The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (21 page)

I
WOULD
HAVE
STOOD
AT
THE
WINDOW
ALL
DAY
IF
MOTHER
HAD
LET
me, watching the bottles move by. To me they looked like soldiers, marching single file. World War II was raging then, and soldiers were much on the minds of everyone, even children. Almost anything could remind us of soldiers.

Now, nearly 50 years later, through the same plate glass window, the bottles still look like soldiers to me, marching along, their heads bobbing. But it's no longer the resemblance that enthralls me, it's the fact that I've come to look at something that I haven't seen in half a century, and it's still as I remembered it.

I remember the heat as vividly as the bottles. Cotton basking in the fields, locusts whirring in the trees, the hot wind blasting through the open windows of the car, we children cranky and fighting and crying on the back seat, sweat rolling down our naked chests, our mother pleading, threatening: “If you don't straighten up and behave, I won't buy you a cold drink.”

Those trips from our farm near Carlton, Texas, to Dublin, some 20 miles away, must have been hell for her. And they must have been necessary in the extreme, for gas was rationed and new tires were impossible to come by. We didn't travel for frivolous reasons.

While Mother did her business in the stores and offices of Dublin, we kids had to wait in the car. The car that had been hot when it was moving became an oven parked on the shadeless street. We suffered. To make our suffering bearable, we teased each other, fought each other, threatened to tell on each other.

But we wouldn't have missed a trip to Dublin for the world, for at the end, just as we were starting back to the farm, Mother would pull the car up to the Dr Pepper bottling plant at Elm and Patrick streets. We would get out and stand at the window and watch the bottles march along the company's little bottling line while Mother went inside and bought us each a Dr Pepper out of the wooden, metal-lined box of melting ice that stood near the doorway.

Then we would climb back into the car and begin the journey home.

The hot wind still blasted us, sweat still rolled down our bellies, but we no longer were miserable. Our lives had been transformed by the wet bottles in our hands and the icy liquid that coursed down our parched throats like a torrent of joy.

In today's air-conditioned summers, there is no ecstasy so intense as that tiny splash of cold into our relentlessly torrid world. None at all.

This time I have driven the 100 miles from Dallas without sweating, even though the heat, when I emerge from my air-conditioned car, is as heavy and aggressive as I remembered. And this time I get to do what I never got to do when I was a child. I get to go inside the building where the bottles are marching.

Bill Kloster, who has worked at the plant for 58 years and now has inherited it from its previous owner, Grace Lyons, who died on the 100th anniversary of its opening, is in his small office, tending to his mail and phone orders. He gets two or three a day, he says, from all over the country, most of them from displaced Texans. Today's orders are from New York, California, Illinois and Nevada.

“It costs $15.27 for a case, including the deposit for the bottles and the wooden case,” he says. “The UPS charges can run up to 25 or 30 dollars. But they're willing to pay it. They've got to have it.”

What the lonesome expatriates have got to have is Dr Pepper. But not the kind of Dr Pepper that you and I buy in aluminum cans at the supermarket.

They crave the kind of Dr Pepper that Mother placed into my hand at this same spot nearly 50 years ago. The kind that's made nowhere in the world anymore but in Mr. Kloster's plant. Dr Pepper brewed with pure cane sugar instead of com syrup or NutraSweet and put up in thick glass 6½-ounce and 10-ounce bottles that must be opened with a bottle opener and are returned to the plant empty to be refilled again and again.

Mr. Kloster takes me into the sacred room, where three men are working the magic machine. One of them is taking dirty bottles from their wooden cases, inspecting them for chips and cracks and feeding them into a slot in the machine.

“The bottles go the length of this machine in hot alkali water,” Mr. Kloster says. “The alkali is strong. If you dropped some of it on your leather boot there, it would bum a hole in it. People put kerosene, brake fluid and everything else in these bottles. It has to be strong to sterilize them. Then the bottles come over here and get rinsed, then they come out clean over there.”

As they leave the washer, the bottles line up in single file and begin their march, first to one of the three syrupers for a squirt of the Dr Pepper syrup concocted by Mr. Kloster himself from a secret formula, then to one of the 20 filling heads for a larger squirt of carbonated water, then on to one of the three crowners, where their little caps are clamped on.

Then the bottles bob merrily into a machine that whisks them about in a little dance that mixes the syrup and the water, then on to the inspection station, where a man checks them for correct color and places them into their ancient wooden cases by hand.

There are 459 other Dr Pepper bottling plants across the country and other parts of the world now, but they're Johnnys-come-lately compared to this one, the oldest of them all.

Wade Morrison and Charles Alderton invented the divine elixir at the Old Corner Drug Store in Waco and named it for Dr. Charles T. Pepper of Rural Retreat, Virginia, the father of Mr. Morrison's beloved, in vain hope that the honor would help Mr. Morrison win the lady's hand. Just six years later, in 1891, Sam Houston Prim, a Dublin dealer in feed, coal, and ice, was given distribution rights to Dr Pepper within a forty-mile radius of the town.

Mr. Kloster does business out of the same building that Mr. Prim did, and still services the same area. “We go as far as Tolar, Hico, Hamilton, Iredell, Comanche, De Leon, Gorman and Desdemona,” he says.

He went to work at the plant in 1933, when he was 14 years old, sorting bottles for a dime an hour. “My father died when I was 11,” he says. “I had two brothers and three sisters, and my mother was left without any money except what she could get taking in washing and things like that. Being the oldest, I had to help out. I mowed lawns and worked at the variety store, then I came over here.”

When Mr. Prim died in 1946, his daughter, Mrs. Lyons, took over the company and made Mr. Kloster the manager. Since then, Dr Pepper has been not only his business, but his passion. When the parent company abandoned returnable bottles and began using throw-away aluminum cans and plastic bottles, he kept filling the returnable bottles. When the parent company gave up cane sugar for cheaper corn syrup, he continued using sugar. He feels strongly about it:

“My wife used to fuss at me. ‘You're wasting money,' she would say. But Mr. Prim always said we should never change the way we blended our sweetener with the Dr Pepper concentrate. And we haven't.”

Three rooms of the plant are full of Dr Pepper memorabilia that Mr. Kloster has collected over the years—signs, clocks, calendars, trays, mirrors, lamps, posters, thermometers, bottles that have held Dr Pepper at various periods of its history, a soda fountain from an old Dublin drugstore and photographs of Mr. Prim and Mrs. Lyons.

On his own signs and bottle caps, Mr. Kloster still uses some of the old advertising slogans that the parent company abandoned many years ago: “Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2 and 4,” with the three-handed clock pointing to the hours when we're most likely to need a friendly pepper-upper. “Three Times to Enjoy Life More: 10, 2 and 4.” “Good for Life.” “King of Beverages.” “Just What the Doctor Ordered,” with its picture of the doctor wearing a top hat and monocle.

And, of course, there's the ineffable bottling machine, a clattering marvel containing nothing the least bit computerish or electronic in its whole blessed body. “The bottle soaker was bought new in ‘47,” Mr. Kloster says. “We've been using the bottling machine since the ‘30s. It's the only one of its kind still operating in the United States. We can't get parts for it, so we have to do a lot of welding and improvising.”

And, in a country that's suffocating in throw-away packaging, the reusable 6½-ounce and 10-ounce bottles that the machine fills are no longer manufactured. So when the 500-and-some-odd cases now in use are broken, thrown away or disappear into antique collections, that will be the end of really real Dr Pepper.

Meanwhile, on the desk beside me stands a bottle made of thick light green glass. I pick it up. It fits my hand just right, and has a pleasant heft to it. I sip. The flavor is dark and rich. If this were wine, it would come from France and cost a lot of money.

Even in this air-conditioned office, without a cotton field in sight and not a whisper of a locust, it's a torrent of joy.

September 1991

MEMORIES OF SELMA

Most of us could tell a story or two about events in our past that we consider landmarks in our lives, pivotal happenings that took us off the course we were on and set us on another. Usually, we don't recognize those events for what they are until years later, when we can look back and see the points at which the directions of our lives were changed. But sometimes, something happens to you, and you know at once that you will never be the same. You catch yourself in the act of becoming a different person. For me, the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 was such an event. That march also was the most historically significant event that I have ever witnessed as a participant, and not as a professional observer. I'm glad I was there. This memoir was published on the 25th anniversary of the final day of the march. It's based on a journal I kept
.

S
OMETIMES
THE
SHERIFF
STANDING
ON
THE
COURTHOUSE
STEPS
WOULD
tell them the registrar was sick and hadn't come to work. Sometimes he would say they had arrived too late, that the registrar had already locked his office and gone home. Sometimes he would say they had come on the wrong day. Sometimes he didn't bother with an explanation. He just told them to leave.

But sometimes a black person would be allowed into the registration office to fill out the application form and take the test that the State of Alabama required of citizens who wanted to vote.

The test was pretty much what the registrar wanted to make it. White applicants might be asked to read their names, or the first word of the U.S. Constitution: “We.” Black applicants might be asked: “What part does the Vice President play in the Senate and the House?” or “What legal and legislative steps would the State of Alabama and the State of Mississippi have to take to combine into one state?” The registrar decided who passed the test and who didn't.

In Dallas County, Ala., in 1965, more than half the citizens were black, but only about 300 of them had been allowed to register to vote. The marches to the courthouse in Selma had added almost none to their number.

In neighboring Lowndes and Wilcox counties, where black people outnumbered white people four to one, not a single black person had registered to vote in 65 years.

The small drama at the courthouse steps had been playing almost daily since early January, when the Rev. Frederick D. Reese, the Selma pastor who had organized the Dallas County Voters League, asked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to lead a registration drive.

Dr. King's intermittent presence in Selma put the courthouse marches on the network news, but the would-be voters always were turned away at the steps, or were told to wait in line all day and then were sent home.

After church on Sunday, March 7, about 500 marchers led by the Rev. Hosea Williams of the SCLC moved through the streets, singing
We Shall Overcome
and shouting: “Free-dom! Free-dom!” They said they were going to march all the way to Montgomery, 54 miles away, and lay their grievances before Gov. George Wallace. They weren't prepared for such a march. Some of the women were wearing high-heeled shoes. But they had started.

At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which carries U.S. 80 across the Alabama River on the edge of downtown Selma, helmeted state troopers and sheriff's deputies were standing on the sidewalk and in the highway, blocking the way to Montgomery. Some carried clubs, some tear gas guns, some electric cattle prods. Some—members of Sheriff Jim Clark's special volunteer “posse”—rode horses. Some of them carried bullwhips.

Col. Al Lingo, the commander of the state troopers, ordered the marchers to disperse. When they didn't, the troopers and deputies fell upon them. They swung their clubs. They fired tear gas into the crowd. They trampled women and children under their horses. They lashed at the fallen bodies with their bullwhips. The horsemen pursued the fleeing marchers back into the town, all the way to the church where they had begun. When the melee ended, 60 black people had been injured.

Americans had never seen anything quite like that on the evening news. By Sunday night, several hundred volunteers, among them ministers, priests and students from all parts of the country, were on their way to Selma to join the struggle. One of them was the Rev. James Reeb, a young Unitarian pastor from Boston.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Reeb and another minister ate dinner in a restaurant in downtown Selma. They finished their meal and walked out onto the sidewalk. A gang of men ran out of the darkness and beat them with clubs.

Two days later, James Reeb died.

His death was one of the reasons I went. I can't say he was my friend, exactly, but I knew him. He had taken a course or two at Harvard Divinity School, where I was a graduate student. After class he would go to the refectory and drink coffee and shoot the breeze, as we all did. The divinity school is the smallest school at Harvard. We all knew almost everybody there.