I was 16 and definitely not sweet although working in a Coca-cola plant should have made me that way. I don't remember how I got the job, probably from asking at the Country Club. The owner of the plant was named Ellwein. He was a member of the club and quite vocal, hmmm loud. For some reason, he liked me. He had a daughter my age, Paula.
Back in those days all soda was sold in bottles or in fountain tanks. The plant I worked at bottled Coke and 7-Up, and maybe Fresca. I don't remember if we actually bottled Fresca but I do remember Ellwein saying that he thought Fresca would knock competitor Squirt off the map. Didn't happen. The bottles were reused, so a deposit was charged when you bought the product and when you returned the bottle you received your deposit back. The deposit on each bottle was two cents. As little kids, we would look for bottles in the ditch or the ballpark, take them to a grocery store, and get two cents each.
Coca-cola "plant" is probably too big a concept for the small building that the plant really was. Maybe 100 feet by 100 feet. The bottling machine was a small part of that, maybe 30'x20'. The image below is from an article about a plant in Salem, NH, taken in 1921. Our machine wasn't much different than this.
Most of the plant was taken up by wooden cases of bottles, most of them were empty, some were full. The idea was that the full ones would leave the building not too long after being bottled. There were three or four employees, me, someone else I don't remember, the foreman, Mr Graff (a former neighbor of mine and father of my best friend in early grade school), and Don. Don was a slow and methodical man, a giant and very strong. His main job was to load the trucks with cases of soda, or pop as we called it. Today, Don may have been labeled "on the spectrum." He was slower than most to learn new things but was very good at them when he learned. He did not work on any of the machines.
My main job was on the bottling machine. One of the other employees, Mr Graff or the mystery man, would use a front end loader to bring a pallet filled to the top with cases of empty bottles. I would grab a case and put it on a ledge at the side of the "beginning" of the bottling machine. In front of me and next to the case of empties was a "moving belt." The moving belt had row after row of six holes about two inches round. My job was to take the empty bottles from the case and put them into the holes, bottle opening down, that is, after I put them into the moving belt the bottles would be upside down. As the bottles disappeared into the washer part of the machine, a metal rod would close on the neck of the bottle and hold everything in place during the washing and rinsing process.
The belt moved fast and although the speed was adjustable, profit was negatively impacted if the speed was slowed. So speed always remain at max. My task was to fill each one of the holes as the belt moved by and of course, if I was too slow and missed holes, that also negatively impacted profit. The bottles would enter the washer at my side and disappear for a few minutes as they were submerged, scrubbed (sort of), and then rinsed. At the end, the belt would appear in front of me holding six bottles which would be plopped into a temporary holder with a bright light...I was to examine each of the bottles for anything that was left in the bottle, that hadn't fallen out or been washed/rinsed away. The machine dropped 6 bottles every 10 seconds or so. Relentlessly. Without stopping. Without mercy. The bottles would then be in a part of the machine that carried them along on sort of a runway. While on this track they'd be filled with the secret coke syrup and carbonated water. And then "capped." At the end of their run on the ramp, they'd travel along a section where they would be backlit by a strong light and the person who put the bottles in the wooden cases would inspect the bottles again for any foreign objects.
Foreign objects? You might wonder what I saw. Most of the objects were paper, candy bar wrappers, cigarette packs, random paper. I had a hooked clothes hanger that I would dip into the bottle and scoop out the paper. That was easy. But then there were the maggots, the dead mice, the dead...well, who knows what some of the things were that I fished out of those bottles but they were gruesome to look at and horrible to smell. Once in a while I'd miss something, especially in a 7-Up bottle. Nothing like seeing a clean mouse in an empty bottle or worse, in a bottle filled with soda. It was fairly hard work and hard on my hands. I'd pick up two bottles by the neck between my fingers on the left hand, slap the bottle bases into my right hand and then stuff them upside down onto the belt. Unless, of course, the bottle had crap in it.
The crew was an interesting crew. Each of them gave all of the others shit, individually and as a group. Both ways. It was brutal and caustic. Hit, counter-hit. Each day. All day. I came out of there even more of a smartass than I had been. The plus side...I got to buy coke at a discount, a dollar a case plus fifty cents bottle deposit. I drank coke all the time. I had one tooth rot away which was horribly extracted by Dr. Harmel, the family dentist and father of a classmate. It was an awful end to my career in the sweet industry.
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