Memories of Brookdale Soda

By Anthony Buccino

Brookdale Club Soda, an original

*****

I never drank milk except in coffee when I was a kid. That was back in the days when milkmen made house calls.

In our neighborhood on Gless Avenue in Belleville, New Jersey, we had strong young fellows who delivered our cases of 12-pack Brookdale soda bottles.

The men, strong and sure, gripped the cases, one in each hand and lugged our soda up the stairs to our second floor apartment.

I remember those big strong young men and the quiet summers on a dead end street.

It's funny, here, now, so many years later, how finding this old sealed bottle of Sparkling Club Soda brings me back home…

We drink Brookdale soda in my house. It's the only kind we buy. It says right on every bottle, "Pride of the Garden State."

It satisfies better than the TV-hyped soda and it's the soda pop I grew up with.

When I was a kid, I called the fruit punch flavor 'blood' and the cherry pit flavor tickled and chilled my chest after a hard day of play.

The bright green soda was lemon-lime. The lemon flavored soda was clear. The ginger-ale was kind of rusty looking. The 'Cheers' flavor was good for mixing grown-up drinks. It was a mix between lemon and ginger-ale.

They even had a quinine flavored soda! Whatever for!

The cream soda had a taste of vanilla. The birch beer was brown and had a kick to it. The orange was orange and left a dye stain on your lips if you were sloppy.

On my first visit to Ashtabula, Ohio, the summer dog day afternoon sun dried me out.

"Soda, please?" I asked my new friends. I waited for them to break out the Brookdale.

My throat was parched. My kingdom for a glass of Brookdale soda, I thought.

In the land of Buckeyes, where they think the Garden State has something to do with Eden, the place, not the TV star, I got a very, very tall glass of club soda!

Yuk! It tasted like the sands of Walnut Beach! What made matters worse was, it wasn't even Brookdale! How foreign can you get?

The people in Ohio, (it really is in the U.S., though you can't prove it by what they drink) call soda "pop."

So, if you're ever out that way and the water doesn't fancy your suit, don't ask, "Soda, please?" Unless you're on a new diet.

I should put in to collect hazard pay for attempting to put ice in my Brookdale soda.

Lately, as my adulthood approaches, I've flavored Kola flavor. It's not cola, or un-cola, it's Kola! And I think it tastes best with lots of ice in a tall glass.

Every time I open the freezer door, a rock hard package of Sara Lee's dessert crashes onto my bare feet.

I won't say I'm a slow learner, but after about the fourth time around, I tried moving back with the freezer door when I opened it for the ice.

Good idea, right? I thought so, but that crumb cake was smarter than that.

It waited until I stepped around to get the tray, then it crashed. I put some ice in a glass and the rest on my foot.

If it keeps up like this, the soda made from artesian well water may just be my downfall.

Unless, and I just thought of this, unless I put the whole bottle in the freezer, then I won't have to get the ice!

Hmmmm, that sounds like a cool, safe idea for a hot summer night, doesn't it?

But I better remember the bottle or I'll really have something to write the folks in Ashtabula about.

I just remembered that those sealed bottles tend to explode when they freeze.

I grew up with that too, on the back porch, in the cold, cold winter nights in Belleville, New Jersey.

POST SCRIPT - We get a random email every so often from some transplanted Brookdale Soda drinker who wants to know if the beverage is still available. WE welcome your emails. In fact, someone offered us two cases of empties whether or not there's a deposit available.

The last time this story was published, in 1996, for the second time in The Independent Press of Bloomfield, the soda pop distributor had been shuttered for several years. Brookdale was also the name of a neighborhood bordering Bloomfield and Clifton.

The site of the Brookdale soda depot at the Allwood Circle in Clifton is now a car parts store. The depot site on No. Sixth Street in Newark has been abandoned. In fact, you can see the back of the building from the Newark City Subway. The Home Liquors and Heller/Heller stores don't carry it either.

The Sinisi depot on Montgomery Street in Bloomfield has no sodas. And lastly, the Brookdale soda depot in Bloomfield near High Street and East Passaic Avenue has been converted to housing.

Anyway, 28 years ago, who would have conceived of a world without Brookdale Soda?

-- (July 16, 2004)

Adapted from:

A Father's Place, An Eclectic Collection