Finish for rare Coke bottles ends era at Missouri plant

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- They're short, they're sweet, they're made of glass, and starting today, they will be even harder to find.

Jefferson City Coca Cola Bottling Company on Tuesday was filling its last 6.5-ounce returnable glass Coke bottle.

The facility, at its current location since 1942, was one of just three locations nationwide still bottling Coke in small, green, contoured containers.

For Linda Taylor, the small bottles have been a part of her life for most of her 54 years. She traveled Tuesday from her home in Washington, D.C., to Jefferson City to snatch up 20 cases of small-bottled Coke.

"I started drinking Coke in a baby bottle when I was living in West Virginia at age 2," said Taylor, executive assistant to the chairman of the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. "It's the only thing I drink. I drink nothing else. I don't drink coffee, I don't drink tea, I don't drink milk. I just drink these."

Taylor said she has been chasing down the 6.5 ounce Cokes across the country and last visited the Jefferson City plant in May. Facilities in Michigan and Minnesota are the only other places that bottle Coke in the small containers.

Carl Vogel, a state legislator and fourth generation distributor at the Jefferson City facil'æity, said modern plastic bottles with twist off caps are replacing the glass bottles.

Manager's retirement

But Vogel also said that the retirement of Martin Schwartze, who can run the ancient bottling machinery, played a big part in the decision to stop distribution.

"It was a combination of the production manager wanting to retire and the equipment is aging," Vogel said. "This type of production doesn't fit into Coke's local process."

The production of the 6.5 ounce bottles occurs about once a month in Jefferson City, in part because so many bottles are not returned, Vogel said.

"We've done everything we could to keep it in existence," said Vogel, who worked the old bottling line as a young man.

The mechanized line where the Coke is poured into bottles and capped can be viewed through a glass window, where Schwartze and four other employees toil in the noisy room.

The chug chug of the machinery and the clinking of bottles echoed as Schwartze tried to put into perspective Tuesday his 31 years of running the line.

"I'll probably miss it, I've done it a long time. I painted this equipment and kept it running all these years," Schwartze said on his last day on the job.

Schwartze said one of the attractions of the small, glass bottles is the fact that many people believe that the Coke tastes better.

Not surprisingly, Schwartze was having trouble with the old machinery on his final day.

"I wanted to be the last one to be bottling the six-and-a-halfs, but it just didn't work out that way," Schwartze said.