The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [149]
And so it went. Emerging into the bright Georgia sunshine, Rogers was elated. “If Neville Isdell thought it was his swan song, that he was going to end on a high note, then he was wrong,” he said. In real terms, of course, the meeting achieved nothing. But symbolically, it put Coke on notice that however hobbled, the campaign against it wasn’t finished.
After the meeting, Rogers’s mobile billboard led an activist caravan back down the highway to Atlanta as cars honked and people waved. Like bees drawn to an open bottle of pop, the caravan ended up arriving downtown at the World of Coca-Cola. Few people were in Pemberton Park to see the billboard truck as it drove around blaring an original folk song called “Coke Is the Drink of the Death Squads.” But Rogers would never miss an opportunity to educate one more person about Coke’s misdeeds. Jumping out with a clutch of “Drink That Represses” flyers in his hand, he ran up to a bus of schoolkids on a field trip to the Georgia Aquarium.
“Hey, kids, look here!” he shouted, jumping aboard the bus and gesticulating wildly at the billboard as it drove past. Before the chaperone could react, he jumped back out, while the billboard truck circled back around the World of Coca-Cola. For a moment a snatch of muzak floated across the park from the entrance to the museum. It took a second to place the tune before it became clear: “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony . . .”
Acknowledgments
Obviously, to write a book of this scope, I have a great many people to thank. First and foremost, I want to thank my agent, Elisabeth Weed, who believed in this book from the beginning, encouraged me through two years of proposal revisions and pitch meetings before it had become a reality, and then through another two years of writing after it had. A huge thanks, as well, to my incredible editor, Rachel Holtzman, who was a calm in the storm throughout the writing and editing process, and offered just the right combination of prodding and trust to see me through multiple stages of rewriting, cutting, and framing the manuscript. Thanks, as well, to her assistant, Travers Johnson, and the excellent team at Avery for the behind-the-scenes work they did in making the book the best it could be.
I’d also like to express a measure of debt to the authors who have previously tackled the rich subject of Coca-Cola, on whose work I drew from heavily (and in some cases, shamelessly) in order to tell various aspects of the history and current practices of the company. For the first chapters dealing with the history of the company, Mark Pendergrast’s For God, Country, and Coca-Cola was enormously helpful, as was Secret Formula by Fred Allen. I was also helped immensely by the collections of documents that Pendergrast and Allen left at the rare book library at Emory University, as well as other collections there, from which most of the historical documents I relied on are drawn. For the later history of the company, I relied on Constance Hays’s The Real Thing and Thomas Oliver’s The Real Coke, The Real Story. In the chapter detailing the fight to get soda out of schools, I was greatly assisted by Michele Simon’s Appetite for Profit (and by Simon herself, who freely shared information with me from the beginning stages of the manuscript). And on international affairs, I relied on Laura Jordan’s excellent thesis on Coke in Mexico, and on Nantoo Banerjee’s book—also called The Real Thing—to elucidate Coke’s problems in India.
In addition to those written sources, I’d like to acknowledge all of the patient time and effort granted to me by those struggling to keep Coke accountable, including: Ray Rogers, Lew Friedman, Terry Collingsworth, Dan Kovalik, Camilo Romero, Amit Srivastava, Jackie Domac, Ross Getman, Michael Jacobson, Stephen Gardner, Dick Daynard, Gigi Kellett, and Javier Correa and all of the other union leaders