All pops used to be called just Cokes. They came in 6 ounce bottles. A case of 'Cokes' came in a wooden crate sort of thing. You had to pay a deposit on the bottle and when you took it back you got your deposit back. We never had a case of Coke in our house and only one to drink now and again. When we decided we could make a few cents by returning bottles we asked Hall Parks and he gave us an old busted up case to store our bottles in. Brenda and I would walk up and down road picking up the bottles someone had pitched. Not many were pitched in our neighborhood but on the other side of the tracks where people seemed to have more the pickings were pretty good. We worked hard at our 'Job'. No one else was doing this it seemed till we started then you had to be fast to get there before someone else picked them up. One day I skidded in just in front of a big bully who will remain unnamed and the battle was on. In getting in front of him I knocked him down on the gravel and skinned him up a bit. I said I was sorry and I meant that but he wasn't very gracious about it. He was a big bully and a bunch bigger and older than us but he had been told before by my Daddy that he “Would Not” jump on his kids. So He decided he was going to see that we got nary a bottle. Well he should have known better. Brenda and I had bested him before bunches of times.
First we went to Hall Parks store everyday and asked everyone who came in if we could have their bottles. Sometimes they drank them in the store and handed them to us but mostly they promised to save them for us. There were still those who would throw the bottles out the car window but not as many and we got lots of them to. That left Mr Bully coming up on the short end of the stick. My goodness was he mad. He knocked me down on the road one day and said, “Oh I am so sorry. I didn't mean to do that”. Well he did mean to do it and I knew it so I tore in to him. Now I have always known that a bully is all blow and bluff and they back off when you turn on them. This bully had tried pushing us before and it never worked. He was tall so my head reached about 1/3 of the way up his chest and he was big but with Brenda to back me up he backed way off in a hurry. He could have taken hold of the two of us and knocked our heads together but he didn't do that which I am grateful for .
All the rest of that summer Brenda and I had free pickings of all the coke bottles on the roads plus the ones saved for us. We had enough to buy us each a pair of white buck shoes for school when it started and we had enjoyed pop sickles and candy a few times also. We were pretty proud of ourselves when we walked in to the 5th grade class room on the first day of school that year. Yep Proud as could be.
