Vintage Glass

In the 1950s, bored teenagers in Flagstaff, Arizona, dreamed of more exciting places. There was idle talk of hopping a passing Santa Fe freight train to Los Angeles. But few, if any, did. One vicarious substitute for travel was reading the bottoms of CocaCola bottles. Each bottle told, in raised lettering, where

Before the turn of the century, the Wellington Saloon in Prescott offered its own hand-tooled, embossed flask (LEFT) that was filled from whiskey barrels, making potent potables more portable. LOCATION COURTESY OF RAWHIDE, ARIZONA'S 1880s WESTERN TOWN Crown-top Coca-Cola bottles (BELOW) were handtooled and embossed with the local bottling company's name until 1916. With the widespread bottling of soda in the 1920s, syrup pumps like the porcelain Hires root beer pump soon disappeared from soda fountain and diner counters. When machine-made bottles were introduced in 1917, Coca-Cola switched to the "Gibson Girl" bottle manufactured in Owens, Illinois, but embossed on the bottom (LEFT) with the city where the soda was bottled.

Continued from page 16 Bottles from J. F. Yorba's territorial Tucson drugstore are coveted; for sentimental value, you can't beat bottles from the Eagle Drug Store in Phoenix.

Eagle Drug was run by E. C. “Doc” Stults, a colorful pharmacist who arrived in Phoenix in 1911. He worked for druggists in Phoenix and Prescott, then opened his own store in 1917. Early in his career, he acknowledged later, he dispensed a harmless “love potion” to young men for 50 cents. He ran Eagle Drug in three different downtown locations for 36 years.

Drugstores also handled patent medicines, which promised to cure almost any condition, including sobriety; they were largely alcohol.

An elixir called Tippecanoe, manufactured in the Midwest, was sold in an ornate bottle embossed with a woodgrain finish. Its intricate label listed the various ailments it would cure on a menu that ran from the top of the bottle to the bottom, each line in a different typeface: “Dyspepsia, Mal-Assimilation of Food, Stomach Disorders, General Functional Derangements, Constipation, Tired Feelings, Malaria, Blood Disorders, Skin Eruptions, Loss of Energy, Female Debility, Feeble Appetite, Bilious Headache, etc. Price, $1.” One of the few patent medicines that originated in Arizona was F. M. Worner Co.'s product. Its bottle was embossed “Worner's Rattler Oil, Phoenix, Ariz.” Its paper label had a drawing of a coiled rattlesnake and proclaimed, “A linament (sic) for all aches and pains.” Olive oil was another product bottled for consumption mostly in the immediate market area. Graceful bottles survive for Munson Brothers and Munger Brothers, both of Phoenix. Munger Brothers became Arnold Pickle and Olive Co., a pioneer firm still operating from a plant near downtown Phoenix.

Some readers may remember a World War II song in which an insomniac — or perhaps a night-shift worker in an aircraft factory — pleaded, “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet.” They would hardly have expected then that the utilitarian milk bottle, resembling a decapitated bowling pin, would become an item of romantic nostalgia. Milk was hard to store or transport, so even towns of moderate size had more than one dairy.

Remember the smaller milk bottles used in cafeterias? The University of Arizona and Arizona State College at Tempe (now Arizona State University) had their own dairies. This proud fact was advertised on the embossed bottles and on the printed pasteboard stoppers.

(At some point in my childhood, we collected the pasteboard disks from the mouths of cafeteria milk bottles. We played a game in which we pitched our bottle tops to the ground, trying to capture an opponent's disk by covering more than half of it.) Remember the miniature milk bottles of cream that restaurants provided for coffee drinkers before powdered substitutes were invented?

Before milk was routinely homogenized, cream rose to the top of the bottle. People of middling age who grew up in colder places like Prescott, Arizona, or Fargo, North Dakota, talk about how milk froze on the porch, pushing the cream out the top of the bottle. One man remembers, “My mother scooped that off and put sugar on it. That was my treat every morning.” Phoenix boasted two olive oil producers around 1910, Munson Brothers (OPPOSITE PAGE) and Munger Brothers. Both bottlers embossed band-molded monograms of a superimposed “B” over the “M” on the handtooled bottles (BELOW). Intended for one-time use, the bottles were of a cheap grade of glass, making good collectors' specimens hard to find. Production of olive oil declined following World War II and only Munger Brothers was able to survive. It now operates in Phoenix as Arnold Pickle and Olive Company.

In the 1920s, the Central Avenue Dairy in Phoenix dispensed milk in a fancy bottle with a bulbous neck intended to capture the rising cream. Regular customers might receive a special silver-plated spoon for dipping out this cream.

The dairy was at Central Avenue and Thomas Road, now the Phoenix financial district.

In 1957 the city's first “regional” shopping mall, Park Central, opened on the site of the Central Avenue Dairy.

An expert from McCall's magazine, studying the postwar malls around the nation, assured downtown merchants that shopping centers could not diminish their trade. Subsequently, in Phoenix and other cities, downtown merchants either moved to the malls that flourished in the suburbs or went out of business.

Milk, meanwhile, gave up the bottle for waxed cardboard cartons. Then cardboard was replaced by anonymous plastic jugs. The milkman, long since motorized, yielded his customers to the supermarket and joined the iceman in retirement. Only the bottles remain as tokens of a more independent, less homogenized style of living.