Well, the weekend is here – and I'm thinking about pop.
I pretty much avoid drinking it during the week so I can really enjoy it on the weekend. This whole ritual is probably a throwback to my youth, when the same rules applied.
Thus it's a good time for a post about pop – a favorite topic on this blog, as my regular readers know.
So here's an ad introducing a pop I'd never heard of: Patio Diet Cola. It ran in the Journal back on July 10, 1963. Patio Diet Cola was bottled by Pepsi-Cola. (The ad shows it being locally produced at 3209 Chester Avenue in Cleveland.)
The ad features Figure Expert Debbie Drake, once profiled in LIFE magazine as "America's First Female TV Fitness Guru."
But – you've never heard of Patio Diet Cola? That's because Patio Diet Cola was rebranded a year later as: Diet Pepsi!
This article on BBC.com tells the whole story, how Pepsi was initially worried the product would fail and thus avoided rolling it out as a Pepsi variation. (Apparently Patio Diet Cola also figured prominently in a few episodes of Mad Men in its third season.)
This Wiki entry also provides a nice history of Patio Diet Cola and a few other products in the 'Patio' line.
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Do you refer to your favorite fizzy soft drink as pop – or soda pop? (I may have asked this before.) In our house when I was growing up, it was always 'pop' – as in, "Can we have pop tonight, Mom?"
I didn't know any other way of referring to it until I was living in the dorm at Ohio State and a fellow dorm-mate from New York said something like, "I could go for a soda." Immediately, I thought: "What kind? Chocolate? Vanilla?"
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So what's at 3209 Chester Avenue in Cleveland today? It doesn't look like any bottling is going on there today at The Venue at Chester. But it's easy to imagine that it once did there.
6 comments:
Pennsyltucky we were soda-poppers because, I think, we were aswarm with tourists from all over the place and it helped to not get made fun of as a hick to call it both. Now, though, it's "pop."
I'd never heard of Patio as a soft drink. I would never have paid any attention to anyways because diet soda-pop was well outside my area of interest.
I wonder if it was marketed more to women, like LIKE - "The first soft drink just for girls."
I'm not sure if I remember Patio Cola, but I do remember Debbie Drake; even at the age of seven, I found pretty girls fascinating, and Ms. Drake certainly qualified. IIRC, she popped (ysptp) up on "Mike Douglas" and the "Today" show.
Paige Palmer 2.0.
Diet Pepsi is my pop of choice although I usually drink iced tea. Nice to see the history on it. This morning I'm drinking my iced tea from a really cool Pepsi glass. They are featured on the side of many Pepsi machines all icy and cool. They have a twisted lower section to help in the grip. I tracked them down and bought a few for home use.
https://good-design.org/projects/pepsi-drinking-glass/
I call it pop too.Soda just sounds weird to me.Like when someone calls a bag a "sack".
Alan beat me to the Paige Palmer reference. I always thought she was the first lady of fitness. I'd join my mother doing her "fanny, bump, bump" in front of the TV.
I liked watching her, too.
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