The Coca-Cola Trail: People and Places in the History of Coca-Cola, by Larry Jorgensen

Review by Mack Hassler

“It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world”     — Octavio Paz

Booksellers and especially publishers hope that books may be part of commerce. So it seems only fair that commercial books may be reviewed as though they were literature. I use the same rather philosophic epigraph that I set at the head of the Jorgensen book on Snow Machines or “snowmobiles” (another history of the business of selling) that I reviewed here (posted August 20, 2024). I do think it is fascinating how much our energetic writers try to brand their work to sell it. For some, the branding is so good that the publishers keep it going even after the writer has passed away. The best example I can think of is Tom Clancy. He nearly established his own genre when he published The Hunt for Red October (1984).  Although he died in October 2013, the stories by Tom Clancy are still appearing. I think Clive Cussler has lived on in the same way. That is the branding that we dream about in our reviews for the best of our Yooper storytellers.

I think the process, also, is modeled on survival in Nature–“the child is father of the Man” as Wordsworth says in one of his poems; and all of the best philosophic and religious thought keeps returning. One of my favorite reading pastimes is to follow the main idea in Marilynne Robinson’s fine non-fiction book Reading Genesis (2024) about the Hebrews as the chosen people, which is their own great “marketing” phrase, and about the links in scripture between the Old Testament and the New Testament. All of the teaching of Jesus is taken right from text of the Prophets in the Old Testament. This is a far distance from the story Jorgensen tells about the branding and marketing of Coca-Cola or the links in the history of technology leading to our modern snowmobiles. But in a real sense it is the same story–an idea or a product or a life form that is so successful that it refuses to die.

In The Coca-Cola Trail: People and Places in the History of Coca-Cola, Jorgensen builds his “trail” in 30 chapters and many, many illustrations. It all started in 1894 in Vicksburg, Mississippi when the son of a Civil War veteran who repaired boots and shoes for Confederate soldiers bottled the first Coke. The son Joe opened a “confectionary store” and eventually the boot business and the soda fountain were combined in the same building. Joe and his uncle devised a “secret formula” which actually had come from a pharmacist in Atlanta, who had been injured in the War and needed morphine. The mix included coca leaves {the basis for cocaine} and kola nuts {a source of caffeine). Joe bought a five-gallon keg of the syrup and bottled it for the first time in his soda fountain in Vicksburg. The bottling equipment and the brand design for the bottle as well as the script followed. The whole story of the bottling and the development of the script moved from Vicksburg all the way to the Black Hills of South Dakota. The great chief of the corporation with its offices located in Charlotte North Carolina is Walter Bellingrath, descended from Joe and Herman Biedenharm and Joe’s Uncle Biedenharm has a full-page portrait on p. 112 of the book. There is a museum in Vicksburg with a fine mural showing the original bottling equipment. From Civil War boots sewn by German immigrants to a massive international corporation with a script image nearly as familiar as the stars-and-stripes, The Coca-Cola Trail is a great American story well narrated by Jorgensen.