Vintage 1960s Atlas Cola Label 🥤 Detroit, MI, Historic Americana!

Remember Atlas Cola From Detroit? 🌎 The Man Who Put the World on a Cola Bottle

Size: 5" x 2 1/2"

This is an Atlas Cola neck label - the big size, which the trade says went on the 32-ounce quart bottle - and it is New Old Stock — it never went onto a bottle, never went into a cooler, never got soaked off in a bucket behind a grocery store. It is about 5 inches by 2 1/2 inches, die-cut with wide flared wings at either end so it would sit flat around the shoulder of a big bottle, and the whole thing is worked in deep maroon, cream and gold.

The word COLA rides on each wing. In the middle is a gold-and-cream globe with the Americas turned toward you and ATLAS laid straight across it. Above it, A FINE DRINK. Below it, A PERFECT MIXER. That is every word printed on this label — no city, no state, no company name, no net contents, no printer's mark, no date. The globe is doing all the work, and it is a good piece of design: you get the brand, the scale of the ambition and the pun all in one image.

🏭 Atlas Beverage Company, Conant Avenue, Detroit

The company behind it was the Atlas Beverage Company, and it was opened in 1929 by a Polish immigrant named Walter Tomaszewski at Conant and Bristow on Detroit's east side, right on the edge of Hamtramck. It was a soft-drink bottler from the first day to the last. Atlas made Brownie Root Beer, Bulldog Ginger Ale, Cheer-Up, V-Mix, club soda, cream soda, strawberry — and the cola this label was printed for.

Tomaszewski came out of Hamtramck, and Hamtramck in those years is a story by itself. In 1910 it was a quiet German-American farming village of 3,559 people. Then the Dodge brothers opened Dodge Main there in 1914, and Polish families poured in to work it. By the 1920 census the population was 46,615 — a thirteen-fold jump in ten years, one of the sharpest booms any American town has ever had. By 1930 it was around 56,000 people, roughly 83 percent Polish or of Polish descent. Detroit surrounds Hamtramck completely on every side, and in 1922 the town incorporated as a city specifically so it could not be swallowed; it elected a pharmacist, Peter C. Jezewski, as its first mayor. That is the neighborhood that produced the man who started Atlas.

🥤 What a Bottler Actually Was

It is easy to forget now, but for most of the twentieth century soda was a local business, and it had to be. The product is mostly water and it is heavy, so shipping it any distance ate the profit. Every city of any size had its own bottlers running their own brands out to the corner groceries, the coneys, the filling stations and the party stores within a day's drive of the plant. They put their names on their crates and their caps and their bottles, and they competed with each other street by street.

A cola was the hardest fight on that street. Coca-Cola and Pepsi were already national, already advertised everywhere, already in everybody's hand. For a Detroit bottler to print his own cola label and send it out anyway took some nerve — and look at what he put on it. Not a local landmark, not a family name. A globe. The whole world, with ATLAS across it, and a promise that it was a fine drink and a perfect mixer. That is a small company aiming high, and I like it enormously.

The "perfect mixer" line is doing real work, too. A cola that sells as a mixer sells to a different shelf and a different evening than one that sells to a kid with a nickel, and a regional bottler who could get onto both was covering his bets in a market where the national brands had him outgunned on every other front.

📅 How Old It Is

Nothing on the label is dated, so the company's own gear does the dating. Atlas printed this same globe, with the same tall serif ATLAS across it, on its wooden bottle crates, and one of those crates still carries its box maker's stamp inside: 2-69, February 1969. That's the 1960s Atlas, and the 1960s is where I put this cola label.

🏢 What Happened to Them

Atlas ran for the better part of seventy years. Walter Tomaszewski eventually handed it to his sons, Walter and Butch, who ran it together until the elder brother retired and Butch bought out his share. It closed in 1996. The building at Conant sat empty for years afterward, was sold around 2003, and in 2006 was literally cut in half and turned into a small strip mall with parking out front.

But one of their brands outlived the plant. Brownie Root Beer — the caramel-cream root beer with the little brown elf on it that every Detroit kid of a certain age remembers — is still made and still sold today, bottled now out in Washington State. The company is gone, the building is half gone, and you can still buy the root beer.

🌎 About these

One thing worth clearing up, because the name confuses people: Atlas of Detroit was a soft-drink bottler from 1929 on and never brewed beer - the Atlas Brewing Company was a different firm in Chicago. Each label is about 5 by 2 1/2 inches, unused, the die-cut wings intact. Hang one with your other soda labels, put it over the home bar where A PERFECT MIXER belongs, or give it to a Detroiter - especially anybody with Hamtramck in the family, or anybody who grew up on Brownie. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Atlas Cola labels again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.