This is another end of an era. The announcement in today’s Allentown Morning Call, “A-Treat closing after nearly a century in Allentown,” will send tremors across a host of people and carnival organizers. What will a ring toss be without A-TREAT bottles as targets and prizes? We are grieving this news.

“Goodbye, A-Treat. Birthday parties and barbecues, field trips and family picnics won’t be the same without you.

“Those are the events where generations of Lehigh Valley residents learned to love the many varieties of soda produced in A-Treat’s east Allentown factory: the cola and cream soda, the birch beer and ginger ale, the grapefruit and black cherry and sarsaparilla and Big Blue — the blue raspberry variety that was colored like nothing in nature but was catnip to sweet-toothed kids.”

Click here to read this A-TREAT obituary in the Morning Call.

By the way, the bottle in the above photo collage is on E-Bay starting at $50.