I can't remember nickel Cokes but I can certainly remember them for a quarter out of glass bottles. When I was visiting my grandmother and aunt in Herrin Illinois we used to go to Bailey's Toy Shop (also the Greyhound Bus Station) to get a strawberry or orange Nehi out of their .25 cent vending machine nearly every day during the summer. On down the road in Energy Illinois was The Polar Whip with their .10 cent hamburgers and .25 cent cherry Cokes (over shaved ice and made with real cherry syrup while you waited).
I still think of sitting in my Aunt Eva's kitchen while she was making dinner (lunch).
I used to go between her house and my grandmothers during the summer vacation visiting for a week at a time each place. They didn't have air conditioning so we'd have a big rattling brass blade fan blowing on us at the table. Would be hot as blazes in there with the gas stove (the kind you lit with a match) going while she cooked. She'd get in her ancient Philco gas refrigerator and get me one of those big tall Cokes to drink with my food. The best lunch was either her fried salmon patties or fried squirrel that had been put through the pressure cooker for a few minutes to make it more tender. She'd sing a little off key wordless tune as she cooked, I can still just hear it like I was there yesterday.
Uncle Phillip would come in from the garden with his shirt off to eat with us. He was the first person I ever saw with tattoos. He'd gotten them "working for the state" during prohibition while doing a stretch at the P Farm for bootlegging. He still wore a pencil thin mustache and smoked King Edward cigars from the drugstore. I think the first cigar I ever smoked was filched out of the box by his chair.
I still have his old Elgin nickel silver pocket watch and carry it on occasion. Big as a turnip and heavy too, he'd had it down from his father.
Funny how thinking about drinking a Coke out of a glass bottle can make you remember so many things. It's hot here in Michigan today, makes me think of those hot summers in Southern Illinois. They're long gone I'm sad to say, I sat in that kitchen the last time with the both of them when I was about 13 years old.
Destry
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I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter--of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three of four times; lived well and in good compass: and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. Falstaff - Henry IV
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