Vintage 1970s-80s Cheer Up Soda Neck Label 🥤 Atlas Bottling Detroit Quart Bottle NOS Mixer

Who Put Cheer Up on a Detroit Quart Bottle? 🥤 A Vintage Atlas Bottling Neck Label

Size: 5" x 2 1/4"

This little winged label rode on the shoulder of a quart of Cheer Up soda in Detroit. SERVE on one wing, COLD on the other, A FINE DRINK arched over the top, A PERFECT MIXER underneath, and CHEER UP in the middle with a tiny ® tucked in after the UP. It's New Old Stock, never put on a bottle, with a plain back. And the story behind it runs from a Polish immigrant's bottling plant in Detroit to a St. Louis syrup company to a lawsuit with the 7 Up people that ended in the most ironic way possible.

🍾 How I Know It's a Detroit Label

The label doesn't name a bottler, so here's how it gives itself away. Two old Cheer Up quart bottles have turned up still wearing this exact neck label, and both have Atlas body labels reading "RETURN FOR REFUND / STATE OF MICHIGAN." The body label that goes with it says it straight out: "Bottled under authority of Cheer Up Co., St. Louis, Mo. 63105 / Atlas Bottling Co., Detroit, Mich. 48212." And I've got Atlas's own Atlas Cola neck label too, cut from the very same die with the very same A FINE DRINK and A PERFECT MIXER. So that wording is Atlas talking, their house line for the 32 ounce bottle, and they used it on their own cola as well as on Cheer Up.

🏭 Atlas Beverage Company

Walter Tomaszewski came over from Poland and started the Atlas Beverage Company in 1929, on the Hamtramck side of Detroit, with a big plant on Conant Avenue. Atlas made a whole lineup of its own: Brownie Root Beer, Bulldog Ginger Beer, V-Mix, Golden and Pale Dry Ginger Ale, club soda, cream and strawberry. It bottled Cheer-Up in lemon-lime and cola under license, too. Anybody could walk in and buy pop by the case, business or not, and local lore has whole Detroit families making the trip to Conant Avenue to load up. The Detroit Historical Society keeps a 1970s Atlas bottle marked "Atlas Beverages, Atlas Bottling Co., Detroit, Mich." in its collection.

Atlas kept going for better than sixty years. The plant closed in the mid-1990s (one local history says 1996), was sold in 2003 and torn down, and there's a strip mall on the spot now.

📜 Cheer Up Was Born in St. Louis

The brand itself came out of St. Louis. In 1914 Claude Johnstone, along with W. F. Cox and Vess Jones, started the Orange Julep Company there, and in December 1918 it became the Orange Smile Sirup Company. They made Smile, an orange drink, and Cheer Up, a lemon-lime. (Their early days had a bump or two: in 1919 federal agents seized a batch of their "Orange Jooj" syrup in New Orleans because it didn't have a drop of orange juice in it.) Cheer Up was first sold under that name on January 13, 1936, and the company registered the CHEER UP lettering with the Patent Office that November. That's the same lettering you see on this label, big swash C and all.

Orange Smile didn't bottle the drinks itself. It sold syrup to bottlers and gave them a territory, which is how Cheer Up ended up bottled by American Soda Water Co. and Blue Ridge Bottling Co. right there in St. Louis, and in Erie, Pennsylvania, in Iola, Kansas, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, all the way out to Hilo, Hawaii, and in Detroit by Atlas. St. Louis collectors like to say Cox's personal favorite of the bunch was Cheer Up, because it worked as a drink on its own and as a mixer both.

You can still see where it all came from. St. Louis was a real soda town. Charles Grigg's Howdy Company started up there in 1920 with an orange drink called Howdy, and in 1929 the same outfit brought out 7 Up. On South Ninth Street in Soulard, the old neighborhood named for Antoine Soulard, surveyor-general of Spanish Upper Louisiana, there's an 1871 corner building with a tiled base that still advertises Cheer Up and Smile. That building has lived a few lives: Union Park and the Union Capitol Hall, a hit from the Great Cyclone of 1896, the Bohemian Hall, then the place Smile was bottled, and now lofts.

⚖️ Seven-Up Sued, Lost, Then Bought It

Here's my favorite part. The Seven-Up Company, right there in St. Louis too, took Cheer Up Sales Co. and Orange Smile to federal court to try to knock out the Cheer Up trademark, figuring "Cheer Up" was too close to "Seven Up." On April 26, 1945 the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals said no. Seven Up was an arbitrary name, the judges wrote, while Cheer Up was meant to suggest a drink that "will improve the customer's feelings," and "the contrast is more striking than the similarity." The court record even describes the Cheer Up bottle of those days: "a delightful beverage. A real super-charged mixer," with vitamin B1 added.

Then in 1963, two years before Orange Smile closed its doors, the CHEER UP name was sold, entire interest and goodwill, through a man named Gerry Shingledecker at the Lennox Hotel in St. Louis to... The Seven-Up Company. The outfit that lost the lawsuit bought the brand outright. Seven-Up renewed the registration in 1976, it passed along to Dr Pepper/Seven Up, and it finally lapsed in 1997. Notice the 63105 on those Atlas labels: that's the Clayton, Missouri ZIP code, which is where Seven-Up had its headquarters.

🕰️ How Old Is It?

That little ® does a lot of the work. The circle-R came with the Trademark Act of 1946, which took effect in July 1947, so this label can't be older than that. The two quart bottles wearing it carry Michigan's "return for refund" state line, which Michigan's bottle law required starting December 3, 1978, and the matching body label has ZIP codes, which didn't exist before 1963. So I put it in the 1960s at the very earliest, and most likely the 1970s or '80s. Atlas was gone by the mid-'90s.

And it's a scarce one. I haven't found another loose one for sale anywhere. The only others I know of are still stuck to old quart bottles.

📦 Condition

New Old Stock, never applied to a bottle. Blank back.

🎁 Good For

• 🏙️ Anybody with Detroit or Hamtramck roots who remembers pop from Conant Avenue
• 🥤 Soda collectors putting together Michigan bottlers or Cheer Up from every territory
• 🍸 A home bar. It says A PERFECT MIXER right on it
• 🖼️ A small frame with a mat, or a shadow box beside an old quart bottle