From the archives of the NPL comes this shot of a Ballantine car in the company parking lot behind St. Aloyisius School. I'm thinking it's a '58 Plymouth.
It seems like yesterday (May 1964), I was sitting on the SRL church steps waiting for the buses to return from the school trip to the World's Fair. This man RC was describing to me how awesome the lights were at the new Shea Stadium. For some reason I often think of this.
I had been driving for three months. I had an aqua and white 60 chevy Impals. It was a beutiful night. route 280, the riots and Viet Nam were a long way off in the future.
The Mets were in last place. LETS GO METS.
The top photo of the Ballantine car has the word "Chevrolet" in chrome on the front fender. Only the capital "C" is clearly legible, but if you count the letters after that, it's a match.
Some Ballantine Trivia:
Remember when Ballies changed their colors from blue to an ungly beige?
Originally my father's delivery uniform was blue with a hat that looked like a policeman. In the mid to late fifties they switched to a ball cap but kept the blue. In the sixties they "modernized" to the beige/red color scheme on uniforms and trucks.
Remember when the beer and ale label changed too? They kept the three rings, of course, but changed the background color to a split down the middle with two different shades of red. There was a story that one of the shades of red was exactly the same color as the color used in third world countries to designate a container as poison. Supposedly sales dropped. I think it was just the ugly colors.
So Coke wasn't the only company to go through the "New Coke"... oops... "Classic Coke"... syndrome.
My father used to say that when he was growing up in Down Neck, the family lived for a time in a house owned by Ballantine and heated by steam piped from the brewery. Too bad the house didn't come with cold running beer!
