Vintage 1960s Dads Root Beer Label 🥤 Chicago IL First to Use a 6 Pack NOS Never Used Soda Label Mid Century

The Root Beer That Gave Us the Six-Pack 🥤 A Vintage 1960s Dad's Root Beer 12 oz. Label with the Gift Stars Coupon, Chicago

Size: 3 1/2" x 3"

NO DEPOSIT, 12 OZ., NO RETURN across the top, FREE GIFT STARS COUPON BELOW, the grinning Dad's boy, and the slanted DAD'S ROOT BEER logo in red, yellow and black. Up the left edge in tiny type: BOTTLED UNDER LICENSE OF DAD'S ROOT BEER CO., CHICAGO, ILL., U.S.A.; down the right, DAD'S BOTTLING COMPANY and CONTENTS 12 FLUID OZ. And in the corner, a little coupon you were supposed to cut out on the dotted line: COUPON WORTH 2 1/2 GIFT STARS FREE FROM DAD'S ROOT BEER, to mail to Gift Stars, Inc., P.O. Box 1155, Minneapolis, Minn. 55440. Never used - the coupon's still on it.

🥤 Dad's of Chicago

Dad's Root Beer was born in 1937 in the basement of Ely Klapman's Chicago-area home, where he and Barney Berns worked up the recipe. They called it Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer in honor of Klapman's father. Dad's was the first product ever sold in a six-pack - the carton the Atlanta Paper Company invented in the 1940s - and the first brand to put out a half-gallon bottle. They even gave the bottles family names: the Junior was the small one, 7, 10 or 12 ounces, the Mama was a quart and the Papa was a half gallon, and back in the 1940s you could buy a Papa at the regular price and get a Mama for a penny. The boy on the Junior bottles, the story goes, was Barney Berns's son Gene. IC Industries of Chicago bought the name in 1971, Monarch Beverage of Atlanta in 1986, and Hedinger Brands in 2007, and Dad's is still made today out of Jasper, Indiana.

⭐ Gift Stars and No Deposit, No Return

The coupon is a little piece of 1960s shopping history. Trading stamps and premium coupons were at their peak in the 1950s and '60s - you saved them up and mailed them in or redeemed them for household gifts - and Minneapolis was one of the capitals of that business; Curt Carlson started the Gold Bond Stamp Company there in 1938. Dad's put a 2 1/2-star coupon right on the bottle. NO DEPOSIT, NO RETURN means the 12-ounce bottle was a one-way bottle, the throwaway glass that was taking over from the old returnable bottles in those years.

📅 How old is it?

The coupon dates it. That Minneapolis address carries a five-digit ZIP code, 55440, and ZIP codes only started on July 1, 1963. So it's a 1963-or-later label, and the 1960s is where I've always had it.

🥤 About these labels

Every one I have is this same unused 12-ounce label, 3 1/2 by 3 inches, coupon attached. It's a fun one for a soda collection, a kitchen, a game room, or anybody who grew up in Chicago with a cold Dad's. The supply is finite - nobody's printing Gift Stars coupons on root beer labels anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.