Heckleman’s Sohio Station was, as previously mentioned, one of our main “hangouts” as kids, the other was TEACO. I attribute our adult well-roundedness as a result of “hanging around” “beer joints” and gas stations as kids. For example, we learned a lot of neat “swear words” and were familiar with important brand names such as “Black Label,” “Old Dutch”, “P.O.C”, “Strohs”, etc. Another important area we were educated in was pop bottle contents measures.  At Heckleman’s, they had a pop machine that was unique. It sat horizontally and was painted dark gray. The pop bottles sat vertically in slots and hung by the ridge just below the neck. You slid them up, over, and through a “trap door” to get one. (See the diagram below) The cost was 10 cents! (Yeah, I know, that WAS a long time ago)!  The most sought after purchase was “R.C. Cola” because for only a dime you got a 16-ounce bottle! This was really unusual in those days because “7 Up” came in 7 ounce bottles and “Kist” and Pepsi, etc. usually came in 10 ounce bottles in vending machines.  If we were fortunate enough to get an “R.C.,” then our day was made! Usually though, everyone else had the same idea. Why they never put 2 rows of “R.C.” in the machine has always eluded me! If the “R.C.” was empty, the next best thing was “Pepsi.” However, you wanted to get the older Pepsi bottles with the “rough neck” with the white dots around the top, as opposed to the newer ones with the twist in the neck. The reason for this was that we somehow had the idea that there was “more” pop in the older bottles! It never occurred to us that both bottles had “Contains 10 fluid oz.” printed on them with the hard, raised white letters! Nevertheless, when we wanted a “Pepsi,” we would run our hand down the neck to see if it was “rough.” If it wasn’t rough, then we would move it to another slot and continue until we felt a “rough neck” (an older bottle and thus containing “more” pop), and pull that one out through the “trap door” after dropping in a dime. As I recall, most of the time we never bothered to move the newer “twisted neck” Pepsi’s back into the proper slot. If anyone else wanted a “Kist” or a Cream soda, etc., they had to move all the “New Twisted-Neck-contains-less-pop” bottles back to the “Pepsi” slots! (Gee, I still can’t imagine why they didn’t like us “hanging around” the station all the time)!  If the “R.C.” 16 ouncers and the “Old-Pepsi-Rough-Necked-contains-more” were empty; the third best choice was the “Chocolate” pop! Boy! That was really good! Once and a while I still find “Yahoo” around these days, but it’s not nearly as good as it was when we were kids (nothing is)! I think these days it’s too “watered down” and not as thick and tasty as it used to be. The same goes for “Squirt.” Remember when it was really tasty and had “pieces of grapefruit” in it when we were kids? After (hopefully) getting an “R.C.” or an OLD Pepsi, we would usually drink almost all the pop, then hop on our bikes and peddle down Ceylon Road to the northwest corner of Tennant Road where our “Breaking Rock” was. We would ride past the rock and throw the empty pop bottles at it. After a while, there was a BIG pile of broken pop bottle glass around the rock! This was very ironic, because when we wanted more pop and a candy bar at Heckleman’s, we would search the ditches and road sides for empty bottles to “cash in” for 2 cents each at TEACO, then take the money across the road to Heckleman’s. Since each bottle was worth 2 cents, if we wanted to buy our “normal” kid main diet of a bottle of pop (R.C. hopefully) and a candy bar we needed 15 cents which meant that we had to find 8 empty bottles to cash in. (The extra penny was used to buy a handful of Spanish peanuts from the machine by the big picture window).  Once and a while some “lucky” one of us would find the “Giant-Size” pop bottle which was worth 5 cents! That meant an “instant candy bar” since they were only 5 cents! Alas, how I long for the “Good Ole Days” (or retirement, which ever comes first)!!!!