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By Root 618 0

sentimental Coke historian Pat Watters puts it, “The syrup of life by now had, for him, entirely soured.” After the death of his wife, Lucy, he scandalized Atlanta society with his intention to marry, of all things, a Catholic suffragette from New Orleans. Under pressure from his brother the bishop, he called off the marriage and instead married a stenographer in his office building who was soon caught in a police raid drinking boot-leg liquor with two strange men. “Everybody is dead but me, and I ought to be dead but I just won’t die,” he sputtered during a trademark infringement case in 1924. “There are too many days between my cradle and my grave now.” It would be another five years before he was finally relieved of suffering, dying alone in a New York City hotel room in 1929.

The company he helped create, however, was prospering beyond the wildest dreams of Asa Candler or John Pemberton. After a sometimes rocky start, it hit its stride during the Jazz Age of the 1920s, with profits increasing by millions of dollars a year over the decade. More important, the product itself had begun to worm its way into the American consciousness. As the company steadily built its brand, what started out as a fizzy drink and a headache cure was taking on new life as a symbol of everything desirable about American life—even as a symbol of America itself.

TWO

Building the Brand

The Gaylord Texan Hotel and Convention Center,twenty miles north of Dallas, is a triumph of illusion. Inside its eighteen-story glassed-in atrium is a full-size Spanish hacienda, an Alamo-like fort, a box canyon, and a covered wagon, all kept a comfortable seventy-two degrees in defiance of the Texan sun. It might seem a strange place to hold the thirty-fifth annual convention for the Coca-Cola Collectors Club, dedicated to the devotion of a product known as “The Real Thing.” And yet, here Coke is, the ultimate symbol in a sea of surfaces. Vintage Coke signs hang year-round at the resort’s pool area, and rusting Coke coolers decorate the café, fixtures in the resort’s vast evocation of Texan nostalgia.

That’s nothing, of course, compared with the amount of memorabilia laid out this Fourth of July weekend in the guest rooms on four floors of an entire wing of the hotel, amassed over decades from some of Coke’s biggest fans.

For Bob Bessenden, it started with commemorative Coca-Cola bottles—6½-ouncers emblazoned with insignias of different college and professional sports teams he picked up for his kids on business trips. From there, he attended a Coke memorabilia swap-meet in Minneapolis after seeing an ad in the paper, and found table after table of collectors’ items, along with a whole subculture of acolytes. “There were people from as far away as Australia,” says Bessenden, who is sixtyish with a trim white beard and glasses. “It was more like a fellowship.”

It didn’t take him long to join that society, hunting down souvenirs at flea markets and thrift stores; in one of his biggest scores, he acquired an entire room full of vintage Coke signs set to be thrown out by a distributor in Alaska. Now his hotel room at the Gaylord Texan is a veritable shrine to the drink, with signs, posters, and menu boards spread across both beds. Most sport the “fishtail” logo of the 1950s, a cherry-red oval with triangles cut out of both sides. “For a couple of years, we collected only fishtails,” says Bessenden. “Some people only collect signs that say ‘Things Go Better with Coke.’ Some people collect Santas. Some collect only Olympic items.”

For those who collect it, this accumulated flotsam comes with many more associations than just the sugary drink it advertises. “It represents an era, a much simpler time,” says Bessenden’s wife, Ann, who’s got a down-home vibe that goes with her unfussy bob. “You know, when everything was more laid-back, soda fountains and ice cream and people socializing.” Countless collectors with their own hotel rooms chock-full of Coke offer variations on the theme. “The nostalgia, the good times, when things were so much easier,” explains