Wylie Jensen stopped by the newspaper office with a nearly perfect 7 ounce pop bottle found while cleaning up the area where a corn crib was once located. The bottle would have been in like new condition had not the screen printed label been scratched when scraped by a skidsteer loader bucket. The inscription on the bottle indicated it had been bottled in Superior. The bottle had been filled with a lemon-lime drink named Sparkling Life.
I surprised Wylie when I remembered when the Blauvelt Station pop cooler contained bottles of Sparkling Life soda. Life was not one of station's best sellers. Our lemon-lime customers would have preferred either 7Up or Squirt but those products came to Superior from bottling plants located in Nebraska and the need to cross the Kansas-Nebraska stateline to reach my family's gasoline station kept those bottlers from delivering their products to the station.
I don't remember ever tasting Sparkling Life soda though I may have. I preferred the grape and orange flavors made in Superior with distilled water.
There must have been a big demand for lemon-lime drinks and the owners of the Superior bottling works wanted a piece of the market for I also remember the plant selling other brands, perhaps Bubble-Up, Sprite and Fresca. While I don't believe they were sold by the Superior plant, there was also Mountain Dew and Mello Yellow. There was even a somewhat generic lemon-lime flavor bottled in the same Squeeze brand bottles used for such flavors as strawberry, cream soda, rootbeer, grape and orange.
Reading the Sparkling Life ingredients list, I concluded Life may have been an early attempt to bottle and sell an energy drink. The bottle described the drink as being a highly carbonated, lithiated beverage containing dextrose and lithia citrate.
I went to the internet hoping to find out more about the drink. My search was pretty much in vain, though it does appear at least one company is still producing Sparkling Life.
The internet reported Sparkling Life is currently a lemon-lime soda available from the Excel Bottling & Brewing Company. A speciality soda, it is said to have a crisp and refreshing taste that will add sparkle to your life. Current advertising indicates it is prepared with pure cane sugar. The company also produces Blueberry Breese, Cherry Breese, Strawberry Breese, orange, grape and strawberry flavors under the Million Dollar label, black cherry, red cream, orange pineapple and golden ginger ale, under the Excel Original label. Other flavors and brands include Cherry, Ski, Frostie Root Beer, R-Pep, Rummy, Lucky Club Cola and Ski Original.
The company web site reported in 1936 Edward Meier received reward money for catching a bank robber and used it to purchase a used bottling machine. Meier and his wife, Catherine, set up a bottling plant in her grandmother's house which previously had housed a general store. Catherine continued to live in the house and do the company bookwork until age 97. She died two years later at age 99. The company is one of the few independent bottlers in the nation and operates the only returnable bottle line in Illinois.
When I remember stocking the pop case with Sparkling Life, a seven-ounce bottle could be bought for a nickel if consumed at the station. If the customer took the bottle, the deposit raised the price to 7 cents.
Twenty-four non returnable glass bottles filled with 12 ounces of Sparkling Life were advertised as costing $15 if picked up at the plant in Breese, Illinois.
I wasn't able to determine if the drink is still a lithiated beverage but I assume the 1948 ruling which changed the formulation of 7Up also affected Life.
The soft-drink 7Up was originally named Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda when it was formulated in 1929 because it contained lithium citrate. The beverage was considered a patent medicine marketed as a cure for hangover. Lithium citrate was removed from 7Up in 1948 after it was banned by the federal food and drug administration.
Early versions of Coca-Cola also contained lithium.
Lithium Citrate is still used as a mood stabilizer and is proscribed to treat mania, hypomania, depression and bipolar disorder. It can be administered orally in the form of a syrup.
If lithium citrate was banned by the FDA in 1948, the bottle Wylie showed me would have been made before that. The Sparkling Life I remember would have been bottled after 1948. I suspect when the lithium citrate was removed sales declined and that explains why the Superior plant quit bottling it about 70 years ago.
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