The car I ended up buying, of course, was from one of the men at RC, a sales supervisor who wore his hair in a huge pompadour perched atop his forehead and who spoke so tight-lipped it seemed he never opened his mouth. By the end of that summer I had enough saved to buy the car, a '49 Chevrolet four-door with, believe it or not, only 22,000 miles on it. Even my primary teen-age rite of passage -- ownership of a car -- was indelibly stamped with an association to RC Cola. It was in that car that my brothers, Tim and Brad (who was home on leave, back from the first of his three SEAPAC cruises), and I drove to California in February 1975. Our father had been promoted to vice president of the Los Angeles franchise of RC Cola.

Gone were the jobs at RC. The Los Angeles franchise was the big-time, tied into national headquarters in Chicago, and my dad could not so easily pass us off on the payroll. I found a job the summer after my junior year at Knott's Berry Farm, making candy apples, getting up at 5:15 a.m. five days a week, weekends included.

My friends -- the small cadre I'd accrued in the few months we'd lived there -- thought I was nuts getting up that early, especially during summer vacation. What they didn't know, of course, was my history, the way my dad called my name at this exact time just as he had for the last three years. It'd been ingrained in me, this notion of work, this getting up early to go and make your way in this world.

Strangely, I looked forward to getting up, to doing this job, because my father hadn't arranged any of it, hadn't fixed things for me, and wasn't there, a looming presence in all I did. I wasn't the boss's son, wasn't given the job, wasn't driven there by my dad.

I kept on part-time once school started, into the spring of my senior year. Every Saturday and Sunday I was out of the house by 5:30 a.m, every week bringing home a paycheck, every Friday night spending it on my girlfriend and the movies and dinner and whatever else it is you waste money on in your senior year of high school. When I got accepted into the forestry program at Northern Arizona University, there lay before me only 12 weeks to make enough money to last me a whole year. With all my money spent and a job skewering apples at $3.10 an hour, I had no choice but to accept my dad's offer of summer employment at good old RC Cola. There I would make $5 an hour, have weekends off, could drive in with him so I wouldn't have to put miles on my car or pay any gas.

At 5:15 the morning after I graduated from high school, having been out until 3 the night before, my dad again leaned into my room, called my name, said, "Time to get up."

I spent the summer building racks, those huge wooden structures you see on the ends of aisles in grocery stores, under the direction of one Jimmy Galintino, a short, gray-haired man who'd been with the company for 30 years and whose ears stuck out from his head like the handles on a trophy. Here I was in Los Angeles, in the middle of Watts in a sprawling factory, hundreds of people at work in all the adjacent buildings, the bottling line running 24 hours a day non-stop. Mr. Galintino filled out rack orders, called stores and arranged times for new ones to be delivered, old ones to be picked up; I sat outside, the pieces of these things spread out around me like the bones of a big dead animal, waiting for me to reassemble them.

Once enough of them were built, we loaded them for delivery onto the back of a flatbed truck and drove all over Southern California, from San Clemente to Ventura, Pasadena to San Pedro, Simi Valley to San Bernardino. We spent a lot of time together, just driving on freeways.

Mr. Galintino talked, his words quick and loud, his hands working all the while. He was barely able to see over the steering wheel and spent his drive time imparting the history of Royal Crown Cola to me, as though he were some sort of oracle, I his amanuensis, though all I ever did was nod, look out my window, wonder which Vons we were headed for, where we might get lunch.

He told of how he'd been the one to invent the display tray, the fold-up and precut sheet of cardboard in which the product was placed to build displays of RC or Diet Rite or anything else; he told of when Nehi was king and you couldn't give away RC; he told of the first summer they sold a million cases out of the Los Angeles franchise, and of how when he was a driver and it was so hot one day that bottles were exploding in the bays.

He'd known my dad for years, knew him back when he was doing driver-truck sales for the company, then when Dad had become the first pre-salesman, a notion back in the '50s of sending someone in to take an order and having it delivered off the truck by somebody else the next day. As radical as you could get, Mr. Galintino let me know. My dad was something of a mover, and he let me know how proud I ought to be of him, how great a man he was.

And he told of how my father, the story legendary now in the annals of Royal Crown, had gotten into a fistfight with a Coke salesman once in the soda pop aisle of a Safeway in Long Beach over who had the right to which facings on the shelf.

"Who won?" I asked when he was through with the story.

He looked at me, his hands finally still and in place on the steering wheel. It was a look that seemed to size me up, and seemed to find me wanting.

He smiled, shrugged. "Doesn't matter, does it?" he said.

* Bret Lott is the author of, most recently, the novel Reed's Beach. He lives in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., and teaches at the College of Charleston.