From Richard Mix, --www.bottleworld.com-- : This week's bottle offer is on the wonderful ZOO ATLANTA PANDA bottle.  I was able to secure a small quantity of these at a great price.  I am offering them on a first-come-first-served basis for ONLY $25 each! I also have a few more of the NCAA bottles in tube (last week's offer) left for $10 each.  Shipping is $6 first bottle and $2 each additional!! --click here to see Richard Mix's auctions--

From Mike Elling : For Sale: 2003 Paducah 8oz Coca-Cola 100th Anniversary Bottles are being rationed by the distributor. I can presently offer one bottle with no seam through the logo design at $10.00 parcel postpaid or $12.50 priority postpaid in the U.S.. Mike Elling, 4042 Sidonia Road, Sharon, TN 38255; or for more information, E-mail: Chero Mike 

From Michael Miller : BOOK: A Collector's Guide to Arizona Bottles & Stoneware. For ordering information, contact: Michael Miller, 9214 W. Gary Road, Peoria, AZ 85345, PH: (623) 486-3123 or by E-mail: helgramike@earthlink.net.

Regarding Robert Curtis : Earlier this week, it came to my attention that Robert's email address bounced. I just wanted to drop a note to those who may have tried it before - that it still bounced when I tried it today.

Be sure to send me your UP FOR GRABS item listings! E-mail to: Up For Grabs 

From Esma Irvine : I am looking for Bogalusa, Louisiana bottles, soda water or any others from Bogalusa, especially those made by the Root Bottling Company, New Orleans, Louisiana. Contact: Esma Irvine, 521 Louisiana Ave., Bogalusa, LA 70427, Ph: (985) 735-7164.

There are also WANTED items listed <here> at the bottom of the page. 

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

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

May 9-10 (Friday-Saturday) Mansfield, Ohio
Ohio Bottle Club's 25th Annual Show & Sale
(Sat. 8AM-2PM, early admission Fri. 2PM-6PM)
at the Richland County Fairgrounds, U.S. Rte 30 (Trimble Rd. exit), Mansfield, Ohio
INFO: RON HANDS, PH: (330) 634-1977, E-mail: rshands225@yahoo.com 

May 10 (Saturday) Missoula, Montana
Montana Antique Bottle, Collectible & Advertising Show & Sale
(Sat. 9AM-4PM, early admission 7AM)
at the Elks Lodge, corner of E. Front & Pattee St., Missoula, Montana
INFO: RAY THOMPSON, P. O. Box 9003, Missoula, MT 59807
PH: (406) 273-7780, E-mail: kcthomp@aol.com  
or TOM BRACKMAN, PH: (406) 227-5301, E-mail: abrackman@juno.com 

The New South Wales Chapter of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club is holding their annual giant swap meet at the South Hurstville RSL, 71 Connells Point Road, South Hurstville, NSW, Australia on Sunday May 25, 2003 from 10:30am-2pm. Admission is Free. For additional information, please contact Brian Hill, at +61-407-922-291. 

Smokyfest 2003 will be held at the Holiday Inn in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee from June 5-7, 2003. Events will include welcome party, silent auction, swap meet, scavenger hunt, banquet and room hopping. For more information, please contact Jean Waddell, 686 Antioch Road, Cedartown, GA 30125. Please call toll free for hotel reservations (800) 782-3119.

June 21, 2003 - Houston, Texas (9am - 4pm)
Gulf Coast Bottle & Jar Club presents their 34th Annual Antique Bottle, Advertising and Collectibles Show and Sale - at the Marriott (formerly Radisson Hotel) 9100 Gulf Freeway, Houston, Texas 77017 (713)943-7979. Admission $2. Early admission Friday night June 20th - 7-10:30 pm - $10. per person. Wide variety of bottles, cans, fruit jars, inks, milk bottles, drug store collectibles - Coca Cola - Dr. Pepper - 7 UP - Orange Crush, Texas memorabilia, oil company items, and lots lots more! For Sales Table and Show Information, please contact Barbara Puckett, 907 W. Temple, Houston, TX 77009, (713) 862-1690 or e-mail for information - bjcoll@hotmail.com or red1@wt.net.

If you would like to view the full 'events calendar,' I now maintain an online one <here>.
Any new events  in your area? E-mail it so all of us can know, to: Upcoming Events

I hope to see anyone who is planning to attend the show in Mansfield, Ohio next weekend (May 9-10th). Look for me, I'll be at the FOHBC table with lots of goodies.

This weekend, on Saturday, I'll be at the local show in my hometown, at the Appalachian Fairgrounds in Gray, Tennessee. I look forward to meeting some of you who have already mailed me that you'll be there. 

Please come by at either show, say "Hey" and let me get your photo too! 

Until next week, Happy Collecting! CokeGirl

In Paducah, Coke was another word for Carson

Luther F. Carson finished bottling his first case of a new soft drink at 10:35a.m. on March 27, 1903, put it on his shoulder and walked to George Wolf's nearby grocery. "George, I want you to have the distinction of buying the first case of Coca-Cola ever bottled in Paducah," Carson said.

Not wanting to disappoint his long-time friend, Wolf paid 70-cents for the case and set it on the sidewalk in front of the store. People were merely curious at first, but the case gradually sold bottle-by-bottle. That convinced Wolf, who later became a La Center druggist, to place a standing order with Carson's new Paducah Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

Coca-Cola did not catch on immediately. Carson worked nights mixing and bottling the drink, and spent days peddling it in a mule-drawn wagon.

When Carson died in 1962, his family-owned, controlled or had an interest in 18 Coca-Cola bottling plants serving four states. The family sold the business in 1986 "because the day of the small bottler was over," daughter Jane Carson Myre explained.

The Paducah plant ceased bottling the next year, but has endured as a distributor in a landmark building that Luther Carson erected in 1939. This year, the company held its 100th anniversary open house in the same building, at 3141 Broadway.

The foyer has a marble floor with a large Coca-Cola logo at its center and a 10-foot chandelier in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. A spiral staircase leads to second-floor offices, whose outer doors are slightly curved to match the large rotunda. Sales center manager, John Norman, who led efforts for the centennial celebration, still uses Carson's mahogany office, desk and leather chairs.

Coca-Cola Enterprises, the parent firm of Coca-Cola, has owned the plant for approximately the last ten years, according to Donnie Jones, marketing development manager. The Paducah location compliments a distribution center in Hopkinsville and employs about 77 people.

Another conversation piece in the lobby is a foot-powered bottling/crowning machine used in the first plant at 726 S. 3rd Street. Often during peak production, it ran 12 to 16 hours a day. Carson and his nephew, Bill Carson, "to this day bear scars on their hands and arms attesting to this old-time way of bottling," according to a feature story in a 1947 edition of the Coca-Cola Bottler magazine.

According to the article, "It was a mostly a matter of guts," Carson said of starting the business. "And the rest of it was just hard physical labor."

In 1899, he and brother John Carson left the family farm in tiny Kirksey in Calloway County to work for their uncle's incline train on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There they met two men who were issuing contracts to bottle and sell Coca-Cola. 

Luther Carson became conductor and the men, who rode the train daily to their homes atop the mountain, offered him a cola franchise covering a 65-mile radius of Paducah. The brothers invested $2700 in the fledgling company and paid themselves about $60 each as a monthly salary.

The plant netted $250 during the first months. By April, 1904, the Carsons had moved to a larger building at 5th and Jackson, and purchased a Coke franchise in Evansville, Indiana, that John Carson managed. 

In 1907, the plant moved one block to a larger quarters at 6th and Jackson, and stayed there until 1939. The foot machine was used until the first automatic bottling machinery was installed around 1914.

For nine years, deliveries were made by mule and wagon. Carson once said that the mules knew the route so well that they made all the stops automatically. In 1912, he switched to a chain-driven, two-cylinder truck with a side crank. The first advertising was on oil-cloth signs painted on awnings.

The late Bill Carson hung around the plant as a small boy before he was old and tall enough to run the foot machine. One day, his uncle found him wading nearly knee-deep in sticky Coca-Cola syrup, having spilled the entire inventory on the floor. That stopped bottling until another shipment of syrup arrived.

That story became one of Luther Carson's fondest about his nephew, who later had distinguished service as an Army major. Bill Carson took over as president of the plant at 31st and Broadway when Luther Carson retired in 1959.

His daughter, Myre, who was ten when the plant was built, remembers seeing her father walking without railing on the partially built rotunda, so he could get a panoramic view of the work. She recalls that when she stubbornly threw down a spade during groundbreaking, he made her pick it up and turn another pile of soil.

"He loved that plant," she recalls. "He said there may be a bigger one in the world, but no better one."

Happy 100th Anniversary Paducah Coca-Cola Bottling Company from 'the Fizz'!

Note: This year, 2003, Paducah Coca-Cola started loading delivery trucks for the first time since 1989. Loading was previously done at the Hopkinsville location.

Condensed  from information in an article by Joe Walker in the Sunday, March 23, 2003 Business and Investment section of The Paducah Sun, submitted by Mike Elling, Sharon, Tennessee.

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