In Minnesota, we call it pop!

My lovely hubby, the mayor of Cobb County, bought me this empty pop shoppe bottle in an antique store in Two Harbors years ago. He could see the nostalgia in my eyes and hear the adoration in my "THE POP SHOPPE" shriek and couldn't help himself from buying me this memento.

The Pop Shoppe was in the back of a gas station across from Hardees in Brainerd when I was growing up. Not a convenience store gas station like we have today, but the kind with a few mismatched candy bars under glass and car parts. In the back of the station were hundreds of bottles of Pop Shoppe Pop. A man would fill up the gas tank and my brother and I would run in and pick from the delightful array of flavors. Sarsparilla, Cream Soda, Black Cherry, Grape, Orange, Pineapple, Strawberry, Cola, Root Beer, Lime Ricky....it's not hard to see why, with all these flavors, the Pop Shoppe was more exciting than our usual Tab or Fresca. The ability to mix and match, the bottles in the cool red plastic carrying case and the smells of oil and gas, oh man, I'm light headed thinking of it now. (P.S., I'm a fainter, so punch in a 9 and a 1 and hold your finger above the last 1, just in case.)

But just like when my dad brought home the egg fluff donuts, the Pop Shoppe Pop lasted only a few days in our house.
Now that I am rummaging around in the archives, pop has always been part of my life. One of my first jobs at Holtan's Resort was running our pop machine. It was an old Pepsi bottle machine that we filled up with RC Cola products. The money part of the machine didn't work anymore, so people in need of pop had to knock on our metal screen door and ask for me.

I would then emerge with my cigar box of money and THE CRANK.

That is, if I could find the crank. (It really was a crank by the way.) I'd put the crank in the hole, crank and crank some more and hand the customer their beverage of choice. Then I'd collect the money, put it in my cigar box, and thank them for their patronage.

You may not know this about me, but I'm not really cut out for the world of business. A) I frequently lost the crank and B) I drank all the profits. These things didn't stop me from leaving my brother Keith threatening notes on his pillow that looked something like this:

To: Keith
From: Heidi

You owe me $3.50 for pop. Please pay by Friday. Or ELSE!!!

When I reflect on these formative years in the business world (I was 9), I really believe that being a pop entrepreneur and being my own bill collecter made me the woman I am today.