Beer Cans and It Hasta to be Shasta

If you feel a nostalgic pull toward old beer and soda cans, Jim Plant has created a website for you. He's certainly created one for me. My days coming of age in Kellogg, Idaho were dominated by cans, especially beer cans. My father loved Heidelberg beer. I don't know why, but he had a brand loyalty to Heidelberg that defied logic and reason. Maybe it was because he bowled for a team sponsored by the Heidelberg distributor. I'm not sure. But the men dad drank beer with at the bars in Kellogg and in our home and theirs knew my dad as much by his brand of beer as by any of his other qualities. As I sit here at the kitchen counter my computer rests on, drinking a Diet Pepsi (my beer days are over), I am grateful for the convenient tab I pull that pops the can open. This tab was preceded by a ring top tab and before that by a pop top that was a little rectangle atop the can. These earlier versions of pop tops were a tiny bit dangerous. Cut fingers accompanied many popped open cans.

I miss opening cans with a can opener, cutting two triangles into the top of the can. My dad often commissioned me to get his beer and open it for him. No matter how long it had been sitting in the icebox, when I puntured the top, foam arose. It billowed out of the can like cloud cover. I loved it. It got on my fingers, sticky and yeasty. I smelled like Dad, minus the Camel straights. I drank the first cold sip of my dad's beer. It was bitter, but sweet, a taste I have loved since I was four or five years old. These old cans take me back to Saturday Baseball games of the week or Sunday NFL football or Saturday evening's NFL Countdown to Kickoff, opening beers for Dad, drinking a little, and feeling a tiny bit high and leaving the foam on my fingers as long as I dared.

My mom was a soda driker: Pepsi or Tab or Coke were her favorites. But, I liked it when Safeway had Shasta soda 12 cans for a dollar...or was it even cheaper than that? A couple cases of Shasta meant variety: strawberry, cream soda, grape, ginger ale, orange, root beer, cola. I loved the snow-capped Mt. Shasta on the front and when I saw Mt. Shasta for the first time in 1973 at Mc Cloud, CA, the first thing I thought of was "It Hasta be Shasta";I'd been that enamoured with the Shasta can and its contents.