The Coca-Cola Company may have invented as well as perfected the art of iconic implant. Their Betty Grable-shaped bottle and ribbon-style lettering saturated every aspect of life as I knew it. And it was never subtle. The name Coca-Cola included the word “Drink” in all its advertisements—and it seemed more of a command than a plea. To keep the pressure on, Coke paraphernalia was dispatched everywhere. The red and white signs were attached to anything that didn’t move, and the things that could move had ample opportunity to carry the Coke message along. Just about every item of merchandise at sometime or another featured a Coca-Cola edition, including shirts, caps, yo-yos, pencils, tablets, bicycles, wagons, and yes, even underwear. Every grocery and country store in America added “Drink Coca-Cola” bull’s-eye discs as bookends for their storefront signs. My first metal lunchbox portrayed a Norman Rockwell image of a delighted angler. And even there, beckoning at me from a tilted corner of the man’s wicker creel, was the greenish neck of a bottled Coke.

Despite the impression of widespread popularity, a kid in the early Fifties still considered Coca-Cola to be a special treat. That rare reward of a simple soft drink cannot be measured against the numb gratification that kids would eventually demand. My mother and I lived a frugal life, and it was akin to luxury to even split a soft drink. On occasions, perhaps as we watched a favorite television program on Saturday night, we would halve a bottle. For those times, my mother always chose the empty jars she saved from pimento cheese spread. In those tiny tumblers, a single bottle of Coke would yield two portions—with room for one cube of ice as a chill-topper. In all those Saturday nights, I never knew a time we were disloyal to the brand. If there had been a Nielsen Rating for soft-drink households, we were a Coca-Cola family.