This year came and went as a golden year for me, far from the doomsday movie 2012 foretelling the end of the world as we know it.
To start with, I turned 56 this year, having been born in 1956. Come on, how many times in your life is your age the same number as your birth year? Happenstance, too, played a big part leading to my main story — a newfound hobby (“vice,” my Darleng tells me), a newfound family, and to add to my bragging rights (ahem, ahem) our book Linamnam just won the Best Travel Guide for the country in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards based in Madrid, Spain. But that’s getting ahead of my story.
In May of this year, I was invited to be a guest chef at the Memphis in May Festival, held in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. It goes without saying that my wife Mary Ann, son Nico and I were given all-out, down-home southern hospitality, feted with the famous Memphis pork barbecue, a tour of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, and several nights out on the famous Beale Street, with Memphis being the birthplace of the blues and rock-and-roll.
While in Graceland, I found out that Elvis’s first No.1 hit single Heartbreak Hotel was released in January 1956, and in November of the same year, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender. Of the many cars in Elvis’s automobile museum, my favorites were a 1956 purple Cadillac Eldorado Convertible (for its customized offbeat color) and also a 1956 Continental Mark II (for its classic design). One can also order a commemorative car plate with “Tennesee EP 1956” emblazoned on it. Within the plaza is a 1950s-themed diner, where we rested and had a drink (what else but Coke, being the exclusive official drink of the park). And what diner would be without a jukebox — a 1956 Wurlitzer, the Cadillac of jukeboxes displayed by its entrance, to boot. All coincidence?
The numbers 1-9-5-6 just kept popping up and it didn’t stop there. So, too, came the Coca-Cola thing that seemed to be stalking us everywhere we went (or was it the other way around?) After all, we were in the Deep South, where the number-one most popular brand in the world was invented in 1886 in neighboring Atlanta, Georgia. In most of the establishments we were brought to around Memphis, there was some kind of Coke memento that adorned every wall or just sat proudly in a corner: a giant button sign, promotional posters galore, serving trays, a glass-encased shelf full of commemorative Coke bottles, vintage coolers, etc. Even when we visited Mary Ann’s cousins John and Christine Wright in Natchez, Mississippi, which is even further south, there was no way to escape the Coke bug (Christine gifted me with an old wooden Coca-Cola crate and some old Coke bottles that I sent home door-to-door together with other finds). Especially so when John brought us to the Coca-Cola Museum in Vicksburg, housed in a former candy store, where the soft drink was first bottled in 1894 by Joseph Biedenharn (prior to that, it was distributed in jugs or barrels to pharmacists and soda fountains in syrup form, mixed with soda water and drunk on site). I can categorically claim it was here where I got infected by that virus Coke-itis (my own coinage, after “Coke it is,” and the gay-speak “Coke-itish.” Getz mo?), and a craving for anything from the 1950s, the decade of my birth year.
Once I got settled back home, I lost no time searching the Internet for books on Coca-Cola history and collectibles. The Coca-Cola Conversations blog and Coca-Cola Collectors Club (US) are a good source of information on anything and everything about this iconic brand, too. Felice Sta. Maria’s book The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culinary Vignettes and Period Recipes, 1521–1935 is a great source of trivia pertaining to pre- and early American presence in the country.
Anyway, in between my deskbound sleuthing, by another stroke of happenstance, or was it the cupid of collectors (if there is such a thing) aiming its arrows at me — as a longtime art and antique collector, I am a firm believer that things find you, and not the other way around — several items of great interest literally fell in my lap: a 1956 Seeburg VL200, whose owner I met some 20 years ago, resurfaced and was selling his prized “toy,” complete with the original 100 pieces of 1950s-60s 45rpm vinyl records, including Elvis’s 1956 Heartbreak Hotel mentioned above (time to rock and roll!); an original copy of the first Coca-Cola advertisement in the country, which appeared in a local Spanish periodical, Revista Economica dated October 1912, was shown to me by a local picker in Manila; and also several magazine clippings of Coke ads with brand ambassadors Gloria Romero and Amalia Fuentes (you guessed it, dated 1956!). Yes, a true-to-life counterpart of History Channel’s American Pickers Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz does exist here, whose finds could be anything under the sun. Name it, he has it, but I’m not telling his name (invoking my collector’s-privilege rights, hehe).
The 1912 Coke ad more or less set the parameters and direction on what Coca-Cola theme I was going to collect — anything and everything to do with the soft drink’s 100-year presence in the country, especially ephemera in printed form (vintage photos, magazine ads with its ambassadors, posters, etc.) and marketing tools made and distributed locally.
Being in the midst of my middle-aged years, I suddenly found myself with a new “love” interest (despite her complaints about my expensive vice, my Darleng should be thankful it’s just a shapely bottle I’m chasing after, not the whistle-bait two-legged type, di ba? Wink, wink). As a collector, there’s the exhilarating thrill of the hunt, a tip that could lead to a rewarding great find, or one could also end up empty-handed after a wild goose chase. Nevertheless, as they say, the joy is in the journey. It’s as thirst (for knowledge)-quenching as the drink itself.