When I was a boy a bottle of pop cost ten cents. Added to that was a deposit for the bottle of two or three cents if you took the bottle with you. Most pop at that time was sold in bottles so pop bottles were common and, in fact, many people who bought pop would just throw away the bottle when it was empty. Sometimes when we needed a little cash, we would walk around town looking for empty pop bottles and turn them in at the store for the deposit money.

Some bottles were the wrong kind and were not accepted for a deposit refund. We kept those bottles at home and used them each summer when we made HOMEMADE ROOT BEER! Almost every summer from the time I was very small to when I was in high school, my family made a batch of homemade root beer at least once each summer. Usually the making of the root beer was timed so that the root beer would be ready to drink about the Fourth of July.

Each year Mom and Dad purchased a box of new bottle caps from either one of the bottling companies in Holbrook or through the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue. We had a small machine for pressing the caps onto the bottles to seal them. I assume it was called a “bottle capper.”

The process for making homemade root beer had several steps. The first thing to be done was to wash all of the empty pop bottles we had collected. They were all from obscure or obsolete brands, but we didn’t care. They all had to be washed and that was done in a couple of large wash tubs on the back porch. One had soap and water and the other was for rinsing off any remaining soap so that we had completely clean bottles. We kept the supply of empty bottles in the wash house and used them each year but each year they had to be washed.

After the bottles were clean, we had to mix up the root beer. We bought “Hires Root Beer Extract” at the store. At that time it was available in many stores. The other ingredients were sugar, water and yeast. As I recall, we used about five gallons of water, about five pounds of sugar and I don’t remember how much yeast. The water had to be warm to activate the yeast to get the fizz.

The next step was to fill the bottles. Early on we used to fill the bottles with a cup or dipper and a funnel but in doing so we spilled a lot down the side of the bottle so all the bottles had to be washed off after they were bottled. Later when we got the milk separator, it had a large bowl that had a spigot on it and it was ideal for filling pop bottles. We filled the big bowl with root beer and dispensed it into the bottles without spilling any at all. We had to be sure to leave at least an inch of space between the top of the liquid and the bottle cap.

After the bottles were filled, they were capped. The capping operation took at least two people but usually when we got ready to make root beer, we had lots of friends around to help so manpower was not a problem. One person would put the cap on the bottle and the other would press down on the capper to squeeze the bottle cap edges around the lip of the pop bottle. It took a little skill to get the cap on straight so there was a good seal but we mastered that pretty quickly.

Bottles that had been capped were placed, lying on their sides, in crates or lug boxes. The boxes were then stored under Mom and Dad’s bed. The usual brewing time was about two weeks. After about a week and a half had passed, we started to pester Mom and Dad to let us open a bottle of root beer to see if it was “ready”. The root beer was taken out from under the bed and a bottle was selected. The yeast had always settled to the bottom (side) of the bottle since it was lying on its side. We could get rid of the yeast by shaking the pop before opening it. Almost always, the pop was not ready and had no fizz. When it finally was ready, it had a pretty good fizz, but we had usually drunk several bottles before that trying it out.

Once it was ready, it was a case of drinking it as fast as we could because if it got too much fizz, it wasn’t very good. We always were afraid it would pop the caps off if it got too old, but I don’t know whether or not that would have really happened. I don’t remember it ever happening but we had usually consumed it all well before it would have been that old.

Once it was ready, bottles were stood up on end and we always had a bunch of bottles in the refrigerator. Anytime we wanted a bottle of pop, we could help ourselves. We drank it like we would never have another bottle of pop in our lives. Because of the yeast, it had a slightly different taste than root beer bottled with carbon dioxide but we didn’t complain. We looked forward each year to the Homemade Root Beer!

One Easter, when I was five or six years old, my parents gave each of us boys a baby duckling. They were all yellow and fuzzy and we loved them. We named them Donald, Scrooge, Daffy and Daisy. They grew up to be the large white ducks with red around their beaks. At least some of them were females because they laid eggs. I don’t remember too many other details about the ducks except that somewhere along the line it was decided that we should kill and eat one of them. I can’t remember which one was sacrificed, but we refused to eat it. I can still vividly remember seeing that cooked duck’s carcass laying on a baking sheet with not a single bite eaten from it.

I’ll let that particular one rest in peace and tell you about the remaining three. We moved back to Heber in the summer between my kindergarten and first grade years. Mom and Dad had rented the rock house so we lived in Uncle Alma Bigler’s house for the summer. Their family lived at the Dude Ranch close to Airipine during the summer months so their house was available. When we moved there, the ducks moved with us. Uncle Alma’s house was conveniently located right at the bottom of the “West Hill”.

Being well educated boys, we knew that ducks liked to fly even though we had never seen ours fly very far. Not wanting to deny them the chance to see the earth from greater heights, we decided to carry the ducks up to the top of the hill and let them practice flying. We carried out our plan. We took the remaining ducks and carried them up to the top of the hill. We threw them up into the air so they could get a good start and watched them go! What a disappointment they were. They did flap their wings but instead of soaring into the sky as regal birds, they more or less plummeted to the earth. They managed to flap their wings and stay aloft until they got to the bottom of the hill, but then they crash landed on the road and waddled off home.

We were not to be denied and we knew that you couldn’t expect perfection on the first try, so we went down and caught them again and carried them back up to the top of the hill for a second attempt. The second try was not much more successful than the first. Again they flapped their way to the bottom of the hill, crash landed, and waddled on home.

After a few tries we decided to change the objective of the exercise. We decided to see which duck could fly the longest distance in the air before crashing. As I recall, we did that contest several times but I couldn’t tell you which flew the longest distance. Mostly they were glad to get home more or less intact.

We had those ducks for many years. They laid eggs and we ate some of the duck eggs along with chicken eggs. The ducks were pretty good at hiding their nests so we couldn’t find the eggs and as a result, we ended up with at least one or two sets of ducklings that I can remember. We enjoyed the ducks. They were fun to feed, fun to fly and just fun to watch as they waddled around or swam in the water. As my family will attest, I still enjoy watching ducks swim. I guess it all started when we got those “Mighty Ducks” for Easter when I was just a little boy.

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.