Soda run

But not just any soda, of course.  The soda.  Dublin Dr Pepper.

Some weeks ago, Shiny Woman, Hero Woman, and I made a date to make a run up to Dublin to tour the Dr Pepper plant, the oldest one still in service.  It’s been in continuous operation in the same building since 1891.  I enjoy taking friends up to see the plant; I first toured it with my Cub Scout den in ’67 or ’68, back when the bottle washer (newest hardware in the plant; installed in ’65) was still new.  They picked me up at eight and started up 183 toward Lampasas.  (I told Hero Woman, who was driving, to ignore the map from the Web site, ’cos it takes you about an hour out of your way.)

A short stop in Lampasas for them to get some kind of convenience-store breakfast and a bathroom break for everyone, and we went on up 281 to Hamilton.  At Olin, we turned off on FM 219 and did the Meandering Farm-to-Market Road thing for 35 miles or so, through Carlton and Purves and coming out on the east side of Dublin, maybe a mile from the plant and in time for the second tour of the day at eleven o’clock, which we almost missed because I forgot to watch the time.  However, an alert employee got us herded in only a minute or two late, before we missed anything.

Since the last time I was there they’ve spruced up a bit—given the bottle washer a coat of paint and cleaned up the alkali encrustations, and gotten a much prettier full-color reproduction of the washer’s cross-section.  The original one, which had been in place since the washer was put in, was badly faded and water-stained.  Our tour guide, as is so often the case with young tour guides, had no notion of pacing his speeches and gabbled through them at ninety miles an hour.  He would have done a lot better had he slowed down to an intelligible speed.  Even so, he obviously knew the material; he works the bottling line on Wednesdays, the only day of the week they run any more because (1) the machinery, some of which dates to the 1920s, is prone to breakdowns and (2) “they can’t get the wood bottles, you know.”  The last domestic glass company making returnable bottles quit doing so in the 1990s, and non-returnable bottles are too fragile to stand up to being bounced around the bottle washer.  (A side-by-side comparison of returnable and non-returnable bottles will show you how much thicker the returnables were, all round.)  When the stock of returnable bottles are finally all broken or worn out, the bottling line will have to be decommissioned.

Some of the memorabilia in the “museum” had been changed out since I’d been by last, so there were some new things to see.  The museum contains a selection of memorabilia from the collection of a former owner, who collected absolutely ANYthing that said “Dr Pepper” on it, including one or two items that are so rare as to be literally priceless; e.g., the 1941 “Patriotic Girl” stand-up—created for a 1942 ad campaign, her stars-and-stripes halter-and-shorts outfit outraged the bluenoses and Dr Pepper was forced to end the campaign and destroy all copies—except this one, hidden in a storeroom to re-emerge in a more broad-minded time.  Because it is unique, no one is willing to put a value on it, and hence it’s uninsurable.

We left about noon with six cases in the hatch, three of bottles and three of cans.  I mentioned at work that I was taking the trip and had orders for four cases right away, I always have to bring back a case for T or she’ll have a conniption, and the last one is for domestic use.  For the variety of it Hero Woman decided to drive back via Meridian, Clifton, Valley Mills, and Waco.  We stopped for a few minutes in Clifton to let me take pictures of a darling abandoned gas station/grocery, a survival of the 1920s built of peanut-brittle flagged limestone.  (I wish I had the money to buy and restore it; I would in a minute.)  The ninety miles to Waco took several minutes too long given we all wanted our lunches—I had something of a “need-food” headache myself.  We stopped and ate at a Texas Roadhouse, where I fortunately didn’t find the wall-size mural of Poppy and Dubya as stagecoach drivers until it was too late to fulminate about it.  On the way out of town we stopped at Best Buy to let Shiny Woman look for the B5 Season 3 DVD (they didn’t have it), and then drove home down I-35, getting back around four.  It was a good day-trip excursion, and I certainly didn’t object to getting to spend the day with two of my favorite people!

The platinum-reinforced possum created a bluebonnet genre painting.  Fnord.