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Soda Bottles for a Movie Seat: Cuero, Texas
Growing up in South Texas in the 1970s I had two things going against me
from the start. One, I was being raised without my father; and two, we
were poor. Our mother did the best she could with three kids and we
would go without a lot of things but always seemed to have the
necessities and laughter in our hearts.
Mom would try to give us a treat every now and then, and when she could
she would take us to our local drive-in, the K&N, or sometimes to the
ever-popular Moo Moo's. But what we really looked forward to was the end
of the month when we knew our mother had saved the Coke bottles that she
had purchased from H-E-B or Stanley and traded them in for a movie
ticket at the local theater.
You see, the Coca-Cola company in our town honored the return of two
one-liter glass Coke bottles with one adult ticket, and the return of
one one-liter bottle with a child's ticket. I thought we were in heaven!
Not only did we get the treat of having soda with our meals, which was a
luxury that mom could not always afford, but we knew that if we saved
the bottles we could get in to see a movie.
The first movie I really remember wanting to see was The Legend of
Boggy Creek. When my friends and cousins were trading in their soda
bottles for money to buy candy that month--you could do that back
then--I was holding on to my one one-liter bottle with all my life. It
was not easy considering I had two younger sisters that were a dentist's
dream! Ha! But the end of the month came and I had made it, and I
thought, at that time, it was probably the scariest movie that I had
ever seen.
The summers at the movie theater came and went in Cuero for maybe a few
more years and then, one day, the movie theater closed. Not only had the
movie theater disappeared, but so had the one-liter glass Coke bottle.
It was replaced by plastic. We now had to travel to Victoria, which was
about twenty-eight miles away, to watch our movies, and to my
astonishment we had to pay to get in.
Every now and then I come across an old glass bottle sitting in a
knick-knack shop in some small town and I cannot help but think of that
little boy holding onto his glass bottle. You see, at that time in my
life it was my key to a door of imagination and wonder, even if it was
just for a little while.
Gabriel Mejia
Cuero, Texas
Published:
November 14,
2005
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