Dear Paul and other Carnation folks, Those flavors sure sound good! That Dark Cream and Bitter Lemon ring a bell...maybe during roadtrips from Indiana to Oklahoma during the 50s....whilst stopping at Onondaga Cave! Although I grew up in Southern Indiana. I do remember Ski very well....but most important, thanks for the earlier memory of little glass soda pop bottles (always with a sandblasted texture!), the telltale bottle caps, and naturally, the wondrous red soda bottle chest on a rural grocery store's front porch. The hope of a child that when you dropped your nickels in, you could sliiiiide that bottle along its slot and pluck it out. The Soda Bottle Myth was -- if a bottle was awkward, or wouldn't slide smoothly, you were in danger of losing the ten cents --- and Old Man Eble wouldn't give your money back! cheers Amber >I think that a good number of folks in middle Lawrence made their living, >one way or another, from the Carnation plant. One of my uncles, Will >Jackson, and a great-uncle, Emery Stearns, drove milk pickup routes. > >Emery was honored at retirement for being the longest tenured employee of >Carnation in the U.S. -- 45 years. He went to work there, along with his >father, Loren, and brothers, Bill and Albert, in 1924. I'm told that this is >the year it opened. Emery and his brothers also had dairy cattle and sold >their milk to Carnation. > >My fondest recollection of Carnation is not the dairy, but the soda pop >bottling plant. Carnation developed their own flavors, mixed, bottled and >distributed regionally under the Carnation brand. My great-aunt, Katherine >Orr Jackson, remembers her uncle, Henry Orr, developing new flavors and >"trying them out" with her. > >They bottled every flavor you can imagine, including an incredible Bitter >Lemon, a dark Cream with a heavenly flavor, fruit and berry flavors and root >beer. These came in small (10 oz., perhaps?) bottles. The bottles were all >the same; embossed with the Carnation logo and type. You had to look at the >bottlecap to identify the flavor. They also franchised a lemon-lime brand, >Ski, which came in its own bottle. > >I remember drinking Carnation in my Granddad Jackson's store in Stotts City >as recently as the early 1970s. I don't know when they quit bottling; my >Granddad retired in 1975 and that was the last I ever saw of Carnation Soda >Pop. > >I'm not sure what caused the demise of the Carnation dairy plant, but I >suppose that it was the eventual dissolution of the dairy farm industry. For >years, the dairy production of southwest Missouri burgeoned until it rivaled >Wisconsin. The profits, however, turned out to be in beef; by the mid 1960s, >farmers had switched from Jersey and Gurnsey to Black Angus and Charolais. >