Last week, in a hospital in Atlanta, to which he had given a million dollars, an old man lay dying. The press took note of his impending demise. He was the president of a famous soft drink company. Very well, he must have a rags-to-riches obituary. So the papers watched for the passing of Asa Griggs Candler, Coca-Cola king.
His father was a member of the legislature of South Carolina, and fought in the Indian War of 1836. His great-grandfather came to the colonies from Dublin when he was a child and lived to command a regiment in the Revolution. Asa Griggs Candler, born too late for Indians and Redcoats, began his business career in the drugstore of Best & Kirkpatrick in Carters- ville. Ga. He had almost no money. His family was indifferent to money. Let a man be honest—shrewdness was unnecessary. It was about 1887 that he sold in his store (he had started a little dispensary of his own in Atlanta) a few quarts of some stuff invented by a certain Dr. Pemberton, and called Coca-Cola. Various people had owned and controlled Dr. Pemberton's in. fant company. During the first year 25 gallons had been sold and $46 spent for advertising. In 1889, Mr. Candler got a part interest in the company; in 1900 full ownership. In 1919 he sold the Coca-Cola Company, a Georgia corporation, to a group of capitalists organized xinto the Coca-Cola Company, a Delaware Corporation, for $25,000,000. Before the sale Mr. Candler's private fortune was estimated at between forty and fifty millions. He had fastened a prodigious habit upon his countrymen, who today drink 7,000,000 little brown glasses every 24 hours in response to $5,000,000 per annum of advertising. And so a miracle had happened in Georgia. An aristocrat, a South-ener, had beaten modern industry. "Merchant Prince of the South," they called him; "First Citizen of Atlanta." He accepted his honors gravely. Why should he have been flustered ? He was not a nouveau; his was no rags-to-riches story but the far rarer reversal by which blood wins back, in a world of commerce, the position it owned in a world of pioneering and of war.
His holdings were enormous. Singlehanded he prevented a real estate slump by buying lots for what he thought they were worth, at a price above the asking." When, in 1914, cotton went to four cents a pound, he worked hundreds of builders day and night to put up a 44-acre warehouse. Then he signed full-page advertisements in the press saying that he would lend six cents a pound on every pound of cotton stored in his warehouse. His storage charge was ludicrously low; his insurance rate lower than any other storehouse in the world. Millions of dollars' worth of cotton poured in. The owners he had saved from bankruptcy sold their cotton later for twelve cents a pound.