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Quote of the Day: “How About a Co-Cola?”
My mother was born and raised in the small town of Ridge Spring, SC on a large farm with a huge columned house. My older brother was born there shortly after our father went off in WWII. When I was growing up, my family would often go down for several weeks during the summers and sometimes, my father would drive back home to work for several weeks and then come back to get us at the end of the summer. For most of the summer, all we did was play outside.
Even though there was a lot of shade from the trees, there was no air conditioning and us kids would get pretty hot in the mid-afternoon after playing outside all day.
Our grandmother’s solution to this was to call out “How about a Co-Cola?” – never a “Coca Cola” and absolutely not “Pepsi”. That was the sign for us to come running to the large screened porch where there was a top-loading cooler with cold drinks inside and the bottle opener on the sides, like gas stations used to have. Everyone who was in the house at the time would come and we would all open up a bottle – the first sip of an ice-cold “Co-cola” on a hot day was wonderful.
On special occasions, a cold watermelon would be sliced and shared by “Na” – my older brother’s name for our grandmother and since he was the oldest of all the grandchildren, and the name stuck. It was a very social event and we would talk about events of the day until everyone was done. Then the kids would go back to playing outside. Who knows what the adults did!
Even though all the kids knew right where the cooler was, it would have been unthinkable to go get a Co-Cola out by ourselves, and only “Na” could declare “Co-cola” time.
What family social events do you remember from when you were growing up?
Published in Group Writing
I could feel the bubbles while reading…Thanks, @willowspring
I was born during the depression. The period of my childhood matching what you describe was during the 1940’s. We were poor and I played outside all the time and it was a real treat to have a ‘Co-cola’, and that is how we pronounced it in the Atlanta area. A ‘Co-cola’ cost a nickel then and there was only one version to buy, the original bottle that was frequently used as a descriptive term for a shapely female.
Here’s my additional connection. My maternal grandfather grew flowers and was sometimes called a horticulturist by those familiar with that term but he had no formal training. He did have the distinction of working at one time growing flowers on Asa Candler’s Briarcliff Estate. Candler was the founder of the Coca-Cola Corporation.
We also had “Co-Colas” in Atlanta although they were in the fridge – definitely not as romantic as the ice cooler.
When I was growing up, there was a place in Buckhead (in a neighborhood where the houses had become businesses – law offices, accountants, etc.) where we would go for watermelon. They had wooden tables out under the shade of the trees in the backyard. They would cover them with brown paper and bring you watermelon slices (with salt shakers, of course.) You could spit your seeds on the ground, make a mess (that your mother would not have to clean up), and generally have a great time. Then when you were done, they would bundle everything up in the paper and put more down for the next family.
That’s a “plantation” for sure!
I am not sure if I have written about this before, but there were two things I believed as a kid. The first was that the house was built before the civil war and the second was that the large scar my grandfather had on his face was from a cannon ball in the same war. I believed these things so strongly, there was no point in talking to any adult about them.
Sadly, reality was not quite so romantic as my sure knowledge.
The house was built in the 20’s and my grandfather’s scar was from a skin transplant required by a skin cancer treatment.
There was Thanksgiving. My aunt and uncle would drive from Jamestown, NY to Scottsdale, Arizona every year to avoid winter in the Northeast. They’d stop at our house in Raleigh over Thanksgiving. They were both world travelers, and we would watch slides of their trips from the previous year.
Routine events included the Friday night buffet at the Raleigh Country Club, followed by “Clubo”, our version of Bingo. Of course, the 4th of July at the Club was also a blast. There were tons of games, then the day would end with a fireworks display that rivaled the others around town. Sadly, one woman complained about “Clubo” (mainly because her husband went and she didn’t) and the authorities said it was gambling and shut it down. IIRC, the fireworks went away when the city passed some ordinance prohibiting them inside city limits.
I had forgotten about all of the games my grandparents had – games like Chinese Checkers, Parcheesi and so on. We kids usually ended up with our own set of rules.
Except for my grandfather sometimes watching baseball, there was very little TV watching going on.
Loved it! I guess there are some things that really don’t change. I grew up about a mile from my Grandmother’s house during the 1990s. We call her “Grandmother,” though years later she picked up the name “Grumbunny” – sometimes shortened to “Grum” or otherwise “Bunny.” There were 16 of us, and since we were all fortunate enough to grow relatively close to each other during that decade, every Christmas and Thanksgiving was packed, either at my house (the house my grandparents moved to when they came to Florida in 1968) or the house that they moved into when my family moved in to their old one.
During these wonderful years, Grandmother and “Papa” (the man sticking his tongue out at you in my profile pic) were extraordinary hosts. Usually these get-togethers had about 50 of us crammed in – though us little ones were outside, playing some variation of tag. We all adored Grandmother, but her most appealing quality to her grandkids was that the house always had coco puffs and coca-cola. Years later, she explained to us that it actually drove her a little nuts that at the end of the party she had to go around picking up half-full cans because us grandkids weren’t great at keeping tabs on our sodas. Since she was never short on supply, we were quite liberal with fetching a new one when we couldn’t track ours down – sound like your generation was a more conscientious one, but I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t know there. ;)
Actually, there is more to this, provided by my brother after his years in Nashville and doing work throughout the South.
“Co-cola” is a generic term. just as “Coke” is in other places of the South. If a hostess asks you if you want a “co-cola” or a “coke”,and you say “Yes”, you will often get the follow-up question- “What kind of co-cola would you like? Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Coke, lemon-lime, what?”
Well, almost. When someone says, “Do you want to get a Coke?” or “Co-cola?” They are inviting you to get a soft drink. I’ve never had a server ask, “What kind of co-cola would you like? Dr Pepper, Mountain Dew, Coke, lemon-lime, what?”
I’m from Atlanta and I have lived in various locations across the South. Although, I’ve never lived in Nashville, so……
During WWII and for just a few years more, my grandfather ran a small community grocery store outside Atlanta. My parents were divorced and we lived with my mother’s folks next to the grocery store. So I pretty much know about the soft drinks from that time. No Co-Cola in a different later introduced container has ever been as good tasting as that in the original six ounce bottle. Can you believe anyone today would be satisfied with a six ounce drink? The competition to Co-Cola back then we called ‘belly-washers’ and they came in twelve ounce bottles for the same price: Pepsi-Cola, Royal Crown (RC) cola, and Red Rock Cola. But don’t kid yourself, even twice as much of these ‘colas’ didn’t beat Co-Cola. The other competitors offered flavor variations in bottles varying from six to twelve ounces, but every brand was offered only in a single form: Dr. Pepper, Seven-Up, Orange Crush, Nehi Orange and Grape.
After the war everything broke loose, new brands, cans, plastic bottles, liters, diet, you name it, and I never tasted a Co-Cola that matched the original again.
Your story reminds me of a family tragedy.
My mother’s grandfather was a businessman in Augusta GA and a friend of Ty Cobb. Cobb also had several business interests in Augusta. Our tragic family story is that he rejected his friend Cobb’s advice that he get in early on a fly-by-night Georgia startup selling carbonated colored sugared water in glass bottles. That dumb idea was Coca Cola. Cobb got rich and our modest family fortune disappeared in the Depression.
My brothers and I can’t drink a Coke without an ironic toast to ancestral business acumen.
I still play Stratego with my middle daughter. It’s been a while, though . . .
Our family afternoon break involved my mother’s homemade root beer. After dinner (farm dinner is at 1:00 P.M.) we’d go back out and haul some more hay bales in from the fields to stack up in the sheds for winter feeding. We’d usually get about three more wagon loads of bales before it was time to stop to do the afternoon milking. So, we’d park the wagon, and come into the yard to change out of the bale aprons and gloves, and into the coveralls and cow milking rubber boots.
But, first–a root beer break. Sometimes, we’d just drink the root beer and eat cookies (usually warm from the oven) and sometimes we’d have a root beer float. But, always, it was with my mom’s homemade root beer. She made it in a ten gallon milk can. She mixed up yeast and water and sugar with the root beer extract. Then that was heated up till the sugar melted, and then poured into the milk can that already had the water measured into it. I don’t think she actually made ten gallons of root beer, but she used the milk can because it was big enough to hold a lot of liquid. She’d then put all the root beer into Karo Syrup bottles, two quart sized, and screw on the caps tightly. She’d kept the cardboard circles inside the caps, so that they’d seal up and let the yeast work. These bottles went down in the old basement where it was very cool. I don’t even know how long she let it “brew.”
When the root beer was ready, she’d bring it up and chill it in the refrigerator, and we’d have our afternoon snack of root beer with something, before we’d go do the milking. Most nights, we’d have enough daylight after we finished in the barn to go haul another wagon load of bales before we’d go in for supper.
Wow, that all happened in a galaxy that was a long time ago, and far, far away from my life now!
My wife – the Maryland Yankee – had a hard time understanding that “Dinner” could sometimes be “Lunch” and sometimes “Supper”. For us, the one big mid-day dinner was Sunday. I think my grandparents were too old and we were too young to actually work at hard jobs.