Back in Wyandotte, Michigan, when Andy Reynolds was just nine years old, an old lady who lived on his street used to send him to the Max Variety Pac for six-packs of Pepsi a couple times a week. She drank it every day. Then one day she told Andy she wouldn’t need him to run her errand anymore. Her doctor had told her she needed to quit. This boggled Andy’s mind, but now he’s haunted by the memory. It’s one reason he’s cut back.
“I don’t want to do that either.”
Recently someone asked him how long it had been since he’d drunk a glass of milk or water or for that matter anything other than Pepsi? It dawned on him that he had no idea. Ten years? He couldn’t nail it down. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. Like a lot of things in life, it just happened. He finally decided it was probably in the mid-80s that he “kind of phased everything else out.”
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This has always been the case. Back in Wyandotte he grew up in a little house across the street from the Coca-Cola bottling plant. He and his friends played ball in the street, and when they were lucky they got free pop from the guys who loaded the Coke trucks. This was wonderful for everybody but Reynolds, who turned down the free Cokes. He said he’d rather walk three blocks to the store and spend a dime–half of his allowance–on Pepsi. The way he saw it, the best use for Coke was taking the rust off his bike.
When he’s dead, Reynolds’s children may stand in his office on the second floor of his home and gaze around, sure that he knew who he was. “There was more to me,” he says, “than ‘I put beans on the table. I died.’”
