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The folks at Mountain Dew – PepsiCo, I suppose – are now marketing a “throwback” version of their classic soft drink, one with an older logo and formula, and it gave me a flashback to the summer of my first Mountain Dew. It was an experience that brought me closer to hellfire than a 10-year-old ought to be.

Every summer my parents sent my sister and me to visit our cousins – either our girl cousins in Montgomery or our boy cousins in the wilds of rural Alabama, which I preferred.

My cousins Bill, Gene, and Larry, and their little sister Phyllis, lived at the time near Notasulga, Alabama, where their stepfather, my uncle, Reverend Howard E. Gunter, was the home missions pastor at Friendship Baptist Church and my sainted Aunt Eloise took care of them all. (The fact that he was a missionary to the primitive tribes in rural Alabama always amused us no end, since we’d moved up to high-church Presbyterian when we moved to the big city of Birmingham.)

Big and red-haired, Uncle Howard was fairly new to the ministry. He was a freshly retired Air Force master sergeant and a recently reformed alcoholic, which, along with being a newly minted Baptist preacher made him a Bible-quoting force of nature. It should go without saying that he felt led to be the living hand of God against drinking, drinkers, and anything even remotely alcoholic.

That summer, a new soft drink came into America’s stores, a lemon-lime concoction of sugar, citric acid and caffeine. And, if you’re old enough to remember, the first Mountain Dew bottles had a drawing of a moonshiner, Willy the Hillbilly, shooting at a revenuer running from an outhouse. “Yahoo! It’s Mountain Dew!” said the bottle. “It’ll tickle yore innards.”

I’d had a taste of the new Dew in the big city of Birmingham, and I was anxious to share the snappy tastes, sugar rushes and caffeine buzzes with all my country cuzzes. So when Bill and I walked to the country store to get a drink, I suggested he try Mountain Dew, not knowing that the wrath of Howard would soon be upon us.

So imagine the scene: Two innocent boys come home from the store, drinking soft drinks and reading the cartoon on the label out loud. Really loud. “Yah-HOO, it’s Mountain DEW! Whooee!”

Overhearing the commotion, my uncle the reverend, the recovered boozer, comes steaming out of his study and unleashes a torrent of preaching on Bill and me about how the pit of Hell was awaiting for winebibbers and that anyone who drank moonshine would, without a doubt, burn in Hell forever.

Now, we Presbyterians were God’s frozen chosen and we didn’t mention burning in Hell much, but I was familiar with the concept. I had certainly never been on the receiving end of a personal, eyeball-to-eyeball, finger-wagging message from God’s own red-faced spokesman, and it scared me pretty good.

I remember the cold bottle sweating in my hand and me not daring to drink that last tasty swallow of sin. I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to escape without a paddling until my Aunt Eloise rescued us with the dinner bell, practiced as she was at saving kids from her husband’s misdirected wrath.

After that, needless to say, I drank Mountain Dew at every opportunity, now partly for the illicit thrill. I never did grow into a winebibber or Hell-bound drunk; in fact, I never developed much of a taste for alcohol. (I am, however, a big, big fan of caffeine to this day.)

This weekend, I saw that Willy the Hillbilly was back on Mountain Dew’s website, and I tried the throwback Mountain Dew, with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. It was pretty good, that taste of long ago, but when I took that first sip, I thought for, just a second, that I detected a nostalgic whiff of brimstone.

And it sure did tickle my innards.

This article originally appeared in The News-Reporter, serving Washington, Ga., and Wilkes County, and is re-printed with the newspaper’s permission: http://www.news-reporter.com/news/2009/0514/opinion/023.html

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7 Responses to “Hellfire, brimstone, and Mountain Dew”

1. Billy Howard says:

   July 16, 2009 at 4:03 pm

   Thanks for the soda-pop road trip. I remember Mountain Dew was pretty cool when it first came out, but I can’t imagine drinking it, or any other soft drink now (unless, it’s the occasional ginger-ale, which of course is best served with a shot of bourbon. Now that’s something to Yah-HOO about!)

   Reply
2. Kip Burke says:

   July 16, 2009 at 9:38 pm

   You’re right Billy, I’m a sweet tea or black coffee guy myself — soft drinks now are just alchemists’ brews, not the co-colas of our youth. The nice thing about iced tea, I think, is the camouflage nature of its lovely color, able to hide anything from single malt to day-old moonshine. Or so I’ve heard.

   And thanks for the welcome — I love this place. Myra Blackmon pointed me this way, just so you’ll know who to blame.

   Reply
3. Bob says:

   July 17, 2009 at 10:27 am

   How well I remember when Mountain Dew first appeared! Not that we got to sample much of it, mind you. The Kentucky relatives who reared me weaned us on sweet tea that was of the consistency of 30 weight motor oil, but we were rarely allowed cokes–the name we called all carbonated drinks. My grandmother, in particular, informed by the best Missionary Baptist thinking the New Gasper Church could instill, insisted that any kind of beverage that foamed had to have some beer in it somewhere–not in her house–no sir! Of course, when our bachelor uncle let us ride to town with him, we always got some–and had to make an extra stop on the way home to sell the bottles back–concealing evidence and making a little change! Somewhere in the midst of that we discovered Mountain Dew. Ma went to her reward assuming she had kept us from that and a multitude of other sins.

   Reply
4. Brian says:

   July 17, 2009 at 11:13 am

   I got addicted in the summer of 1988 at the pool. Still am addicted to the stuff (drinking one as I type). And I remember drinking it with my country cousins in the NC mountains all summer long as well. There is a big billboard n 85 I often notice as I travel between Atlanta and Watkinsville that says “Mountain Dew — Georgia’s Best Selling 20 oz Beverage.”

   Reply
5. Kip Burke says:

   July 17, 2009 at 11:49 am

   My daddy, born in Montgomery in 1911, always called a bottle of Coca-Cola “a dope,” harking back to when it really contained coca derivatives. My mama did not approve of the inference, which only made it more tempting. But then she also bought us cola-flavored Fizzies, perhaps the nastiest-tasting drink ever concocted.

   Reply
6. Bob says:

   July 17, 2009 at 1:33 pm

   I remember Fizzies, too. We couldn’t have those either! That alke-holic fizz! Of course we found ways to sample them. You’re right–nasty! But forbidden fruit is usually sweet, so we downed them.

   Reply
7. Tim Oliver says:

   July 20, 2009 at 4:18 pm

   Mountain Dew, in those early days, ran a promotion that, if you bought a six pack, you got a “hillbilly hat”, and an imitation corncob pipe. My brother and I just had to have us one, and we mowed enough yards to make this so. Unfortunately, my brother got the last black hat in the store. All the rest were red. I hated that red hat that I bought with my hard-earned money ! Oh, the laughs I incited with that fool thing. My Uncle Curt took pity and gave me an old cream-colored felt fedora that was damn near the real thing, except he was a barber, and part time moonshiner from south Georgia, not a hillbilly.
   He put my red hat on a scarecrow. Even the crows laughed at it !

   Reply

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