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.
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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.
