My History teacher told my class that when he was young (He is now nearly 60) that he use to have a Milk Man deliver his milk, and a Bread man would come and give him bread every two days, these two seemed normal to me but the one that I thought was quite bizarre was when he mentioned a "Soda Man" or something like that, apparently he use to come by and give bottles of coke, cream soda, a type of drink that he said tasted like "cough medicine" and a bunch of others. Can someone tell me a bit about this and what type of sodas they use to give out?
You don't mention what country your teacher lived in but I assume from your use of the word "sodas" that it was North America. I can tell you how it worked in Australia, where that type of beverage is usually called "soft drinks".
While major soft drink bottlers like Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola and Marchants distributed through shops, there were a huge number of small local bottlers who sold mostly direct to consumers. There might be one bottler in a small town, larger bottlers might cover several towns and in cities there would be several bottlers although they would tend to each have their own geographical area.
The soft drinks were delivered to the home in a wooden crate each containing 12 glass bottles (Typically weekly or fortnightly). The customer had to pay an up front deposit on the crate and bottles on the first purchase and typically would have a standard order so that the empties would be returned each time there was a delivery. Each bottler would produce a variety of flavours.
Common flavours were Creaming Soda, Portello, Orange, Pineapple, Ginger, Sarsaparilla, Lemon, Cola, Lime.