If we take Angie Morrow’s summer romance in Seventeenth Summer as a barometer of teen life in the 1940s, Coke flowed like water into the mouths of high schoolers. Weiner roasts, backyard picnics, and parties at Pete’s are incomplete without bottles of Coke and McKnight’s Drugstore provides a social soda fountain built around the drink. Angie describes the popular “checkers” who loiter outside McKnight’s, staying up to date on who is having a Coke with who and scouting sophmore girl prospects. There is something unabashedly American and mid-century about this image and I sought more information about the drugstore soda fountain as the heart of American teen’s social fabric.

In Food in the USA, Carole Counihan discusses the significance of Coke in the 1940s, especially as a memory of home for American soldiers fighting oversees. Coke became a symbol of The American Girl, a social mediator and sign of “wholesome romantic courtship.” Couninhan quotes one Coke employee who describes it’s role in the dating scene. “You want to know what makes Coke so romantic to so many people?…Well, maybe that starry-eyed kid who lives next door to you was sitting in a drugstore booth with his girl one night, and maybe they were drinking Coke, and maybe while they were drinking that Coke it was the first time that girl let that boy put his hand on her leg.” (Food in the USA: A Reader).

The vivid imagery of these social gathering places leaves me considering what has stepped up as the drugstore soda fountain of the 21st century. The dining hall? MMORPGs and Facebook?

McKnight Drug Store in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin