As I have mentioned before, when I was a teenager I worked at the Heber Store. At that time most soft drinks (pop) were sold in glass bottles. Customers had to pay a deposit of two or three cents for each bottle that left the store. When the bottles were returned to the store the customer was refunded the deposit money. Most customers just returned the empty bottles and exchanged them for the full ones they were taking out of the store and no money had to change hands. Since the people in Heber drank lots of pop, we ended up with a large basket full of empty bottles almost each day the store was open.
Then, as now, there were two major bottling companies: Coca Cola and Pepsi. Since some of the empty bottles were from Coke and some from Pepsi, when the delivery man came to bring the pop and take back the empty bottles for refilling, he had to sort out the bottles that were his.
Somewhere along the way the pop delivery men made a deal with my brother Terry that if he would sort the bottles each day and put them in the appropriate wooden cartons owned by the different bottling companies, they would pay him two six packs of pop each time they came to deliver pop to the store and pick up the empty bottles. Since it wasn’t too difficult to do the sorting as he emptied the pop bottle basket each day, he agreed to do it. Since I also worked at the store part time, I did some of the sorting. As a result, about every two weeks Terry would get paid two six‑packs of pop for his trouble.
This is where we ran into a slight problem. The Coke man agreed to pay Terry with six-packs of 7‑Up or some flavor which we could drink, but the Pepsi man paid up only with Pepsi which we did not drink since it was a cola drink and contained caffeine. To add to the dilemma, the Pepsi man paid up with a six‑pack of 16 oz. bottles of Pepsi instead of the standard 12 oz. bottles.
I am not sure exactly who hit on the solution to our problem but someone in our family figured out that we certainly didn’t want to cause any one of our neighbors or friends to have to drink caffeinated pop, so giving the Pepsi away was not the solution. Furthermore, if you shook up a 16 oz. bottle of Pepsi you got quite a fizz so we just used the Pepsi to have “pop fights.” Everyone would take a bottle of Pepsi, shake it up while holding his thumb over the opening, and by lifting the thumb just so, he could direct the spray of pop at his opponent in the fight.
Needless to say, we made quite a mess but we also had lots of fun and besides, we probably saved some person’s poor soul from hell by using up some of that Pepsi so no one drank it. I’m not sure Mom ever knew about our pop fights, but I’m sure she probably wondered about our clothes that were a little sticky. With 16 oz. of pop, the fight could go on for several minutes at a time.
I don’t know whether the store got different delivery men or what, but somewhere along the way the deal fell apart and so the pop fights had to stop. I can still smell and even taste (but only a drop or two) the Pepsi that soaked me more than once.