My dad drank Rheingold and occasionally I would be allowed a sip. One day he was drinking Ballantine and I asked for a taste. "Wow, Dad, this beer is much better than Rheingold. You should switch." Who knew an eight-year old could be beer connoisseur? He said Ballantine was too expensive and laughed his head off.
3
My father was a Schaefer man. "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one." On another note but equally as important. Name the Piels brothers.
3
One was Bert! I discovered a bunch of coasters in a drawer at my parent's house featuring those two.
1
...and Harry. We loved those commercials done by Bob & Ray. I was also a great fan of the Miss Rheingold contests each summer. Whenever my mother would send me round the corner to the deli, I would stuff the ballot box with votes for my favorite contestant
1
The barman asked “What’ll you have”???
I’ll never forget the following once ubiquitous jingle, which I heard in my head as soon as I read those three words:
What’ll you have? Pabst Blue Ribbon.
What’ll you have? Pabst Blue Ribbon.
What’ll you have? Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.
5
From my 1950s childhood outside Washington.
"Hey! Get your cold beer!
"Hey, get your Ballantine beer!"
"National Bo, National Bo!
"Brewed on the Shores of the Chesapeake Bay!"
1
My uncle was a salesman for Rheingold ("the dry beer, think of Rheingold whenever you buy bear) and every year brought home a Miss Rheingold ballot box and voting pads. He had six kids, as did my parents, and much of the street was the same. So a city block may have hundreds of children. We would have a block ballot, picking a winner of the contest (8 to 14 year old kids did not really know beauty).
It was always surprising how often the actual winner was the contestant we picked! Go figure?
6
Beautiful, evocative story that stirred my own youthful memories - thanks for your recollections! Also, perfect retort to your mom, ha ha!
4
I remember the song that was played in commercials it started “Vote, vote for Miss Rheingold” the contest was a big event each summer during the 50’s
2
My beer is Rheingold the dry beer......as the ad went....my uncle Mike drank it, all other uncles drank Schaefer.
4
Every once in a while, I try to remember the names of the old beers my family drank. There was, of course, Rheingold; but there were also Piels, and Schlitz.
And then the old milk: Renkin. There's a ghostly sign near the BQE, where the distributing garage was. Its move from glass bottles to wax cartons was a frightful thing for kids; we used to have to pick off chunks of wax from our tongues when drinking our glasses of milk.
I wonder what happened to the old metal box that was on our front porch. In the morning, as if by miracle, a bottle of fresh milk would be inside.
7
Good news, B. You can buy it:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Renkens-Dairy-Porch-Metal-Delivery-Milk...
4
Hah! Elle, thank you! I need such a thing like a hole in the head, but if it's not too expensive . . . .
1
Thanks, Joy - This was one of those rare Diary items that I had to re-read and then re-read again to really get, but what interesting memories it brought back!
9
The story required re-reading because the story required editing. As written, it seemed that "One afternoon in May...." was most likely this past May. It wasn't.
It took a second reading to figure out that "the wall behind the counter was" from 1944 and not a present-day counter with memorabilia from that era.
I'm not sure that 5-yr olds in 1944 could be shocked out of their wits at the sight of a mother (her mother, from dry Texas) drinking alcohol in public, but we'll let that slide.
And that the writer made the first and only reference to "Mrs. Rheingold" to her mother (then, as a 19-yr old, in 1958) as the piece's coda, well it was a [plausible?] stretch to an implicit name for beer.
As someone commented two weeks ago about the erratic quality of Metropolitan Diary pieces, "well, there's always tomorrow."
16
As someone who didn't know about that era, this was actually a good read, and an unusually well-structured one.
You read the voting for "Miss Rheingold of 1944", you figured it's some kind of a beauty contest, but why Rheigold?
Then you read about the other mother ordering a Rheingold, so you figured it's the brand of a drink.
Then you read how the author reacted, and you figured it's some kind of alcoholic drink, and it was probably not hard liquor since it was the middle of the day and there were children around. Finally, the button brings it all together, since you can imagine that after the previous episode, her mother probably started referring to that other lady as "Mrs. Rheingold".
The article leaves out just the right amount for you to fill in the blanks.
Plus, some 5-year-olds are quite precocious....
7
Rheingold was the first beer I ever drank. I was three years old, and polished off most of a can. My dad and his best friend were watching a baseball game on TV and I was playing with their dog on the floor. Dad rested his can on the floor next to me (there were no coasters for the coffee table) and I tasted it -- loved it -- proceeded to finish it, and promptly fell asleep. It was the "legend" story for decades.
I still remember the song --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_51RANXHg0
25
What I neglected to mention was the year. It was (cough) 1956.
5
Always loved these commercial jingles!
Sadly we don't see much of them anymore, since it's cheaper to get rights to a pop song than to pay a composer, musicians, etc. to record one of these gems.
Hilarious! Thought it was just me. 5 years old, Carling Black Label (a fine product of Framingham MA), Red Sox v. Orioles.
My mother was very, very unhappy with my father. It was also my last ever Carling Black Label.
2
I remember the Miss Rheingold contest because I associated it with July and August. My friends and I would would circulate around our Bushwick neighborhood and stuff the ballot boxes for our favorites. One of my favorites was Diane Baker who had a Hollywood career.
14