By Jim Hagarty
2008
When I was a kid – 20 years old, I think I was – I put in the hardest summer I ever worked. Harder than any summer I spent on the farm or even on bridge construction. For more than two months back in 1971 I delivered pop. Homegrown pop sold in every shop for 30 miles around. I know because I delivered it to all those shops, though not the many ones in Stratford that sold it.
Kist Beverages was started here and bottled in a building down behind the old Beacon Herald building where an eight-storey condo now sits. Every day I would leave the warehouse in my big blue truck jammed to the rafters with heavy wooden cases (no plastic back then) which carried heavy glass bottles (no plastic back then.) I had five distinct routes – each of them heading in a different direction from Stratford, one for each day of the week.
I never was the strongest pup in the litter and so I had a heck of a time hauling these boxes of pop up and down rickety old stairs in some scary basements where rats were right at home. I never could toss the pop around like those big Coke and Pepsi guys who handled their cases like they were empty cardboard boxes.
Even today, when I’m out driving with my family, I can point to country stores that just don’t exist any more – often the buildings themselves are gone – and tell them, “I used to deliver pop there,” with a voice filled partly with pride and partly with pain at the memory. I took pop to gas stations that are gone and grocery stores. Khuryville, Slabtown, Kennicott, Rostock, Cromarty, Staffa, Mitchell, Wellesley, New Hamburg, St. Marys, Monkton, Brodhagen and many more.
The thing that Kist had going for it, over its more famous competitors, was its variety and taste. It had orange, lime, cream soda, grape, and root beer. It also had a drink called Double Cola. But its big seller, my old boss Graeme Martin reminds me, was Green Label gingerale which, in this area, rivalled even Canada Dry in popularity. It was hard to keep some stores stocked with it at certain times of the year, they went through it so fast.
Kist’s pop came in quart bottles as well as the 10-ounce ones. Sometimes, covered in sweat while delivering the stuff on a hot summer’s day, I’d grab a warm quart of orange from the truck and trade it for a cold one out of a store cooler. Back outside, I’d pop the top (no twist caps then) lift it up and down the whole 26 ounces in a few big swigs.
Since then, I’ve regaled others with tales about how good that pop was, how nothing on the market now compares.
Kist disappeared years ago, bought up by this company and that but I had heard its pop was still around. The other day, I saw it in a store – in glass bottle form under a different name – and I impulsively bought nine bottles and brought them home. I set them all around the supper table and prepared everyone for the treat of their lives. I chose a lime for myself and after savouring the look of the bottle for a while, I popped the top and took a swig.
I’ve never tasted anything so awful in my life.
Either it wasn’t really Kist, my taste buds have changed dramatically or I’ve been living a lie for the last 37 years.
The only way to know for sure, I guess, would be to tilt that bottle back after a sweltering day of delivering hundreds of them.
Thankfully, I will never again get a chance to do that.
