
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
I poured one of the new Jennifer Lopez Delola cocktails for my friend. She looked at the bottle label and said, “Have you noticed that this is made in Silverton?” She’s right! Isn’t J-Lo supposed to be “Jenny from the block” in the Bronx? Does she sneak into Cincinnati to run her company? —JENNY IS A CROCK
DEAR CROCK:
Poor J-Lo. Staying true to your roots is hard when your spritzers come “from the block” on Plainfield Road near Italianette Pizza. Her obsessively curated authenticity has already faced criticism over selling alcohol after years of disparaging it, having once said, “I don’t get s***faced. It ruins your skin!” And now this.
It should be noted that many national beverages are regionally bottled, such as Cincinnati’s Coca-Cola coming from Madisonville and Pepsi from Amberley Village (until this year). Maybe this is also true for Delola? To find out, the Doctor asked a friend in Los Angeles to send a photo of their Delola bottle. It says, “Produced by House of Delola in Silverton, Ohio.”
Delola is distributed by Meier’s Beverage Group, the century-plus-old Silverton winery that’s currently struggling with its own problems: bankruptcy and sell-offs. It’s enough to drive someone in Beverly Hills to drink spritzers from Ohio. Maybe after the bankruptcy settles down, J-Lo will ultimately partner with a company from the Bronx. Or Ben (again).
I was discussing transgender issues with my grandmother. She told me about a famous Cincinnati story from the 1960s when a local person tried to legally change their name after transitioning. It was very unusual back then and got a lot of attention. Can you find out more about it? —THE NAMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
DEAR NAMES:
Your question’s delicate walk through various pronouns is duly noted. Cincinnati Probate Court was petitioned in October 1962 by one Gerard Charles Thomas, requesting a legal name change to Janet Thomas. Documents submitted included letters from doctors who detailed various surgical, hormonal, and psychiatric procedures and certified that Ms. Thomas “can no longer be considered a male.” The local newspaper story could not resist including details about “the golden brown-haired applicant” wearing “a tan gabardine skirt with expertly made-up eye shadow highlighting gray eyes” and who measured “34½, 24½, 34½.” We’d like to assume a sensitive editor quietly struck the “Va-va-voom!” from the story.
Your grandmother described Ms. Thomas as a local person, but consider this: She traveled extensively, had her operation in Casablanca, and did not stay with her parents upon returning to Cincinnati for a legal update to her birth certificate. Draw your own conclusions about how “local” she thought herself to be by this time.
The Doctor could find no follow-up media coverage about whether Ms. Thomas’s name change was granted. She got married in New York in 1966 and died in Oklahoma in 2020.
I was surprised by the shutting down of the Pepsi bottling facility in Amberley Village. I thought it closed years ago when the enormous neon “Pepsi” sign along I-75 went away. That thing was huge! It was my welcome-home sign whenever I returned from traveling. What year did it come down? —SIGNING OFF
DEAR OFF:
Thanks for the callback to our first topic. Everything about the Pepsi- Cola bottling plant was huge. The company bought 103 acres of Amberley farmland, proudly boasting that “trees disappeared, hills leveled, streams changed, and a maze of posts, wire, pipes, and sewers” bulldozed most of it. The 1958 grand opening included big ceremonies and celebrity appearances.
To the public, though, the most visible symbol of the plant’s enormity was that giant neon sign. We couldn’t find its measurements, but it probably would have been visible from space if humanity’s one satellite hadn’t recently fallen back to Earth. When I-75 was built, the sign was especially visible to drivers traveling south, welcoming visitors to one of the few places in the U.S. where Pepsi outsold Coke.
The Doctor hopes that all of this interesting information has distracted you from the fact that he’s failed to answer your question. In what year did the sign disappear? We hope to hear from someone who lived nearby and finally started getting some sleep.
Dr. Know is Jay Gilbert, radio personality and advertising prankster. Submit your questions about the city’s peculiarities here.
Facebook Comments