Old Mountain Dew still tickles the innards with memories of hellfire and moonshine

The folks at Mountain Dew - PepsiCo I suppose - are now marketing a "throwback" version of their classic soft drink, one with an older logo and formula, and it gave me a flashback of drinking my first Mountain Dew. It was an experience that brought me closer to hellfire than a 10-year-old ought to be.

Every summer my parents sent my sister and me to visit our cousins - either our girl cousins in Montgomery, or our boy cousins in the wilds of rural Alabama, which I preferred.

My cousins Bill, Gene, and Larry lived at the time near Notasulga, Alabama, where their stepfather, my uncle, Reverend Howard E. Gunter, was the home missions pastor at Friendship Baptist Church and my sainted Aunt Eloise took care of them all.

Big and red-haired, Uncle Howard was fairly new to the ministry. He was a freshly retired Air Force master sergeant and a recently reformed alcoholic, which, along with being a newly minted Baptist preacher made him a Bible-quoting force of nature. It should go without saying that he felt led to be the living hand of God against drinking, drinkers, and anything even remotely alcoholic.

That summer, a new soft drink came into America's stores, a lemon-lime concoction of sugar, citric acid and caffeine. And, if you're old enough to remember, the first Mountain Dew bottles had a drawing of a moonshiner, Willy the Hillbilly, shooting at a revenuer running from an outhouse. "Yahoo! It's Mountain Dew!" said the bottle. "It'll tickle yore innards."

I'd had a taste of the new Dew in the big city of Birmingham, and I was anxious to share the snappy tastes, sugar rushes, and caffeine buzzes with all my cuzzes. So when Bill and I walked to the country store to get a drink, I suggested he try Mountain Dew, not knowing that the wrath of God was awaiting us.

So imagine the scene: two innocent boys come home from the store, drinking soft drinks and reading the cartoon on the label out loud. "Yah-HOO, it's Mountain DEW! Whooee!" Overhearing the commotion, my uncle the reverend, the recovered boozer, comes steaming out of his study and unleashes a torrent of preaching on Bill and me about how the pit of Hell was awaiting for winebibbers, and that anyone who drank moonshine would, without a doubt, burn in Hell forever.

Now, I was raised Presbyterian and we didn't mention burning in Hell much, but I had heard plenty of high-volume Baptist preaching. I just had never been on the receiving end of a personal, eyeball-to-eyeball, finger-wagging message from God's own red-faced spokesman, and it scared me pretty good.

I remember the cold bottle sweating in my hand and not daring to drink that last swallow. I wasn't entirely sure I was going to escape without a paddling until my Aunt Eloise rescued us with the dinner bell, practiced as she was at saving kids from her husband's misdirected wrath.

After that, needless to say, I drank Mountain Dew at every opportunity, now partly for the illicit thrill. I never did grow into a winebibber or Hell-bound drunk, in fact, I never had a taste for alcohol at all. (I am, however, a big fan of caffeine to this day.)

This weekend, I saw Willy the Hillbilly was back on Mountain Dew's website, and I tried the throwback Mountain Dew, with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. It was pretty good, that taste of long ago, but when I took that first sip, I thought for just a second that I detected just a whiff of brimstone.

But it did tickle my innards.