Me and my RC

If the world has ended, or if a rogue wave has blown Saipan into Polynesia, I wouldn’t even know about it. I’ve spent the past week unplugged. That’s because I plunged into yet another road trip through the Old West. This time around it’s pleasure, not business.

Anyway, as is appropriate for the week of July 4, we’ll now veer into some Americana. Kindly leave your zoris by the door, please, and pull on some boots.

I’ll start by offering a term from the dusty porch of a sleepy roadside market. That’s where I am having my morning coffee, such coffee serving as a chaser for a can of soda. Come to think of it, I’ll offer two terms today, not just one. Such is the potency of the soda-and-coffee combination.

The first term is “farrier.”

That’s a profession. A farrier fits horseshoes and tends other tasks in the equine-footing realm. I know this because, here at the roadside market, I got to talking with a guy who is a full-time farrier.

He said that business this time of year is always brisk, of course.

I just nodded knowingly.

What I didn’t tell him, but I will tell you, is what I actually know about horses. And what I know about horses is absolutely nothing. I have friends who own horses, so over the years I’ve done a lot of knowing nodding of the know-nothing variety.

Now that we’re all caught up on the horse topic it’s time for a second term from the lexicon of Americana. That term is “RC Cola.”

Up until today I had no idea that they still made the stuff. RC Cola, which competed cheek by jowl with Coke and Pepsi, was my favorite in the 1970s.

RC had a robust advertising presence. Singer Nancy Sinatra, daughter of Frank Sinatra, pitched RC in some ads that were of the groovy 1960s variety.

In the 1970s RC had some country twang in their ads. Many of the ads had a small-town theme. Those ads were a good reflection of 1970s hometown culture, or at least a good reflection of its idealized depiction. Some of the ads are available on YouTube.

A line from an RC jingle still rings in my ears: “Me and my RC, ‘cause what’s good enough for other folks ain’t good enough for me.”

That’s a great line that did justice to a great soda, and so much the better that it used one of my favorite words, “ain’t,” in the process.

The jingle came to mind when I noticed RC Cola in the market this morning. Though I recall liking the soda on its own merits back in the day, I suspect it was the old advertising campaign that tipped me into action and converted my mere recognition of the brand into an actual sale.

That’s because recalling those ads also allowed me to relish memories of an idyllic small-town upbringing.

There is, however, one minor problem in my story: I did not have a small-town upbringing. But, hey, those commercials were still fun to think about.

I’ll also think about the fact that culture, and depictions of culture, have a way of swapping ends faster than a tin roof in a typhoon. It’s easy to lose track of which side is which.

Let’s talk shop for a moment. I once saw a slice of a marketing campaign that targeted retirees. The company populated its list of leads by asking people to submit brief comments about their best memories. Judging from the comments that I saw, a large number of those memories were memories of various TV shows. Many other memories were centered on celebrities and sports teams. Overall, I’d say that roughly half of those prime memories were rooted in media or entertainment, at least if we take the broadest sense of the terms. These were the markers by which people took measure of the past, including, one can assume, their own pasts.

The culture was, in other words, interwoven with its own depictions.

This demographic, the retired set, was well into adulthood before the Web was ubiquitous. It had far less saturation in electronic media than most people have nowadays. I’ll let you connect the dots if you want to ponder this further.

As for me, I can’t sit on the stoop of this roadside market any longer. I’ve still got 620 miles to drive. The skies are clear. The craggy mountains offer a stark, dry beauty, and my pickup truck kicks up some dust as I pull out of the parking lot. This scene has a true Western texture to it; in fact, it’s almost as real as a commercial.