Friday, April 4, 2008

More Waco - Dr Pepper

This one is going to be a bit difficult. You see, a cleaning frenzy irrupted and the brochure from the Dr Pepper Museum got trashed. Now I am not laying blame, but, I don’t have cleaning frenzies. So, the accuracy of the info contained herein is subject solely to my faltering memories and the passage of a week since I was in the museum.

The museum is housed within one of the original bottling plants in Waco, Texas, where the drink was invented. Originally you would have asked for a Waco because that is the only place you could get it. The name Dr Pepper came later, as the drink began distribution.

Say “Hi” to Doc Alderton, the guy who perfected the mixture of 21 fruit flavors that became Dr Pepper. By the way, if you’ve ever heard that one of those flavors is prune juice, well, the company won’t say what is in Dr Pepper, but they will say that prune juice isn’t.

This is the original drug store soda fountain where Wacos were served. The drink was formulated and created by the Doc in a storage room in the back of the drug store. Doc wasn’t a doctor, he wasn’t even a pharmacist.

This is one of the early bottling machines, circa 1910 (I think). It was more manual than automatic (and I’ll bet you worked in a pile of broken glass). Remember when bottle caps had a cork seal in them? This machine can, and so can I (just barely).



Worthless Trivia:
>There has never been a period following the Dr in Dr Pepper. That is because the original font picked for advertising had a period that looked more like a comma. The decision was made to drop the period and it has remained that way for over a hundred years.
>The origination of the drink’s name is unsure. The most popular version is that it is named after the father of a woman that Doc Alderton wanted to marry. His name really was Pepper and he was a doctor. The doctor thought little of the Alderton, so Alderton tried to impress him by naming his drink after him. Apparently this didn’t work because he never got the Doctor’s permission to marry his daughter.
>Dr Pepper is owned by Cadbury/Schwepps. They also own a bunch of other drink and candy companies (like Orange Crush, A&W, RC Cola, etc.)

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