Her husband took her to Vernor’s plant on 1st date. He didn’t know she was the Faygo heir.

Samuel Rosenthal was a doctor, but this was April 1939, the back end of the Great Depression. He was supporting his sister, four brothers and his mom, and bottom line, his bottom line wasn’t good.

He’d met a young lady named Ruth and she had agreed to a date. Now he needed to figure out where to take her, someplace cheap that didn’t feel that way, and … aha! They’d go to the soda fountain at the Vernors plant on Woodward Avenue for fizz and ice cream.

“They had a wonderful time, talking and getting to know each other,” said their eventual daughter-in-law, Marta Rosenthal. The one subject Ruth kept off limits was what her father did for a living, because she knew she wanted to see Samuel again, and embarrassing him felt like poor strategy.

Her father was Ben Feigenson, the co-founder of Faygo.

Nearly 84 years later, in mid-February, Faygo and Vernors were linked again, on the WCSX-FM (94.7) morning show. Hosts Jim O’Brien and Ryan Logan noticed that the state drink of Indiana is water, which seemed ripe for ridicule, and that Michigan doesn’t have an official beverage, which seemed ripe for exploration.

Listeners quickly narrowed the options to Vernors, founded by James Vernor in Detroit in 1866, and Faygo, created by Feigenson and his brother Perry in the same city in 1907.

A couple of teachers heard the show and turned the debate into lesson plans, we saluted their ingenuity here, and we threw the subject open for more discussion.

Tell us stories, we asked, of Vernors and Faygo. Tell us which of them should join the Petoskey stone, brook trout and Eastern white pine as official symbols of the majesty of Michigan.

Back in 1939, Ruth and Samuel were engaged by May and married in August. They were united for 62 years, Marta Rosenthal said, and had four wonderful sons — “and four great daughters-in-law.”

The Rosenthals knew what they wanted. So, it turns out, do Free Press readers.

Team Faygo, or Team Vernors? Hundreds of afizzionados responded, and there’s no sense announcing the result in dribbles:

The leader was Vernors, with probably 80% support.

“Vernors!!” wrote Sharon Larson, of Novi, in big blue letters.

“Vernors Vernors Vernors Vernors Vernors Vernors Vernors Vernors,” said Donna Baier.

But there are stories and recollections to go with the devotion. Where the very best Vernors flowed from the tap. Where employees in a much-remembered commercial sang "that's why we make Faygo," and no, it wasn't aboard a Boblo boat. How daring and delinquent Detroiters obtained their beverages for free.

It may not be official — at least not yet, from the Michigan Legislature — but it's clear as cream soda that we have a passion for pop.

Making the cases

The case for cases of Faygo seemed compelling.

Fifty-plus current varieties, plus another hundred that have cycled through the bottling plant on Gratiot Avenue. The plant itself, what with Vernors engulfed and devoured in half a dozen corporate purchases and now manufactured in Holland. Lower prices. Consistent recipes, even as originalists will tell you Vernor's has lost not only its apostrophe but its actual ginger and much of its snap.

"Faygo tastes the same then as now and it is still manufactured in Detroit," said Gabrielle Lucci, of Farmington Hills, who described herself as a longtime Detroiter and onetime Vernors connoisseur.  "It stayed native."

It's Vernors, though, that tugged at heartstrings and soothed turbulent tummies.

“I vote for Vernors,” said 95-year-old Stan Wickman, of Westland. “It was way better tasting than the citric acid I had to drink when Mom thought I needed something for whatever she deemed was my problem.”

Joe West, of Novi, so associates Vernors with feeling better that he has asked for it by name in four hospital systems.

“Sadly,” he said, “in every instance, they said they didn’t have it. They had some other brand of ginger ale.”

West is in his 70s, and it’s reasonable to surmise that age and its intermingled nostalgia had much to do with our respondents’ fondness for Vernors. Faygo is a treat, but it’s never been considered a cure for anything but thirst.

“Don’t these health care systems understand,” West asked, “that when you were growing up in the 1940s through '60s, your mother always gave you a Vernors when you were sick and so you align Vernors with getting better and your mother taking care of you?”

The applications for Vernors varied by household. Some remember it served room temperature to cure indigestion, others hot to attack raspy throats. It was mixed with orange juice or actual medicine or dairy products — not just vanilla ice cream in a Boston Cooler, but milk.

"Sixty years ago when I caddied at Oakland Hills, a member introduced me to Vernors and milk mixed together 50/50," said Larry Marson, of Lewiston. "Yum. I'm still enjoying this concoction."

The last brand standing

The Vernors company was first sold to outsiders in 1966. The Woodward plant closed in 1985 under the third owner, United Brands. It's now part of Keurig Dr. Pepper, and what once was a local treasure is now found pretty much everywhere.

Mary Ellen Vaydik, of Saginaw, said her husband's parents moved to Kansas City, Missouri., in 1965, crossing the Mississippi River well before Vernors did.

"Whenever we visited them," she said, "we had to bring a case of Vernors, and whenever they returned to Michigan, a case of Coors had better be coming with them."

Ellen Herscher, who lives in Washington, D.C., calls Vernors "Michigan's ambassador."

She’d summer in Frankfort, Herscher said, then load her trunk with enough Vernors to survive the winter, counting cans and rationing until June.

Now it’s available at her local market, meaning she can introduce it to “all these East Coasters who think ‘egg cream’ is actually drinkable.”

The finest Vernors, contends Judith Doner Berne, did not travel. It was on tap at the Detroit Zoo.

Berne, a former managing editor with Eccentric Newspapers, has since moved to Northern California. She's Team Faygo, with a family connection to the brand: her dad's ad agency, W.B. Doner, created musical commercials with the chorus, "Remember when you were a kid? Well, part of you still is, and that's why we make Faygo."

Multiple Faygo fans referred to that song in a famous ad with former radio star Harold Peary leading passengers aboard a Boblo boat — except that with icy season approaching on the Detroit River, said author Joe Grimm, Doner actually whisked a planeload of employees to Acapulco to perform aboard a boat called the Fiesta.

Grimm wrote "The Faygo Book" and said he has spoken on the subject in more than 200 Michigan communities. Faygo is “an ongoing love story,” he said, and the last brand standing in a neighborhood once so dotted with bottling plants it was known as Pop Alley.

One tale Grimm didn't know was imparted to Lake Orion physician Erik Zuckerberg, a cousin of the founding Feigenson clan.

An older patient, Zuckerberg said, told him that “when he was a mischievous young man, he and a friend would go down into the storm drains by the Faygo plant, follow the sweet smell of sugar, pop up right into the middle of plant floor at night, and ‘borrow’ a couple of cases of Faygo.”

Vernors by the barrel

What else to pass along?

Ed Lebowsky, of Livonia, said that when he was a kid, he’d ride his bike to the bottling plant for an ice cold Vernors — in Toledo.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, of Farmington Hills, said that when his daughter was 10 and he was a sophisticated adult, he learned something jarring about Boston Coolers: they’re not universal. His daughter ordered one on vacation at a New Hampshire ice cream stand and the puzzled clerk said, “We don’t have peaches and cottage cheese here.”

Baby boomer Myra Rosen Burnstein, of Oak Park, and another reader, John Wagatha, said they attended school in northwest Detroit at James Vernor Elementary, named for the creator of the soft drink and still in use.

On various holidays, Burnstein said, “It was a childhood thrill to line up in the school hallway and watch huge barrels of Vernors roll past. Throughout the day, each class was called one-by-one to receive glasses of Vernors.”

Then there’s a gentleman who said his summer job one year was running the bottle washing machine for Faygo.

His brother was also working that summer, the bottle washer said, over in milling where the flavors were mixed. One day, he forgot an ingredient and ruined an entire batch. A cousin ran a forklift, and he carried a load too high, mashed a CO2 line and forced the closure of the entire plant.

The bottle washer, who has gone on to greater things, is Benjamin Feigenson Rosenthal, the third son of the couple whose first date was sodas at the Vernors factory.

Rosenthal, 75, is CFO of a different family business, 109-year-old Madison Electric in Warren. He said he doesn’t know when his mother told his dad what family he’d be marrying into, but “it was probably after they got engaged.”

He does know that “when I was a little boy, we thought Coke was a swear word,” and that if you open his refrigerator in Franklin you’ll still find Rock & Rye, RedPop, root beer and orange.

He and Marta will celebrate their 47th anniversary in April. “She never drank Faygo growing up,” Ben said, and she still says soda instead of pop no matter how many times he tries to set her straight.

But they’re making it work, a sweet story all their own.

Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or follow him on Twitter at @nealrubin_fp.

To subscribe to the Free Press for less than you'd invest in a 24-ounce Moon Mist, click here.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Even the Faygo heir had a Vernor's story