Vintage My Pop's Root Beer Bottle Cap 🎈 Chokola Beverage Wilkes-Barre PA 1960s Crown Cap Soda

Remember My Pop's Root Beer? 🎈 My Pop's Root Beer, from the Wyoming Valley

Size: 1 1/4"

In northeastern Pennsylvania it's "pop," never soda, and this bright little cap leans all the way into it. My Pop's Root Beer was bottled by the Chokola Beverage company of Wilkes-Barre, and the cap still looks like a birthday party.

🔍 What's on it

A New Old Stock crown cap, never crimped onto a bottle, in canary yellow. A burst of red and dark teal balloons on strings pops out of the top (even the apostrophe in POP'S looks like one more little red balloon), then MY in teal, POP'S in big letters that alternate blue and red, each outlined in white, and ROOT BEER in red. Around the skirt it reads "CHOKOLA BEVERAGE WILKES-BARRE," and on the other side there's a little ZapatA® mark, the company that made the cap. Inside, a gray plastic liner. Like every uncrimped crown it measures 1 1/4" across.

📅 How old is it?

That little ZapatA mark dates it. Zapata Industries of Frackville, Pennsylvania, a crown and closure maker up in the coal region, first used the ZAPATA name on bottle caps on October 17, 1968, filed it that November and had it registered in 1970. So this cap is no older than late 1968. Zapata went on to register crown slogans like "From Z to A, the best of everything in crowns," and the ZAPATA registration stayed alive until 2016.

🏭 Chokola, Wilkes-Barre

Chokola was a little Wilkes-Barre bottler, listed at 33 Vine Street, that made its own sparkling beverages and this root beer under the My Pop's name. Wilkes-Barre sits on the Susquehanna River in the Wyoming Valley of Luzerne County, about twenty miles south of Scranton, a valley built on anthracite coal and on the Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak and other immigrant families who came to mine it. It was a root beer town, too: across the city, Ma's Old Fashion Root Beer came out of South Washington Street in its barrel-shaped bottle. The valley once made everything from silk to cigars to beer, and most of it is gone now, which is why little pieces like this cap are how people remember it.

Local legend has it that Chokola's root beer was a fixture at valley get-togethers, the church carnivals, Polish heritage days and school fundraisers, and that kids who grew up in Wilkes-Barre in the '60s and '70s could spot a My Pop's bottle from across the picnic just by that yellow cap. Nobody wrote that down, but I believe it.

Root beer has deep Pennsylvania roots, too. Charles Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist with a drugstore on Spruce Street, started selling his root beer concentrate in the 1870s, and the way the story is usually told, his big break came at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where he handed out free glasses of it to the crowds. The other half of the legend is my favorite: his friend Russell Conwell, who went on to found Temple University, is said to have talked him out of calling it "root tea," because Pennsylvania's hard-drinking miners would never touch anything called tea. So a root beer cap from the heart of anthracite country feels just about right.

🍺 The crown cap

The crown cap itself goes back to 1892, when William Painter of Baltimore patented it, and it sealed nearly every bottle of pop in America for the next century. A plastic liner like this one had replaced the old cork discs by the time this cap was made.

📌 A fun one for a cap collection, a Wilkes-Barre or coal region keepsake, or a Father's Day gift. "My Pop's" says it all!