Vintage Ma's Lime Rickey Soda Label 🥤 1950s Meadville PA Bottle Label NOS Old Fashion Mixer Ephemera

Where Was the Lime Rickey Born? 🍋 Ma's Lime Rickey Soda Label, "It's Ma's - For Mixing" - Ma's Old Fashion of Meadville, Pa.

Size: 4 1/2" x 4"

Ma herself, white curls and round glasses in her little red circle, next to the blackletter "ma's" - IT'S MA'S FOR MIXING - with LIME RICKEY on a yellow ribbon below. A full-quart label from Ma's Old Fashion of Meadville, Pa., Inc. Never used. Yours will look just like this one.

🍹 The Rickey

The rickey was born in Washington, D.C., in the 1880s, at Shoomaker's bar. Colonel Joe Rickey, a Confederate veteran, was a Democratic lobbyist from Missouri and a gentleman gambler who bought into Shoomaker's in 1883, and his drink - bourbon, fresh lime and fizzy water, no sugar - took his name, though the historian George Rothwell Brown gave the credit to the bartender, George A. Williamson. Rickey wasn't thrilled; he grumbled that he was "known to fame as the author of the 'rickey.'" By the 1890s gin had pushed the bourbon out, Gatsby's crowd drank gin rickeys in 1925, and the soda fountains made the lime rickey into a sparkling soft drink of its own. Prohibition made it a fountain favorite - with liquor hard to come by, an alcohol-free lime rickey still felt like a round at the bar - and by 1942 a rickey turns up in the words of Glenn Miller's "Jukebox Saturday Night." Washington still claims the drink as its own: the rickey is D.C.'s official hometown cocktail, and every July the bars there keep Rickey Month. "For mixing" on this label means it went both ways: straight for the kids, or with a splash of something for the grown-ups.

👵 Ma's

Ma's was a Pennsylvania brand built on mother's cooking. Old Fashion, Inc. used the Ma's name on soft drinks from January 1940, its root beer labels said "Ma Knows Best" and "The Kind That Mother Used To Make," and the drinks went out through local bottlers who carried her name - Reinerton in Schuylkill County, Ma's Old Fashion Bottling in Wilkes-Barre, and Ma's Old Fashion of Meadville, who bottled this one. The Ma on the bottle was the mother in the slogan - Old Fashion, Inc. registered OLD FASHION MA'S ROOTBEER, THE KIND THAT MOTHER USED TO MAKE in 1955, with a woman's portrait in the design. A mother's face had been part of the brand for years by then: in July 1945 Old Fashion, Inc. of Scranton registered the slogan The Kind That Mother Used To Make with a woman's portrait set in a circle, just the way Ma sits in her red circle on this label. In those years the corner drugstore was where a town met, ate lunch and caught up, as much a social center as a pharmacy, and a lime rickey was your excuse to sit at the counter and catch up on the news.

🔎 Reading the Small Print

It's marked © 1948, the year the artwork was copyrighted, and the blackletter "ma's" over REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. was registered on November 15, 1949, so this one came off the press after that. The top line closes the window from the other side: "CONTENTS ONE FULL QUART," with no fluid ounces and no ZIP code, is wording the federal label rules under the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act stopped on new and reordered labels from December 31, 1967. Artwork from 1948, a registration from 1949: this is a 1950s label. Old Fashion, Inc. had filed for that blackletter mark in April 1948; the words OLD FASHION MA'S went in the September before, in 1947, but weren't registered until 1952. The ingredients are spelled out - carbonated water, sugar, flavor, citric acid, citrus juice, U.S. certified color and less than 1/10 of 1% benzoate of soda - the way the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act wanted, and down in the corner there's a tiny lithographers' union label from Philadelphia. That benzoate line has a fight behind it: Harvey Wiley, the government's pure-food crusader, battled to keep benzoate of soda out of food, and a referee board Theodore Roosevelt set up ruled by 1909 that it did no harm in small amounts. Meadville itself, the Crawford County seat founded by David Mead in 1788, was the home of the Talon zipper. Mead's party settled where Cussewago Creek meets French Creek. In 1913 a Meadville lawyer, Colonel Lewis Walker, brought the hookless fastener business to town; it took the name Talon in 1937, after an eagle's claws, and at its peak had more than 5,000 people on the payroll in a city of about 19,000, so for decades Meadville was known around the world as "Zipper City, USA." All the toolmakers and machinists the zipper works needed gave the town its other nickname, Tool City. Allegheny College is there too, founded in 1815 and the oldest college west of the Allegheny Mountains still going under its first name - a young William McKinley spent a year there as a student.

Fun framed by a home bar, next to a bottle of the good stuff.