Before I knew what sex was, I knew the White Rock girl was sexy. Her trademark name was Psyche, and she was a dead ringer for Walt Disney's rendering of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan. I was smitten from the first sip.

Pysche, who made her debut on the White Rock mineral-water bottle in 1894, was taken from a painting named Psyche at Nature's Mirror, by the German artist Paul Thumann, showing the topless "kneeling nymph" leaning over a fresh water spring. She was supposed to symbolize purity.

Now Psyche was no Greek goddess, but she was so humanly beautiful that the goddess Venus became jealous, sending Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with an ugly creature (as does Puck with Titania in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream), but instead Puck falls hard for the girl on sight. After a nasty breakup, Psyche was forced to search the world for a lover, and would eventually marry the god Jupiter and move to heaven.

White Rock was founded in 1871 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on the banks of an Indian water hole at the Fox River, years before Coca-Cola and Pepsi came on the market. The company flourished (it's changed hands a few times since), and its sodas were promoted as healthier beverages with curative powers. The brand flourished during Prohibition, so much so that when Charles Lindbergh christened his plane The Spirit of St. Louis in 1927, it was with a bottle of White Rock in hand.

After World War II, with enormous competition from other soda brands like Dr Pepper, Nehi, Royal Crown, and Hoffmann's, White Rock was canny enough to position its brand as finer stuff, used at the nicest bars and restaurants in America. And that's when I fell for the White Rock girl: Whenever my father would take us out to a good restaurant, there was White Rock — the small bottles, all the better to make mixed drinks, set alongside your cocktail. Those bottles I was allowed to drink.

The girl, whom I did not yet know as Psyche, was very beautiful — very blonde, with a Debbie Reynolds-style haircut and bangs that suggested she was maybe in her late teens. She even had these little wings. If you looked real close, you could maybe make out a hint of nipple. Which begged the question: If the White Rock girl was supposed to represent purity, why was she so brazenly topless?

The post-war White Rock ads were in fact pretty racy stuff. One 1947 ad showed Psyche barging in on a couple's restaurant dinner and even peeking through their bedroom window:

The wife, you will notice, is positively exultant, telling Psyche she was right (wink, wink) about drinking White Rock with dinner. In another ad that year, the bare-breasted girl is taking drink orders on a train club car, with passenger and waiter seemingly looking straight past the bottle and onto her rack:

According to White Rock data, Psyche's physique has changed with the times. The 1947 model was estimated to be two inches taller but 15 pounds lighter than earlier renderings (when she seemed to be a redhead), but by 1975 she was taller by two inches — five-foot-eight — and had dropped another seven pounds.

In 2000 the company asked art students to come up with some new images of the goddess, but by then Psyche had covered up, now wearing what looks like a nightie worn at a toga party. Was she shamed into it by popular sentiment? The Moral Majority? Or was it that she had grown older — millennia by Greek legend, at least 120 by contemporary count — and thought she needed a little more coverage. Women get that way.

In any case, Psyche is still with us, and I still look for White Rock at bars and the little blonde on the bottle I can still clutch in my hand the way I did when she first made me think maybe there was more to girls than I thought.

PLUS: More John Mariani on Esquire's Eat Like a Man Blog and John Mariani's Official Site

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