Zoe, the 60's era of that confession brought back memories so vivid that if I hadn't known better, I could have just as easily thought that was a confession right out of my own life. Sometimes it's a bit odd the way the memory works, but I am old enough to remember being about 5 or 6 or somewhere there abouts during the mid 60's, at time when things like soft drinks were taken only as an occasional treat. Where I grew up it was the same with pizza. In my home town area, it was during the same mid-60's that pizza was in large part foreign to the average person. I'm guessing it was still a good decade or so away before I would see pizza being advertised nationally on the TV, but along the way there was a slow but gradual increase in local advertising via the newspapers and radio. Somewhere around 68' the town got it's first small momNpop pizza shop. It offered two things: pizza; pepsi. In that era, it was not a 24-7-365 fad. Tops, we (the family) would have pizza maybe once or twice a year. Outside of these event, at least in the beginning, I would have pop a good few times more per year, and yes, those rare times were especially more likely after having come in out of a few hours in the hot sun.

It's hard to remember how or when the shift occured. It seemed to be a gradual thing, at least in our town. I do remember this. There was a somewhat legendary high school football coach that moved into the area in the late 60's, and as it was, he was a big fan of pizza & coke. During the fall months (football season) he would regularly host pizza & coke parties for the team members and their families. Get this: for football games, coach would have coke, by the quart bottles (still in glass) trucked in weekly. At half time, all starters would be permitted to drink as much coke as they wanted..... to "pep them up" and restore energy for the second half, you see? It was not long after this fellow came to town that the local momNpop pizza shop upgraded their offerings: pizza; pepsi; coke; root-beer.

It seems well within the realm of liklihood that the further back in time one goes, the more likely it was that the given recipe in use by Coke Corp was at least reasonably untainted, keeping in mind there is somewhat of a limite this theoretical untaintedness: a product made of plain- refined sugar, relatively safe drinking water (not fluoridated), and some form of liquid /syrup extracted derived from the coca plant. This of course is moot now that we are well entrenched in the era of pop and pizza and the like "treats" being a never ending, 24-7-365 phenom.