Townsquare Media on Westport Avenue in Shreveport is getting a face lift.  If you've ever been to our studios, you know that when you walk in the front door, it feels like you're walking into a Western Sizzlin'.  My first reaction was, "Where's the salad wagon?"  Well, that's all changed.  Gone are the double wooden doors; they've been replaced by a streamlined glass facade.  The ponderous front desk has been torn out, along with the brick wall that stood behind it.

When the workmen knocked the brick wall down, an amazing discovery was made: the wall was actually two layers of bricks with a hollow space between.  We believe the building was built in the late 70's.  Sometime between then and now, various articles were dropped into that space.  We found a book of matches, a pack of Merit cigarettes, and the relic that I hold in my hand in the picture above.  It's a returnable glass Coke bottle!

Back in the day, you could get up to 10 cents each when you returned your empty Coke bottles to the store.  The bottles were then taken to the bottler where they were sterilized and reused.  While most millennials have never even heard of these things, the final demise of the returnable glass bottle didn't happen until 2012 when the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Winona, Minnesota, ceased using them.

While this bottle is probably not worth much, is does take me back a bit.  When I was in high school in Terrell we'd go to Terrell Pharmacy after school to get a Coke, but we wouldn't drink the entire thing because the very last bit of it was backwash and you didn't want to drink that because it was all spit.  (Silly wives tale that isn't true at all.)

The bottle we found here actually has a little remnant of dried-up Coke at the bottom.  Or is it tobacco spit?

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