Dear readers,

Last month I made a wonderful discovery. I found a new story teller right under my nose. I was having lunch with my friend Mel and we were discussing our respective childhoods, his in Brooklyn and mine in the Bronx. There were amazing similarities. So much was the same while still different. Although we both knew that Manhattan, (“The City”), was the center of the universe I grew up thinking that you needed a passport to go to Brooklyn, while he thought there was no better place to be other than Brooklyn, so why get a passport?

We talked about about many things over lunch that day. His story telling ability was excellent and I came up with a brain storm; why not write a few articles together? He agreed that he would try to write down some of the things we discussed.

The follwing story is what he gave me to read. Except for a few typos I haven’t changed a thing. Of course he didn’t leave me too much room to co-write in this maiden voyage, so I’ll finish this introduction and let you get on with reading it.

A TWO CENTS PLAIN
Mel Yahre

I mentioned a two cents plain to my granddaughter as I took out a bottle of seltzer from the fridge. She laughed and said, “Papa, there is no two cent planes.” I laughed as I had an instant flashback of my parent’s apartment in Brooklyn during the 1940’s. Dinner on the white enameled table and a seltzer bottle sitting in the center, the in-home dispenser of the bubbly that made you belch, delivered weekly by the seltzer man with a bottle of u-bet syrup.

The seltzer man was Audrey Ziglier’s brother-in-law who had taken over the bottles from Sadie Rosenblatt’s son after my mother had an argument with him. His name was Hymie. He would walk up five flights of stairs with three cases on his back to make the delivery. Often he would drop off and pick up bottles and then climb to the roof, cross over to the next house and walk down the stairs, dropping off and picking up bottles. He had a large truck with bottles and syrup sticking out of the side. There must have been at least 1000 bottles on that truck. Hymie looked like he lived in Miami, brown as a Bosc pear, skin like leather and a pained expression on his face. His hands were like leather and he was very strong . . . he never smiled.

Seltzer bottles in green, blue and white, all with that wonderful bubbly stuff. Many of those bottles I used to squirt at my older brother, Herb, when Mamma and Pop weren’t home. What a wonderful mess and such laughter as we squirted each other.

I always enjoyed making egg creams. An egg cream? Whatsamatta, don’t you come from New York? Didn’t you live in Brooklyn? An egg cream is made by taking u-bet chocolate syrup and filling it up to about 20% of the glass, then adding 15% whole cream, and then squirting the seltzer along the inside of the glass as it fills up and develops a wonderful beer-like head. Sir gently and watch the head turn a beautiful light brown . . . a macheiya to view and a New York experience to drink! We also had syrup delivered so that we could make our own soda. My friend Elliot said that his father used to like to use strawberry jam and strawberry syrup to made a strawberry soda.

Did you ever have a seltzer bottle explode? I did, for no reason so I thought. But I found out many years later what caused that to happen. You see seltzer bottles were imported from Czechoslovakia and, of course, we as Americans felt we could do it better. In Czechoslovakia, the glass was blown as one piece. To bring costs down, in the United States it was decided to mold them in a two-piece mold, creating a mold line in the middle. Two-piece mold, water, carbonation, and pressure resulted in a mini-explosion. I can still se my family ducking as the bottle exploded. The United States manufacturers decided to stop producing seltzer bottles.

Why the different colored bottles? Well, what can cover up the impurity of a liquid better than a dark green or dark blue color!

O.K. I give up. I’ll tell you about Good Health Seltzer and how it got started. All the seltzer bottles were engraved Good Health Seltzer. Good Health Seltzer was an association that would go from one bottler to the next returning the proper bottle to each company and getting compensated. That way, if your brother went into the seltzer delivery business and you gave him my bottles to have filled, I’d get them back from the bottler doing the refilling when they saw my logo (hallmark) sandblasted on the bottle.

Yes, when I was a kid, seltzer cost two cents a glass in the local luncheonette. Of course, we always asked if we could get a little syrup put in . . . not too much, that would make it a soda and it would cost a nickel.

Ahhhh, nothing like a two cents plain and frappe. A frappe? What’s a frappe? Find out next month . . .

Mel (The Fat Guy)