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It was his father, Ernest Woodruff, who in 1919, for $25 million, bought the Coca-Cola company from Asa G. Candler, who in turn had got it from Inventor Pemberton for $1,750. Hardy old Ernest Woodruff was accused by his enemies of every sharp business trick in the book, and suspected even by his friends of chewing broken Coca-Cola bottles to strengthen his teeth. Son Bob is a chip off the old block. The steel of Young Bob's determination early clashed with the flint of his father's will, and the resulting sparks could have lit up Atlanta and environs. Bob quit Emory University and went to work selling fire extinguishers. He did so well that his father relented, gave him a job in the Atlantic Ice & Coal Co. (which he owned along with Coke). But he flared up again when young Bob, too dynamic for the old man's tastes, ordered a fleet of White trucks to replace the old ice buggies. Bob went to work for the White Motor Co. Old Ernest finally bowed to his son's indomitable business talent, in 1923 made him president of Coca-Cola.
Bob Woodruff, who has the build of a lumberjack, the face of an intelligent fullback, runs the company with a relentless executive grip. He recalls how, in the 1920s, he discovered one day that per capita Coca-Cola sales in Montreal were larger than those in Miami. Then & there he decided that Coca-Cola was destined to spread beyond the U.S., across the world.
One of Woodruff's smartest moves was his policy of supplying U.S. soldiers anywhere in the world with nickel Cokes, no matter how much money the company lost in the process. The Coke bottling plants which moved along with the invading U.S. armies and brought the sight and taste of Coke to millions of people who had never heard of it before were actually the biggest impetus of Coca-Cola's present international boom.
A Matter of Survival. Favorite of Woodruff's several homes is Ichauway, a 47,000-acre Georgia plantation. His guests are usually roused before dawn to go hunting, and kept up long beyond midnight playing poker. Woodruff is strenuous company. Recently one of his associates went to a doctor complaining of high blood pressure. Asked the doctor: "What have you been doing?" When the patient answered that he had just spent an hour with Bob Woodruff, the doctor said: "Oh just go home and go to bed. That's all you need." Woodruff rarely relaxes, but likes to refresh his pauses with Martinis.
Said one of his Atlanta friends once: "He's always been one for prophesizin' and realizin'. Now he is re-prophesizin' and re-realizin'." In 1950 there was plenty of realizin' for Bob Woodruff and his Cokempire.
To many, the world of 1950 looked like a poor prospect for free international business. Prophet Woodruff swept pessimism aside. Said he last week: "We're not selling the world short, we're playing the world long. We decided that we would live with the world and that the world would survive, that it must survive, as a decent place to live in."
If that was the way Coca-Cola's Bob Woodruff felt about it, the world had better take another swig of Coke and make up its mind to survive.