Blue Cola Blues: The Ups & Downs of Life and RC Cola
By: Andrew Donaldson
Tags: a posting in Litterouti, Food, History

Blue Cola Blues: The Ups & Downs of Life and RC Cola

Back to where it started: a father’s trip to the far corner of a grocery store just so his kid can say they drank soda out of a glass bottle

Photo by David Antis. Image has been sized and cropped from original

The Kroger in Gassaway/Sutton (don’t ask, it’s complicated where one ends and the other begins), West Virginia of the mid-to-late 1980s had what current folks might think was quaint and odd. Truth be told, even by time the Cold War was ending, the little boxed-shaped pass-through window with a counter running through it was already archaic enough. By that point, the ritual of return was done as a traditional thing more than anything, so kids such as me could say they’ve participated. History holds still for no one, of course, least of which business practices that are not profitable. Thus, occasionally, my father had me take the glass bottled RC Cola case and put it on the little pass through to return it. While up the road in Sutton Elliot’s Fountain was still technically open, it was long past it’s dedicated drug store soda fountain days. For me it meant a milkshake that was a longer drive and different consistency than the two-windowed walk-up Dairy Queen shakes I was more accustomed to. I only got those because my primary babysitter worked the counter and hooked me up. As far as nostalgic soda pop goes, those RC Cola bottles going back and forth to Kroger was the sum total of my non-plastic, more traditional soda rearing.

While other parts of the country hold the green glass Coke bottle in the highest of historical regard, those RC bottles that looked to be as long as your arm as a kid were something special. Mom wasn’t big on letting me have soda in the first place, which made such a binge truly memorable. The glass bottle in the era of everything going to plastic added to the sense it was something special, out of place, a big deal. While Coke, Pepsi Stuff, the short-lived and disastrous New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, and a hundred other products in the carbonated world have come and gone, those bottles of RC Cola have stuck in my mind and memory. The world of beverage spins and RC Cola just abides.

It’s a shame RC Cola didn’t revolutionize the cola industry with such innovations as diet cola, canned cola, national advertising, local distribution, the first 16 oz. bottle, the first celebrity endorsement campaigns…

Oh, wait. They did.

What happened, then, that RC Cola has long been an afterthought behind Coke and Pepsi? Similar to many businesses, and food businesses in particular, there is tragedy, and incompetence, and bad decisions, and a big ball of human emotions and hurt feelings. How is it when I proclaim my fond memories of RC Cola on social media, the Coca-Cola Calvinists descend to decry my total depravity for daring to exercise a free will beverage opinion?

Reader’s Digest Version: it’s complicated.

Like Fizz Through the Hourglass…

The fight over cola supremacy started with, well… a fight over cola.

Claud Adkins Hatcher [Public domain]

Described as a “a quiet scholarly, absent minded-professor type from Terrell County,” by his mid-twenties Claud Hatcher had set aside his pharmacy training and moved to Columbus, Georgia to throw in with the family grocery business. He sold his drug store in Dawson in 1901 to focus on his father’s burgeoning wholesale operation. Things went well enough that the Hatchers were able to buy out their partners and strike out on their own course.

In that era, what we know as soda had been available only at the “soda fountain” which was usually found in drug stores. The bottling of soda was relatively new, and wholesalers like the Hatchers sent bottles to their customers at cost. Studious businessman he was, Claud was quick to notice the increasing demand of the fizzy concoctions and saw an opportunity.

Since he was moving more and more bottles of Coca-Cola, the only soda game in town — or anywhere else for that matter — Claud figured his fellow businessmen from Atlanta should cut him a deal and discount his end to offset the volume he was sending their way.

He was wrong. The local Coke rep not only turned him down, but whatever was said between them lit a fire under the pharmacist-turned-grocer wholesaler that burned for the remaining 30 years of his life. Hatcher swore he would never again sell a bottle of Coke. Problem was, all his customers had their own customers, and those customers were beating down the door for this new-fangled soda drink. Hatcher grocery better sell cola, or else.

Claud got to work. He turned a basement into a laboratory, and combined his pharmacy training with his working knowledge of having owned and operated soda fountains before in his drug store concerns. If Coke wouldn’t work with him, he could invent his own cola to sell.

The result was Royal Crown Ginger Ale, and it was an immediate hit. Such a hit the company turned into a full-blown beverage wholesaler. With the former Hatcher distribution network to grocers already built in, Hatch had his product on shelves almost immediately. Later he came out with other flavors, most notably Chero-Cola with a cherry flavoring.

The drink was a hit. The brand almost ended the company.

Having bought his own beverage company himself, another Georgia pharmacist-turned soda maven in Asa Chandler re-named it the Coca-Cola Company. Based out of Atlanta, Coke quickly dominated the fledgling market, and as the company grew so did imitators. By the early 1900s Coke was sufficiently strong to start going after anyone who tried to use the term Cola on anything, to the tune of 500 some lawsuits over 30 years. Among them Chero-Cola. Hatcher, already nursing a grudge against Coke, was having none of it and vowed to fight. In 1923 a judge ruled in Coke’s favor, forcing Hatch to change the name of Chero-Cola — his best selling brand at the time — to Chero, which just isn’t the same. A name change to the whole company, the great depression, and other luck both self-induced and of the random variety left the company’s fortunes very much in doubt when Claud died in 1933.

No offense to Claud, but it was one of the best things that happened to the company, as the able H.R. Mott took over. First order of business was to shelve the under-performing Chero, ditch the cherry flavor, and rebrand it as a straight cola flagship flavor in a throwback to the original concept right out of Claud’s basement. Named Royal Crown, it sold as fast as they could make it and the company rebounded. By 1944, and ten years after his own death, Claud Hatcher at last got his vengeance on Coke. The courts ruled the term “cola” was not trademarked by the Atlanta juggernaut, and it’s been Royal Crown Cola ever since. RC Cola had arrived. Mott borrowed another of Claud’s innovations to keep it that way, heavily investing in advertising. Using print, radio, and some of the earliest TV ads, RC Cola had celebrity endorsements and the now familiar “taste test” method of pitching a product. But regardless of success, RC Cola never could catch the twin towers of the carbonated world, Coke and its Carolina cola cousin Pepsi. By the mid-50s, RC Cola was down again.

The company did what it had done before in hard times: went back to the laboratory. In 1962 it launched Diet Rite, and changed soda forever. The diet cola innovation was such a success that stories abounded of store owners chasing down the sales reps in their cars to get more product than the trucks could haul. The reason for the crazy was the innovation of the artificial sweetener. Far “sweeter” than regular sugar, folks just went nuts for it. The reason the crazy ended almost overnight was artificial sweetener. Folks can chuckle at the idea of “healthy soda” but Big Sugar was not amused at one of its cash cows finding another method. Thus it wasn’t long before studies flooded the news of how the artificial sweeteners were all kinds of bad for you, killing Diet Rite almost overnight. On top of that, there isn’t anything RC can seemingly do that Coke and Pepsi can’t borrow, so after the debacle of Diet Rite’s collapse, both developed and marketed their own versions of diet pop, along with their bigger market shares. RC Cola was back to being third, again.

The self-inflicted wounds accumulated. RC bought and almost bankrupted Arby’s in the 70s, a guy named Victor Posner who is mostly famous for perfecting the hostile takeover, bought the company and managed to do all sorts of damage before pleading no contest to federal charges in 1987, and the executives at Royal Crown spent years trying to get rid of him, then a few more mitigating the damage. At the same time RC Cola was curling into the fetal position to survice, Coke and Pepsi embarked on the multi-million dollar “Cola Wars” of the 80s and 90s, advertising with everything from gimmick space races to new formulas and merchandising tie-ins. There is only so much room at the top, the old saying goes, even less so when there are two giants patrolling the top of Mount Soda.

So what about RC Cola? Jeff Wells explains it well:

So who drinks RC Cola these days? In addition to its southern fans, the brand has a presence in Chicago, where it’s served at Bears games and at pizzerias throughout the city, which often give out a free liter with orders. According to Encyclopizzeria, that arrangement began back in the ’60s, when a creative local bottler got in good with local pie shops, figuring the pairing of RC and deep dish pizza would generate good vibes with customers. It did, and today many a Chicagoan has a soft spot for the underdog cola. Aside from the Windy City, though, RC’s appeal seems tied to small town America and times gone by. “The company never shook its strictly southern, small-town image,” states the New Georgia Encyclopedia, which chronicles the state’s history. For fans of RC, that image as the overlooked, underappreciated casualty of the cola wars is just what they love about it. It’s the scrappy bargain brand-the un-hyped, unadorned alternative for true cola lovers.

It’s a damning indictment of a once visionary company that they can’t sell that narrative. Everyone loves an underdog, after all, and in the social media age plenty of folks are more aware of their own un-hypedness than ever. Claud Hatcher once spent half the company’s layouts on advertising, so much did he believe in the power of storytelling to bring in the revenue. A company founded to avenge a perceived insult should have more fighting spirit in its brand and advertising, not just its history.

Then again, tough times come for everyone sooner or later, and if they don’t it just means time already passed you by without you noticing it.

Blue Cans, Blue Highways, and Just Plain The Blues

In 1978, just up the road from Kroger, a writer in a painted van wandered into downtown Sutton and discovered that the town’s soda fountain still clung to life- just not the idealized one the term would bring up from the 50s or 60s of his own youth.

“In the frayed, cluttery hamlet everything — people, streets, buildings — seemed to be nearing an end. In one old survivor, Elliott’s Fountain,…I drank a Hamilton-Beach chocolate milkshake, the kind served alongside the stainless steel mixing cup. “The owner, Hugh Elliott, laid out a 1910 photograph of the drugstore when you could buy a freshly concocted purge or balm, or a fountain Bromo-Seltzer, or a dulcimer; although the pharmaceuticals were gone, you could still get a Bromo or a dulcimer (next to the Texas Instruments 1025 Memory Calculator)….what had been a spacious room of several bent-steel chairs and tables was now top to bottom with merchandise. What had been a place of community was now a stuffed retail outlet…

If he thought that was bad, should he ever return, William Least Heat-Moon could see the Elliot’s Fountain of my youth and his mid-life trip of discovery to now be the Flatwoods Monster Museum. And by museum, they mean the fountain counter is now the place various brochures and other merch are hawked about the local legend of an alien that the locals don’t care about, but draws outside attention from time to time.

Sutton West Virginia. The “Sealtest Ice Cream” sign hangs where it always has, a remnant of Elliot’s Fountain, now Flatwoods Monster Museum. Photo by Tim Kiser via Wikimedia Commons

Elva Sue passing me off-the-books milkshakes, even though Hugh or whoever was running things by then didn’t care, is no longer.

Two years later and a thousand yards up town hill from where Blue Highways made a literary pit stop, my folks brought their first, and as it turned out, only son home. What Heat-Moon found to be an amazing travel experience was just the road my folks drove to their jobs teaching at Braxton County High School every day, or to church, or to visit folks, and once or twice a week to that Kroger to stock up. As great writers do, he took our ordinary and wordsmithed it with an outside perspective into something else. Sutton, like most of Appalachia, had indeed seen better days. Most of its businesses have since moved down the road to Flatwoods, keeping their “Sutton” address but being adjacent to the interstate for greener pastures and balance sheets. As did our family, moving down river from Sutton, past Gassaway, and to a place called Frametown for the next decade before returning to Up Yonder for good.

Anyhoo…

Places like Sutton certainly fit some folks’ stereotypes of small towns, espcially West Virginia ones, with hundred year old buildings that have now been empty longer than they housed the businesses they were built for. Bigger and better things elsewhere means those not a part of that remain unchanged from the revolving world. You can argue those folks should evolve, change, or innovate. That they should maybe just give up what they still have and become more like the successful and prosperous folks elsewhere.

There is validity to the accusation. My parents had been part of the original staff at the then-brand new consolidated high school for the county, also with a Sutton address but in Flatwoods, situated about where the eponymous monster had supposedly been seen. By the time they retired, my father was getting grandchildren of his first students. You leave or stay, or come back. There are only three options. To an outsider, it seems there should be more than those three. To some those don’t seem like many options. Then again, some of those same folks thinks only one soda is perfectly fine and no other options are allowed, so it’s a matter of taste after all.

It’s a refrain the folks of West Virginia hear constantly. It’s an accusation that RC Cola has been saddled with, accurately in many cases. It’s also something the giants of Coke and Pepsi might become all too familiar with themselves.

All That Remains, But Not the Same

Royal Crown has been a trendsetter in another way for the soda business. In declining first, they were ahead of the entire business model.

To modern sensibilities the chaos of the Diet Rite era probably seems quaint. Between fad diets, health kicks, and increasing instances of “soda” and “sugary drink” taxes, Big Soda has been trending down. Sales of cola have declined so much that in 2016 bottled water passed soda in sales for the first time. Somewhere, Claud Hatcher the master marketer probably smiled at that one, that someone somewhere convinced folks to spend gobs of money on something they have at home for free. The mega-companies that Coke and Pepsi are now have diversified out in multiple directions, so while carbonated sales slump, their companies are talking about lost revenue percentages and not any immediate business collapse.

Meanwhile the thing that has kept RC Cola from ever joining Big Cola also means they are relatively stable: RC Coal just keeps on keeping on, its blue cans still there for folks to find, with little to no advertising.

Photo by Joel Kramer via Flickr

Long gone now are the soda fountains that started the carbonated craze, and the practice of returning glass bottles for a discount on the next batch. You can get glass bottled Coke anywhere in America, either the glass novelty bottles or the full sized ones from Mexico. In a small and unexpected joy, the little local grocer/butcher shop I frequent actually has RC Cola in glass bottles. They are small, like the gas station Coke glass bottles, but still immediately bring back memories. I’m not sure how that happened but I made a point to let the proprietors know as long as they carry it, I’ll be buying it.

It’s a neat full circle then. A soda story that started with a Coke rep arguing over the grocer’s cut and launching a rebuttal and beverage company of his own. It winds through towns that were forgotten — if ever known in the first place — who went from soda fountains, to soda bottles, to rusted signs blowing in the wind, defiant to the building whose purpose has long since stopped being the ice cream advertised on it. It comes back to where it started: a father making a trip to the far corner of a grocery store just so his kid can say they drank soda out of a glass bottle. Like they did when they were a kid. While Least Heat-Moon decried community spaces becoming stuffed with retail, advertising is now ingrained right into the palm of our hands. Don’t believe that, try watching a YouTube video someone sent you and see what happens before it plays. Claud Hatcher would chuckle. Some things never change in trying to get past advertising to the product.

But things are never the same, either. Omnipotent reality always has the upper hand on the underdog that our memories and nostalgia are predestined to be. My kid always wants the Coke in a glass bottle. Or if they are out, a Pepsi Zero, since it’s “healthier”.

I can’t get her to enjoy RC Cola to save my life.

Appearing in this story:

The Tragic History of RC Cola by Jeff Wells is referenced and linked to, first appeared in Mental Floss

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat-Moon excerpt is found in part 10 chapter 3. This excerpt comes from a posting in Litterouti

The Braxton County Monster/Flatwoods Monster/Green Monster local legend involves a group of teens in the 50s that supposedly saw an alien or something. The Flatwoods Monster Museum occupies the storefront that was Elliot’s Drug and Fountain for over 100 years. The Sealtest sign is still there, far as I know.