-sided bottles to complete my collection. They are from Piqua and Bellefontaine.

Do you have a particular item, or items, that you have been looking for a long time to complete part of your collection, or something you want - but have not as yet been able to find? Send it so all of us can help you look. You never know where it may turn up! E-mail it to My Missing Item

The Tiger Woods Foundation announced that Bon Jovi will headline Tiger Jam VI Presented by Coca-Cola, hosted by Tiger Woods. The sixth annual event will take place on April 19, 2003, at 8:30pm in the Mandalay Bay Events Center, Las Vegas, Nev. The annual benefit concert raises and distributes funds for the Tiger Woods Foundation and children's charities based in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. 

The ICEE Company and Coca-Cola Fountain announced that for the first time a nationwide Internet vote will be conducted where consumers will determine the newest ICEE flavor. ICEE lovers can take part in the "Which Flavor Do You Favor?" sweepstakes at www.ICEE.com and choose from 10 varieties to determine which flavor will be the taste sensation of 2004, choosing from: Banana Cream Pie, Cotton Candy, Blue Bubble Gum, Green Apple, Cherry Limeade, Orange Crème, Cherry Vanilla, Peaches and Cream, Chocolate Peppermint and Strawberry Banana.

Douglas Daft, Chairman of the Coca-Cola Company, announces in a memo that 1000 employees will be laid off, with 500 of those in Atlanta. This is the result of the planned consolidation of business units in North America including: Coca-Cola North America, the Minute Maid Company, Coca-Cola Fountain, Odwalla, and Danone Waters of North America.

Coca-Cola Enterprises is closing down its plant in Parole and consolidating its regional bottling activities in Hanover, Maryland. The facility on Riva Road will be shutdown in March and 87 employees of the Mid-Atlantic Coca-Cola Bottling will be laid off. These employees will be offered opportunities at similar plants in Florida and Kentucky.

New bottles or cans, or anything soda, in your area ?
Please send the info so all of us can know @ Whats New

My first issue as Editor of Bottles and Extras for the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors went out in this past week's mail. For more information about B&E and the FOHBC, such as a listing of the Table of Contents, check it out here: FOHBC.com. There are some sample articles online, with more to come. So check back often.

My time in USA is drawing to an end. I can't believe when I look back on it that I've been here for over six-months. Time has gone so quickly and I did not even get the time to do all the things I wanted to do. There were many of you that I had planned to visit, and I am disappointed that I did not get the chance to do that. Hopefully I will be able to manage a trip back soon. And of course, the Fizz will always be here.

February 7-9 (Friday - Sunday) Richardson, Texas
The Lone Star Chapter of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club 12th annual Tex-Fest
at the Radisson Hotel, 1981 North Central Expressway (I-75 at Campbell Road), Richardson, TS 75080
Info: Ph: (214) 747-2474

February 9 (Sunday) Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee Antique Bottle & Advertising Club's 31st Annual Show & Sale
(Sun 9am-3pm) at the Four Points Sheraton Hotel
4747 S. Howell Ave. (I-94 exit 318), Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Info: David Kapsos, 6213 Mourning Dove Dr., McFarland, WI 53558
Ph: 608-838-8041, E-mail: foxhead@chorus.net

The largest gathering of Coca-Cola collectors on the west coast will be held February 13-16 (Thursday - Sunday), 2003 at Jackie Gaughan's Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Great Get-Together events will include silent and regular auctions, raffle, swap meet, banquet and room hopping. For more information, please contact Janeen Davis, 25607 Firebrand Place, Hayward, CA 94541-5711. For hotel reservations, please call 1-800-634-6575. Room rates are $65 per night for Friday and Saturday and $45 for Sunday through Thursday. The Plaza Hotel is located at One Main Street, Las Vegas, NV 89101.

The largest annual gathering of Coca-Cola Collectors in Atlanta, Georgia will be held April 16-19 (Wednesday-Saturday), 2003 at the Crown Plaza Ravinia. Springtime in Atlanta is a regional convention of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club. Events will include an opening party, silent and regular auctions, lunch and dinner banquet, swap meet, children's party and room hopping. For more information, please contact John or Karleen Buchholz at +1-770-458-5670, Fax +1-770-454-1039 or e-mail gacoke@aol.com. Special hotel rate is $73.00/night and must be booked with the registration card sent after you register for the convention. 

Any new events  in your area? Mail so all of us can know, to: Upcoming Events

Regarding last week's question from Alfie Pino about a list of soda brands : 

From Dennis : I have somewhere over three thousand brands on record. Most have just a trademark registration date, but that is enough to look up the original owner and location. I have more detailed information on many brands and bottlers going back as far as the 1820's. Most of this information is from the period 1900 to 1920, and relates to brands and bottlers in the South and California where I spent many hours and days over the last thirty-five years driving from town to town doing local research. I do have some amount of information from almost every state. There are a number of good local books relating to soda bottlers and bottles in general. 

Eventually I want to get a database online for interested people to check and also add information not already there. I doubt that a single individual can do justice to the task considering that eight thousand bottlers were operating in a single year in 1910, according to the National Bottlers Gazette. 

Regards, Dennis Smith, 11 Cleveland Drive, Buffalo, NY 14223

From me, CG : I think Dennis' remark above gives just a tip of the iceberg to what is involved in researching a soda brand, or its bottler. I get hundreds of questions that I cannot answer, because it is virtually impossible, as Dennis says, for one person to know them all. I think it would be valuable to the collector hobby for this information to be documented and available for the collector searching for info regarding his or her bottles - especially online. Dennis has my help 110% to see this happen.

From Justin Simmons : A buddy of mine from Bloomington, IN. has talked alot about The Soda Fizz. He finally stopped talking and sent me the link. That's when I contacted you about receiving it myself. I can tell from reading my first one that I am really going to enjoy it. Thank you!

A funny thing happened to Coca-Cola on the way to China. The opening lines of a stand-up comedian's joke? No. Read on...

Coca-Cola was 'introduced' in China in 1928, to an eager, although confused, bunch of consumers. The words "Coca-Cola" had been translated to the Chinese characters with odd effects.

To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to "Coca-Cola" required a separate Chinese character for each of the syllables. Out of the nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, there were only about 200 of them that could be pronounced with the sounds that Coke needed, but many had to be avoided because their meanings in the Chinese language were not appropriate.

While Coca-Cola searched for its answer to the Chinese tongue-twister, many local Chinese retailers created their own problem. Some of them had made their own signs to announce Coke's availability in their shops - but they used any grouping of characters that sounded anything close to those for "Coca-Cola."

One of these homemade signs had words that sounded like Coca-Cola when pronounced, but the translation of the combination was "female horse fattened with wax." Yet another version would read, "bite the wax tadpole." 

In Vietnamese, even though the English alphabet was used, it still meant something quite odd by comparison, "The girl sings and shouts." Doesn't sound very appealing for something to "refresh", does it?

A similar thing happened to Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound on its way to China. The product's name when translated became "Smooth Sea's Pregnancy Womb Birth-Giving Magical 100 Per Cent Effective Water."

Warning: Ordering a rum and Coke in 1934 could have been hazardous to your legal standing. In that year's issue of The Coca-Cola Bottler, the executive vice-president at the time, Harrison Jones, cautioned bottlers to guard against the use of Coca-Cola in the concocting of any other beverage, especially those with alcoholic content. The warning was meant to block any trademark violations. Jones even suggested that highballs made with Coca-Cola as a mixer should be labeled with some "pet name." His recommendations? How about a "Cuba Libra" or a "Hobbleskirt Cocktail?"

Speaking of Hobbleskirt, this bottle has been used for many things other than to contain Coca-Cola. I can remember my mother with the sprinkler inserted into the bottle, shaking water on the clothes before ironing. The Seabees found another use for the bottle during WWII when they converted them into electrical insulators.

What to do with an "empty" never posed quite the perplexing problem as it did for a Kalahari Bushman in the 1984 film, "The Gods Must Be Crazy." When an empty Coca-Cola bottle, tossed quite carelessly from the open window of an airplane over the South African desert, lands in the middle of a group of bushman - they had never seen a glass bottle, much less knew what Coca-Cola was. That is when the fun began.

Coca-Cola's packaging and marketing strategists could not have envisioned more imaginative uses for the bottle. From stamp printing fabric to pounding cornmeal flour, from a digging tool to a musical instrument, every member of the bushman tribe discovered a use for this 'gift from the gods.'

Unfortunately there was only the one bottle, and possessing it became a cause of strife among the tribe that until the moment that it fell from the sky, had lived happily and worry-free.

So, whether you call it a "female horse fattened with wax", mix a drink with it and call it a "Hobbleskirt Cocktail" or consider it a "gift from the gods", Coca-Cola to most of us is just that, a "Coke".

If you have a soda-related subject that you would like to see here as an "FYI" article, or have information you yourself would like to contribute, don't be shy, send it to: FYI Idea

Until next week, Happy Collecting! CokeGirl