What’s this?

I know how to get you talking, bring up eggs over-easy or Coca-Cola trivia. I don’t think anyone’s mentioned this one: I remember in the early 60s there was a promotion where underneath each bottle cap was a scene from a state in the union. There were 100 in all, two scenes from each state. Kids went nuts collecting them! My buddy Wayne and I would go around to gas stations and markets asking the proprietors to empty the bottle-cap bins in their Coke machines for us, and most of them obliged. Some kids even had magnets they’d employ to retrieve caps. I’m sure the hard-working people we were bugging wished we had a magnet. As I recall, that was about the time the bottlers replaced the cork inside bottle caps with a transparent plastic seal. I guess they couldn’t resist exploiting the new technology.