A Job At Brookdale Soda - by Tom Garcia

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A Kid Gets A Job

At The Brookdale Soda Company

by Tom Garcia

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Sixteen years old and looking for work, something to supplement caddying at the Country Club which was only a good thing on week-ends in fair weather. What could be handier than the soda pop factory two blocks up the street from my house? So came about my three year association with Brookdale Beverage of Bloomfield, New Jersey.

They needed extra help afternoons when the trucks returned from their routes. Unload the empties and pile on the new product so the trucks would be ready to roll bright and early the next morning.

During the summer months when school was out I worked full time week days and half a day or more on Saturday. Usually I was in the plant but occasionally I served as someone's helper on a truck route.

In those days, shortly after World War II, Coke sold for five cents a bottle from machines and candy store ice chests. That's five cents for a six ounce bottle. Pepsi (twice as much for a penny more) was six cents a bottle. Their original slogan had been, "twice as much for a nickel, too" but inflation had gotten to them.

Pepsi was our main competition because we both offered the 12 ounce packages. Brookdale didn't tout its drinks as being bracing, refreshing or healthful as did Pepsi. They had only one flavor and we had almost two dozen including a cola. We had quarts too, which they didn't.

Brookdale sold a twenty-four bottle case of the 12 ounce bottles for a dollar twenty plus deposit. Cases of quarts (12 to a case) cost a little more.

A man named Joe Peretti was Brookdale's owner and my boss. When describing him to my friends I would call him "That fat old guy that hangs out on the front porch of the plant." As I look in the mirror now, in 1999, I am the same age and size Joe Peretti was then.

The work was hard but I didn't realize it at the time or give the subject much thought. It was seventy-five cents an hour and I needed money to support my 1937 Buick's hunger for gas and oil. Gasoline was fourteen cents a gallon.

The hardest task at the plant was working the line which involved stacking cases as high as I could reach as they came off the conveyor belt from the bottle capping machine.

It was a two man job. One man maneuvered the portable conveyor sections and attached or detached pieces as needed.

The second man did the actual stacking. If the stacks started leaning one way or the other they had to be leveled and it was done with flat wood chips that were laying here and there on the concrete floor. Stacking was my favorite job.

You might think a person would have to be very muscular to do a job like stacking for hours on end. I was skinny and underweight. The job was accomplished with leverage, momentum and what I still think of as wrist flipping.

A number of times husky new employees came on the job in the morning and only lasted half a day. Brawny as they were they just didn't have the knack for the kind of work we did.

Some of the regular employees were very strong. They could throw two cases at a time, one on top of the other, up on the stack.

A guy named Sal would show how strong his hands were by putting a bottle cap between thumb and forefinger and crushing it in half.

That impressed me so I took a bottle cap home and scored it on the inside with a sharp tool. Then I glued the cork back in.

The next day I brought up the subject of Sal's cap bending with my co-worker and commented that it wasn't so hard to do. I bent down and picked up a cap from the floor and demonstrated that I could also bend a cap in half. Nothing to it!

The plant chemist had a laboratory up on the second floor. The flavors, purchased in bulk from outside sources, were gravity fed from the lab to the bottling machines.

Ginger ale mix came in gallon jugs and it was so concentrated that a little went a long way. It had to because the flavors cost almost twenty dollars per gallon.

One afternoon the chemist invited me up to the lab to show me the distillery he had built. Ginger ale mix went in and hard liquor with the flavor of anisette came out. The alcohol content of the mix was only high enough to get two shot glasses of booze per gallon so we drank very high priced drinks compliments, unknown to him, of Joe Peretti.

Brookdale employees could drink all the soda pop they wanted. Pop fresh off the line is just the right drinking temperature. Most of the employees drank quarts and didn't fool with the little twelve ounce bottles. Celery soda was my favorite.

The pop itself was a minor part of company expenses. Bottles were the big cost. At sixteen cents per bottle, one had to be sold three times before there was any profit. Stores that were habitually short on bottle returns were dropped from the route and had to go elsewhere for soda.

Saturday was our day to do mixes in the morning. Starting about 10 A.M. the drive-up customers arrived in hordes. Most would buy a case of assorted fruit flavors for the kids and quart cases of highball mixes for themselves.

Brookdale was in a residential neighborhood operating out of zoning but grandfathered because it had been there since 1935 which was before the homes and residential zoning.

They could operate but they couldn't expand. Lack of storage space meant that the Saturday mixes couldn't be made in advance, not in the quantity we needed, thus we all worked on Saturday.

Some Saturday afternoons as things started to slow down I would grab a quart of Tom Collins mix off the line, take it out to my car and replace part of the mix with gin. Peretti would have canned me on the spot if he had found out but he never did.

The most interesting things in my three years at Brookdale happened out on the route. One involved a woman candy store operator who came up with an ingenious method of cheating Brookdale out of money. Nickel and dime stuff for her but bad for the company because of the high cost of bottles.

Before I go on about her I'll explain something. Bottle problems came in two major varieties: Chippies and rusties.

Chippies had a small chip at the mouth of the bottle.

Rusties were bottles which had been under water in ice chests for a long time. They had a brown rust deposit where the lip of the cap had rusted on the glass.

An inspector sat on the line just before the bottle wash machine and pulled problem bottles. Chippies went into broken glass barrels and rusties went neck down into a vinegar solution. After an hour or so they could be sent into the wash machine.

Now, back to the woman and her scam. When a customer in a candy store popped the top on a soda and noticed a chip he wouldn't want to drink it because he might cut his lip or maybe even (unlikely but this is what he thought) swallow the chip. The customer would return the soda for a new one. The candy store person would turn the bottle in for a free replacement when the route man came by.

On one occasion I was out with a driver named Peggy (he had a peg leg) when he commented, "That dame had a whole case of chippies. Same thing last week. No way someone selling five cases a week has a whole case of chippies." The bottles were chipped all right, and still full of soda.

Our chemist analyzed the contents of some of the chippies and found out what the woman had been doing. Apparently a lot of her customers didn't finish a bottle. She chipped a piece off a good bottle and then refilled it with a little cola, a little root beer, etc., till it was full. Brookdale stopped selling to her.

A driver named Bill had a route in the black neighborhoods of nearby Newark, that being New Jersey's largest city. I got to go into bars and pool halls that white people never normally saw the inside of.

Some of the "Minnesota Fats" type pool shooters did nothing but play the game all day everyday. That was their livelihood. I wonder who was dumb enough to play them for money? I saw these guys break, then one shot after another sink every ball without ever missing one a single shot.

One day a very excited pool hall operator just had to show us his new business venture nearing completion out behind the store. We went back there and found carpenters doing the finish work on what had originally been a two car garage. It was now almost ready to go into service as a four cubicle bordello plus tiny office/supply room. Floyd, the owner/operator, invited us to come back for the grand opening but we didn't made it.

Working the round wood vinegar vat out in the yard (good ventilation needed on that job!) was not a favorite task of mine. On a Saturday morning the job got away from me as there were more new bottles to soak than space in the vat. I sent some down the conveyor that were not ready for the wash machine .

Joe Peretti came storming out screaming, "What are you doing? When did you go out of your mind? When did you go crazy?"

My reply was: "Probably the day I started working here." I was fired on the spot.

Not the end of the story. Good men are hard to find and two weeks later Peretti sent Peggy down to my house early one Saturday morning (the extra busy day of the week) to ask me to come back to work. Peggy was such a loveable guy, how could I refuse? Back to work I went but Joe Peretti and I never had another conversation of any description. We ignored each other from that day on.

At Brookdale we had the Beverage Workers Association run by Joe's son-in-law. It was a one company union. As I knew the beverage business and wanted to see what a real union did for the workers, I put in a job application at Coca Cola in Newark.

It was a year before Coke offered me a job but by then I was gainfully employed with the United States Air Force which turned out to be [one of] my real life long careers.

A final note: Brookdale Beverage went out of business many years ago, as did most of America's small independent bottlers. The plant was razed and what had been the long drive going up to the plant buildings (after passing Joe's Peretti's house on the left of the driveway) now leads to a subdivision street with upscale homes. It is named Peretti Court.

Tom Garcia is a retired USAF officer from Bloomfield and Newark, NJ. He now resides in the Tacoma, Wash., area after having spent 32 years in Tucson Ariz., where he retired from Pima County Superior Court where he was a long-time court bailiff.

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