The Coke Cooler

Perhaps the two greatest memories of Wagners Store, of all the great memories, were the penny candy cabinet, and the old Coke cooler.

The Coke cooler was a 1951 Westinghouse Electric Coca Cola Cooler - Cabinet Serial #1353054. It was designed to keep the soda bottles at a temperature of about 32 degrees fahrenheit. Anyone who enjoyed a Frostie root beer, RC Cola, or a 7 Up on a hot summer day will tell you, the sodas that came out of that cooler were good, and they were cold.

And enjoy them we did. We bought Pepsi, Coke, Sprite, Tab, Diet Rite, Fresca, Upper 10, Yoo-Hoo, Dr. Pepper, Crush, Hires, White Rock, Squirt, A&W, Fanta, Mountain Dew, and many more - some of which are still with us, most have long since gone from the market.

Sodas, or soft drinks as we called them here in Lancaster, Pa, cost between $0.05 (yes, that's a nickel) to $0.25 a bottle in the 1950's - 1960's, to more than $0.25 by the time Wagners closed in the 1970's. And of course, the bottles were returnable for a deposit! Drink it right there in the store, turn the bottle back in, and get some of your money right back! Or go out and dig up old bottles from the ground, bring them into Mr Wagner filled with packed dirt and covered with mud, and he'd still give you the deposit money (which you promptly spent on baseball cards, a candy bar, or penny candy).

It was great to open the top of the cooler, and behold the plethora of soda bottles, all crammed into the machine in no order at all. You never knew what might be in there, or if your favorite soft drink would be available. Often you had to dig through the piles of unwanted Fresca and Tab bottles to get that sweet 7 ounce Sprite bottle (the one with the dimples on it) that you wanted.

The cooler had two large side compartments with a smaller center compartment. Often the cooler was in need of a serious defrosting - frost covered the sides of both storage shelves - taking up much needed room for your favorite soft drinks. The cooler is equipped with a drain plug for defrosting.

As all Wagners Dwellers knew the cooler was located just inside the Manor Ridge Drive side door - immediately to the right. It's hallowed position never changed. The Wagners kept empty six pack holders to the left of the cooler (as you faced it), on the floor - for those who could afford to make their own "mix-and-match" six pack of sodas.

Only once was I ever on the receiving end of such great philanthropy. One hot summer day I was hanging out with two friends who lived down the street. Like most of your summer vacation, it was hot, and nothing was going on. Nothing going on was what was going on all the time when we were kids in the 60's and 70's. So the mother of these two friends hands one of them a dollar, a full one dollar bill, and tells us to go to Wagners and get a six pack of soft drinks and bring them back. She wanted an RC Cola as I recall, and she didn't care what we got for the other five. This was too good to be true!

So off we went on our soft drink shopping journey (we had to walk all of 1/2 block to get there from their house). We took our time and each selected a soft drink for ourselves (mine was a Sprite - 12 ounce bottle), her RC Cola, and then two more. My friends got to pick the other two sodas, it was, after all, their mothers money. I was just thrilled to not only have an ice cold Sprite (and a 12 ouncer too boot!) on a hot day, as well as being part of such a momentous event.

Of course, we kids could not afford to buy six soft drinks from the cooler all at once - we never had a full dollar. But we could always scrounge together a couple of nickels, a dime, and some pennies, and we could afford one soda (and maybe a few pieces of penny candy).

To this day, no soda I have had tasted as good as the sodas tht came out of the Wagners cooler.