Manning The Bottle Washer at Made-Rite

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I was talking to a fellow the other day who retired from the Made-Rite Company, which has been a sponsor of the Great Texas Balloon Race since its inception. That reminded me of the nearly two years I spent working at the soft-drink plant on Industrial Boulevard.

I finished my last semester at Longview High School by correspondence course so I could work full-time at Made-Rite and save money for college. I took night courses at Kilgore College in order to continue working full-time — newly married and on our own financially. That is the way I wanted it.

In 1973, Made-Rite still bottled a line of beverages, including Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew, both of which I grew to love. (I am long over that sugary habit, and swore off diet sodas more than a year ago.) I started out doing lowly labor, naturally, such as stacking cases of bottled drinks on pallets, which was strenuous. Twenty-four bottles of 12-ounce DP in a wooden crate probably weighs about as much as a bale of hay. Ray, the foreman, was astute enough to quickly figure out that while I was strong enough to sling the cases, being vertically challenged made it hard for me to load the top layer. Soon I was on the dirty-bottle line.

That was not a bad gig. One loaded the bottles onto a conveyor four at a time, interlaced between your fingers. They were headed to the bottle washer, a large machine on which perched a lone operator. His job was to keep the bottles upright as the marched like infantry into the jaws of the washer. I wanted that job.

The toughest time on the line was when the one-liter (I think) glass bottles were being fed into the conveyor. That’s because people invariably put the caps back on the bottle even after it was empty. I have no idea why, but it meant Made-Rite had to pay folks like me to unscrew and chunk the caps as the bottles clinked down the conveyor.

That was not much fun. In the 44 years since, I have always made a point from separating the cap from the bottle when recycling. They are made of different plastics, and if you don’t do so, somewhere a person is picking through mountains of bottles and removing the caps.

Jack M. Mann, who died several years ago, ran Made-Rite and gave me the job after a brief interview. His son and I were high school classmates. Mr. Mann was a fair, friendly boss. I recall a time a couple of workers, roughly my age, decided to act like idiots and smashed a couple dozen glass bottles. When the pile of broken glass was discovered, Mr. Mann gathered all of us together. Eventually the hooligans were found out and fired. That was the only time I saw him angry. He certainly had every right to be.

I learned to drive a forklift at Made-Rite and spent time stacking pallets of soft drinks, which was a great improvement from twisting off bottle caps. I was a cautious driver, and took great care in stacking loaded pallets of soft drinks on top of each other — three or four high. Those forklift-driving skills have occasionally come in handy over the years.

Toward the end of my tenure, before leaving town to attend SFA in Nacogdoches, I won the coveted bottle washer operator job, along with a modest raise. At last, I had a job where I could legitimately read during the frequent times the machine was halted because of a foul-up in front, where the clean bottles were being filled with Dr Pepper or Sunkist. The front was forbidden territory to us blue-collar kids in back. Here, women wore hairnets and white coats, since sanitation was paramount. When a bottle broke, or the bottling machine jammed, the washer stopped. I would pick up my novel or textbook and read until the buzzer sounded and the bottles again began their march into the washer. I just had to right the fallen soldiers, which was not difficult.

Made-Rite ceased bottling in 1990, according to its website. Down in Nacogdoches, the Coca-Cola bottler was still on North Street in 1974. The bottling operation was behind sheet-glass windows and visible from the sidewalk as I walked to class. I never failed to look and check if things were running smoothly.

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