Vintage 1970s Whistle Strawberry Soda Bottle Cap 🍓 from Tampa Florida

Remember Whistle Strawberry Soda? 🍓 Vintage 1970s Bottle Cap From Tampa, Florida

Size: 1 1/4"

🍓 A vintage 1970s Whistle Strawberry Soda bottle cap from Tampa, Florida, New Old Stock and never crimped, so it measures 1 1/4" across like every uncrimped crown. WHISTLE® in bold red letters inside a silver oval on a strawberry-red cap, STRAWBERRY SODA underneath, and the fine print Artificially flavored & colored, preserved with benzoate of soda. Inside, a plastic liner.

Turn it on its side and the skirt names who bottled it: Morgar Enterprises, Inc., Tampa, Fla. 33603. That ZIP code tells you it was printed after ZIP codes started in 1963, and the plastic liner fits the years after cork, right in line with the 1970s.

🍓 Whistle, from St. Louis

This one is the strawberry, one of the fruit flavors Whistle bottlers poured alongside the brand's original orange. Whistle came out of St. Louis, where Sylvester "Vess" Jones founded his company in 1916. The man who developed Whistle for him was Charles Leiper Grigg, and it did so well that Grigg was made sales and marketing manager, until he and Vess had a falling-out and Grigg left. He went on to create a little lemon-lime drink you might have heard of: 7 Up. Whistle was at its most popular in the 1920s, and by the 1990s the company was still turning out a whole lineup of flavors. Vess was bought by Cott Beverages in 1994, and a giant Vess bottle still stands near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis as a protected landmark.

Whistle was a Midwestern soda by birth, but it sure didn't stay home. The earliest Orange Whistle newspaper ads ran in April 1916, for bottlers in Bloomington and Mattoon, Illinois. A month later the ads were showing up in nine nearby states, and by the end of that first year it was fifteen, all across the South and the Midwest. By the middle of 1917 there were Whistle plants in St. Louis, Dallas, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Greenville, South Carolina, and Evansville, Indiana, plus one clear down in Havana, Cuba. In 1922 the advertising trade magazine Printers' Ink counted Whistle syrup plants in sixteen big American cities and three in Canada, feeding 1,200 bottlers. Whistle was bottled under franchise far from home, and this strawberry cap is proof it made it all the way down to Tampa.

For collectors, this Whistle Strawberry Soda bottle cap adds a splash of color and a great Florida connection to any display, and it's a conversation starter for anyone who appreciates vintage soda history.