In 1993, one of the first things you’d have reached for when your daily Milwaukee Journal was delivered was the Green Sheet, a four-page insert (in a readable verdant hue) that held entertainment news, comics, crossword puzzles and the like. In the Aug. 17 edition, the story on the front of that section is a love letter to Graf’s Beverages, a soft drink company founded in 1873 on Fifth and National by a 20-year-old Milwaukee businessman named John Graf. The occasion for this story was a picnic honoring what would have been the company’s 120th anniversary, and with it ran a large illustration of “Grandpa” Graf’s caricatured face – familiar to local households from the soda line’s label.
I know this to be true because I’m staring at the faded newspaper clipping, tucked into a small file of Graf’s antiquities stored at the Milwaukee Central Library. What I’m specifically hunting down are relics of a soda I grew up with called 50/50, a grapefruit-lime twist that had disappeared from shelves in the last few years, sparking my hunt.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Graf’s, in its heyday, was one of the largest producers of carbonated beverages in the nation. By 1968, 50/50 was one of 10 or so flavors of soft drinks (including ahead-of-their-time sugar-free products) that Graf’s was making, in addition to bottling Dr Pepper, RC Cola and Schweppes products under national franchise agreements.
When I was very young, my mom would frugally ration out portions of 50/50 into tiny tumblers for my four siblings and me. Still a few years before plastic 2-liters were introduced (in 1978), we had the quart-size glass bottles – returnable, of course, for the deposit. It’s been quite a few decades since I’ve tasted 50/50, but I can still tell you why I loved it. The stuff was sweet and tart, with both a hint of bitterness and big, tingly bubbles tickling the throat.
I’m trying to explain the historical significance of a lost soda from Milwaukee in an email to the media relations person for the conglomerate Keurig Dr Pepper, which was the last of many companies to acquire the 50/50 brand after John Graf’s grandson, Lawrie, sold the Graf’s company to Milwaukee’s P & V Atlas (that would be leather barons Pfister & Vogel) in 1968. Local ownership ended in 1985, amid debts and layoffs, with the sale of Canada Dry/Graf’s, as it was then called, to Canfield’s in Chicago, among whose products was a soda called Canfield’s 50/50.
After days of my own research, the Keurig Dr Pepper spokesperson finally responds to me, saying she hopes this info is helpful: 50/50 “was phased out of production in 2021.”
But I kept sifting through the Graf’s file at the library, finding a funny little recipe booklet (no date but I’d guess the ’30s) for making frozen desserts and “luncheon salads” with soft drinks. Next in the pile, inside a protective plastic sleeve, is a collection of old foil labels that once wrapped around the necks of glass bottles of 50/50 and other Graf’s drinks. The labels are so familiar, triggering memories I haven’t thought of in ages, that I feel protective of them. And of 50/50, too – an emblem of Milwaukee’s soda-making past.
