The Soda Fountain Swap
A regular customer at a local Seattle soda fountain finds himself unexpectedly toasted by a new clerk who can't distinguish between pineapple syrup and brandy.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
That proprietor of a Broadway soda fountain had, up to a week ago, a very polite young man in his employ. A month or so ago, a man with a white necktie and solemn look strolled in and lifted his spirits with spirits, and though the young man looked on in dismay, he was rewarded by hearing the stranger say: 'Keep it up to that standard and I’ll come over from Jackson county to patronize you.' He came again and again, and every time he wiped off his chin with a tender emotion and benign expression, and whispered that Jersey city fountains were over forty miles behind the times on pineapple syrup. But when he dropped in again yesterday, he found a new young man at the fountain. He wiped his heated brow and called for his old favorite, but, after a sup or two at the frothy beverage, he set the glass down and inquired if he didn't order pineapple syrup. 'You did, and you got it,' was the reply. 'It can't be, can't be, young man! I have had soda water here for the last four weeks, and the young man always drew the pineapple syrup out of that faucet up there.' 'He did? Why, that's brandy!' exclaimed the boy. The gray man looked at him for a long time, a shade of sadness stealing over his face, and as he put down his nickel and went out, he said: 'That other young man is on the high road to drinking, and yet I wonder why the handle on the pineapple syrup matches that of the faucet used for it.'
“That other young man is on the high road to drinking, and yet I wonder why the handle on the pineapple syrup matches that of the faucet used for it.”
This 1876 anecdote captures a classic 'Seattle moment'—the tension between the city's growing commercial refinement and the gritty, unregulated reality of its frontier saloons. Just as today’s residents navigate the blurred lines of local business identities in a rapidly shifting neighborhood, this patron was unpleasantly surprised to find the 'standard' of his local haunt was not quite as virtuous as he had assumed.
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