Part of the merchandising scheme of the early Mountain Dew was to give the impression that, like moonshine, Mountain Dew was distilled and brewed locally. By personalizing the inscription bottlers hoped to give the impression that a bunch of good ole boys with names like Charlie, Jim and Bill had made up a mess of that good ole Mountain Dew and it was made fresh from mountain water - just for you. The first bottles used the actual names of the bottling plant owners and/or managers - something like "by CHARLIE, JIM and BILL. "

Below is the back of the bottle above right.

As time went on, the bottlers started to issue contests to the route salesmen or plant workers to entice them to sell more (in hopes of getting their own names on a bottle). As an example, the top salesmen for a quarter could get his/her name on a run of bottles (usually - a gross or 144 cases) as did " J.T.-RAY-OTIS-O.P-AUTHUR-CHARLES" (JT was the route sales manager and Ray, Otis, OP, Authur and Charles were the route salesmen that reported to JT).

721 unique Mountain Dew bottles have been cataloged with various names on them. By far and away the majority of the bottles (550) have one or two names on them like "by BARNEY and ALLY" only a few (14) like the one pictured above (Billy-Eugene-Bill-Woodrow-Roger-Ted) have 5 names or more on the same bottle. Other bottles (71) feature the names of towns or counties like "LAURINBURG, N.C.". There is even one bottle with the name of a dog on it - Charlie, named after the faithful mascot GoodTime Charlie. Most of the bottles we don't know who they were named for .... if you know send us an E-Mail. (By Dick Bridgforth)