Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/16/how-leon-jones-got-his-water.html
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Times were simpler, for sure. These days we have pipes and pumps and reservoirs and all sorts of complicated shit to get us our drinking water. 
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It all went swimmingly until that fateful day he got into a fatal auto accident with a Hot Rod Lincoln.
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We had it then too, just that no one trusted water thru pipes for some reason.
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There are a lot of people who still don’t.
Though looking at the spot the customer was out in the country and could be getting water from a well on the property which may very much not be all that great for drinking but just fine for everything else.
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Thanks for a blast from L.A.'s TV past. Been years since I saw it, but the catchy country song came right back. How could I have forgotten Leon Jones (yeah…Leon)?
True. L.A. tap water didn’t have the same reputation as NYC’s (“the champagne of drinking water”). Now everyone uses filter jugs with tap water, so who knows if it’s changed?
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…when it did, indeed, literally go swimmingly at first and then drowningly.
@jlw yeah, I was just being a bit sarky, but one does wonder where a lack of trust of water via pipes might have emanated from - couldn’t have been any water bottle delivery company’s advertising, I don’t suppose? 
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Flint says they were right.
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In our city growing up, it was because of
flouride. 
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Yeah, it proves the point, even though Flint was probably more a product of late-stage capitalist fuckwit corrupt public and private authorities in a way that is almost (but not quite, I guess) inconceivable back in the days depicted by that video.
@knoxblox
Yeah, flour and water - what a mess (but not when @jlw is baking, I suspect)
one day, back in the 80s i was absent-mindely singing this song and my roommate (who was from northern california) was aghast - “sparkletts!? what’s that?? the commercial is for Alhambra water!”
i can’t find any evidence on youtube that there were other water companies (or subsidiaries) using this jingle save for a couple of comments on different copies of the video linked here… but i doubt my roommate was making it up. i can only imagine it was done simpson’s style with “ALHAMBRA” spoken in monotone over the song though 
alhambra has too many syllables to really flow right with the original.
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Most of the piping in place in major cities still has asbestos in it. If you ever look at your city’s yearly water quality report, you can see that there’s a “maximum allowable asbestos” level. I guess they didn’t want water pipes catching on fire.
Imagine your Amazon driver having time to stop for milk & cookies, let alone handling some raw meat with your delivery.
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I remember my folks had a Sparklett’s water dispenser at the apartment. It was one of my earliest memories, pouring a glass of water and listening for the glug-glug sounds.
I’m guessing they were owned by the same company.
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You all with your municipal sources of drinking water.
-posted from a cabin outside Fairbanks
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yeah almost certainly, or sparkletts acquired alhambra sometime after the commercials were made…
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LA’s tap water is actually pretty good at the source level if you don’t mind a bit of arsenic. By the time it reaches your faucet, it may be pretty cruddy from aging, corroded pipes between you and the DWP source, or it may be fine.
LA’s water passes all federal & state standards, but that’s not the same as “completely pure” and not necessarily the same as “safe to drink” (especially with regard to arsenic).
(Arsenic is a natural contaminant, and is very expensive to remove - basically, you’d have to turn the whole water supply into Dasani to get rid of it. For most tap water uses - washing, gardening, flushing toilets, etc. - it makes no difference. But anyone with a developing neural system - young children, and pregnant and nursing mothers – should not rely on it as a primary drinking-water source.)
Filter pitchers or simple inline cartridges filters will usually deal with taste/turbidity problems caused by aging plumbing, but they do nothing at all about arsenic or most other health-concern contaminants.
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The Sparkletts Company (originally the “Sparkling Artesian Water Company”) was founded in 1925 by an Eagle Rock resident who was dissatisfied with the quality of the LA municipal supply. The company established a bottling plant where the Eagle Rock sub-aquifer, rising toward the surface before overflowing into the tail end of the San Fernando Valley aquifer and the LA River, produces an artesian well field.
Its Moorish-domed bottling plant can still be seen just a couple blocks from rapidly-hipsterizing York Blvd, surrounded by a fleet of sparkly-green trucks.
Oh, and a great deal of local distrust of municipal supplies comes from our Mexican and Central American immigrant populations, who often had very good reason to distrust the tap water in their countries of origin. They’re the reason we have so many “agua puro” storefronts in mini-malls. Those stores do R/O purification and refill customer bottles at prices far less than Sparkletts delivery.
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