Here comes the Sun Drop

Kids say the darndest things. They bring them home, too.

A few days ago my 21-year-old son burst through the door with a huge smile on his face and a two-liter green bottle in his hand. "Look what they're selling at Pay Less!" he announced.

A sight for sore eyes (the bottle, I mean)

(Reader Note: Pay Less is a regional supermarket chain. Whether Pay Less customers actually spend less on their grocery bills than at other retail food stores is unproven, but that's not relevant to this story.)

In my son's hand was a bottle of Sun Drop. To the uninitiated, Sun Drop is a citrus-flavored soft drink popularized in the South. It's reminiscent of Mountain Dew, except don't ever utter the name of that other carbonated beverage around a Sun Drop drinker. I made that mistake once in North Carolina and nearly started a second Civil War.

It was while living in Gastonia, NC, in the early 1990s that I was introduced to Sun Drop. There's even a local Sun Drop bottling plant along one of Gastonia's main thoroughfares.

The soft drink has a sketchy, almost fish story kind of history. When St. Louis native Charles Lazier created Sun Drop in 1949 the product purportedly was made from real oranges. Sun Drop aficionados swear if you look closely at the outside of a bottle you can still see citrus pulp floating around inside. I've pressed my nose against the plastic several times and didn't see any -- even back in the days when I still had 20/20 vision.

Almost everyone I knew in Gastonia drank Sun Drop. Some Gastonians consumed the soda pop like other people sip Starbucks or gulp down Dasani. I had friends who drank a 20-ounce bottle first thing in the morning, followed that up with one over lunch and had a nightcap just before turning in. When I read the nutrition facts on a bottle the first time, I figured out why: 105 milligrams of caffeine. I also took note of the 290 calories per 20 ounces. By comparison, you could wolf down a Hostess chocolate cupcake and still have about 100 calories to spare.

Carolinians love Sun Drop

Despite its health-wrecking chemical makeup, there was something oddly comforting about seeing that green bottle with the red and yellow label again. It brought back memories of Jiggers Drive In, a 1950s-themed restaurant up the road from Gastonia in Bessemer City, where they serve homemade cherry Sun Drops with a real maraschino cherry tossed in.

I was reminded of the pulled pork plates at Gastonia's dozen or so barbecue restaurants, where you either drank Sun Drop or sweet tea (no one drinks unsweetened tea in the South). I recalled sultry summer nights at Gastonia's cozy Sims Legion Park watching the Gastonia Rangers -- then a class A farm club of the Texas Rangers -- with a hot dog in one hand and a Sun Drop in the other.

Then there were all the local events that Sun Drop sponsored, and all the volunteer T-shirts I collected over the years. Ever single one of them displayed the splashy Sun Drop logo.

The flash of memories in that instant my boy held out that bottle brought back wonderful times spent with family, friends and colleagues -- some who have moved on to points unknown. So many warm feelings from a product that's best served cold.

Welcome to Lafayette, Sun Drop. To rewrite a line from the Beatles:

Here comes the Sun Drop/And I say, it's all right.