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The Dr Pepper Museum is in the same building in Downtown Waco where the uniquely classified soft drink (it’s not a cola, it’s a pepper!) was first produced and bottled. The three-story Romanesque building, which dates to 1906 and survived the 1953 tornado relatively unscathed, was designed by Milton W. Scott, the most prominent and prolific of Waco architects. If anything, the building shows that we just don't make 'em like we used to. For a bottling works, it’s pretty and visually striking, with a jaunty turret and an asymmetrical elevation, stacked up in the rear with the smaller second and third floors that once held the distilled water and syrup tanks. The building also features these great burly arches, emphasized with roughly hewn voussoirs, that frame the doors and windows like the out-of-control eyebrows of white-haired philosophers.
Dr Pepper was bottled here until 1965, and the company donated the building in the late '80s to the nonprofit that now runs the museum. It opened in 1991. Next door, the 1880s Kellum-Rotan Building, also fully renovated, houses administrative offices, educational spaces, and a boardroom. The museum, which has an operating budget of about $500,000 annually, is also home to the Free Enterprise Institute, “dedicated to educating students of all ages about the most successful and empowering economic system in the history of the world: America’s.”
It’s a truism that museums are dedicated to education, and I learned a lot at the Dr Pepper Museum about the carbonated soft drink. It also struck me as a kind of unintentional diorama of the division of labor and corporate hierarchical structures. You could cross-section the building, open it up, and show students of all ages roughly how American companies were made in the 20th century: Workers make things at the bottom; middle managers figure out how to package and sell it; and the head honchos make the big decisions at the top. For me, the experience of the museum was a story of these three stories. To wit:
5th Street façade.
First Story
The first exhibit you see is a large cabinet lined with apothecary bottles. Behind glass, inside the cabinet, is a wax figure of Charles “Doc” Alderton. A speaker plays a recording of a local actor telling Alderton’s story of inventing the syrupy signature combination of 23 flavors. Alderton worked at Wade Morrison’s Old Corner Drugstore right there in Waco. In 1885, he sold the recipe to Morrison, who had tabbed Robert Lazenby, a local bottler of fine ginger ales, for a partnership. The duo formed the Artesian Bottling and Manufacturing Company and then hired Scott to design them a grand building for their grand venture.
The next room over is the original bottling room. A bottle-washing contraption takes up the bulk of it. In glass cabinets lining the walls an array of pretty glass and dingy plastic bottles and aluminum cans show both a progression of Dr Pepper logos as well as a struggle to find a working solution to the essential problem of soda water: How do you keep the fizz in? Early stoppers and corks weren’t cutting it. The invention of the crown seal by William Painter in the early 1890s was a boon for the industry. Bottles could be produced uniformly and much more sanitarily. (Note to the museum: How about an exhibit on the manufacturing of glass bottles?)
Mechanical bottle washer.
The highlight of the first floor is the living artesian well. (It leads to a handy display on the importance of distillation and a water supply.) A large mirror hangs above the well so you can peer down inside, but beads of condensation had formed that morning on the underside of the protective lid. What I could see didn’t exactly look like fresh, clean, artesian water, but a dirty, granular slurry of mercury, graphite, and asphalt. Of course you don’t just ladle it out right into the pot, but still.
Second Story
Here, two exhibits teach visitors how a product like the one innovated and made just a few feet below you is promoted to a thirsty public. You see a parade of logos, typefaces, mascots. You learn about David Naughton, one of Dr Pepper’s early faces for the “I’m a Pepper” campaign. You peruse a gallery of posters from Hollywood movies with QR codes that you can scan with your iPhone to watch the trailers in which products have been placed. A smaller room was devoted to the history of the thermometer. (Dr Pepper, like revenge, is best served cold.)
Another exhibit shows an array of the standups and cutouts you see in grocery stores. They’re lined up like an advancing army.
R2D2 and Frodo Baggins, as one.
Seeing R2D2 like that you can’t help wondering whether George Lucas was already thinking of the promotional opportunities when he designed the little guy: He’s a barrel with wheels. You can put a lot of bottles in there. A small theater was set up to show the company’s commercials, but the audio wasn’t working that day. When I pressed play, a terrible blast of static overwhelmed the space, and I did my best to sit through it until I had to scurry for the elevator to escape.
Third Story
The Free Enterprise Institute is based here. It has the feel of a boardroom. The floors are carpeted, the walls trimmed with polished oak. Brass plates identify each room. Signs and placards with trenchant observations from Thomas Jefferson and other quotable somebodies infuse your spirit with history.
There is just a small amount of exhibition space on the third story, most of it devoted to the life of the longtime CEO of Dr Pepper, Woodrow Wilson “Foots” Clements. The first exhibit is a replica roadside shack with a tin roof and porch and a few wooden Dr Pepper cases. Then a hologram blinks on and addresses you. A piece of glass reflects the image playing from a screen below to create the illusion of “Foots.”
“You look like you need a cold drink,” says the actor.
“I do,” I told him. I was pretty thirsty at that point.
“Well, here,” he says. “Let me get you an ice-cold Dr Pepper.”
“That sounds real fine,” I said.
The ghost of Foots.
“Foots” told me his story while I enjoyed my imaginary refreshment. He started as a route salesman, working his way up to the top through a series of well-timed suggestions and the force of his personality. (He was also a White man, which helps.) One of his selling techniques, or so I could discern, was holding up a bottle of Dr Pepper at someone’s lips and tipping it until the person feared it would spill. At that point, instincts took over, and the soon-to-be customer had no choice but grabbing it. Foots is quoted as saying: “Once I get Dr Pepper down their throats and tell them about it, I’m in business.” (“Down their throats”!) When I worked one summer at a national chain bookstore, we were taught a similar strategy. A customer was more likely to make a purchase if she had the item in her hand. Most of us are so polite that we prefer to buy the thing rather than leave it lying out. We booksellers were taught to walk the customer to the shelf, pull the title down for her, and hold it out until she took it. This was known as “The Moment of Truth.”
The next room over featured a hagiographic glass case of some of Foots’ trophies, awards, and other memorabilia. At the end of the small space was his desk as he kept it, protected by a glass barrier. Foots liked to live by the Golden Rule, said another placard, and he kept on his desk a dish filled with marbles that he had had engraved with the adage to hand to investors.
I leaned over the barrier to take a photo of the marbles when the alarm sounded. It was as though I had pressed the self-destruct switch on a nuclear sub. That brought a quick end to the third story.
The hall of Foots.
Back downstairs, I saw a mother and daughter having a drink at a table inside the working soda fountain, manned by a teenager. They were the only other people I’d seen that day. I wondered about that. I reached out to Katharine Shilcutt, the writer for Houstonia and a proud alum of nearby Baylor, to see what she thought of the museum. “We visited fairly regularly because there wasn't much else to do in Waco anyway at the time. Students like bringing their parents there when the folks visited; like the Texas Ranger Museum, it's a really safe, family-friendly bet for visitors that's also quite a lot cooler than it has to be,” she wrote in an message. “I feel weird visiting Waco and not going.”
She's right: The museum is a lot cooler than it has to be. And it tells a particularly American story about innovation, partnership, and business, as evidenced by a quote up in the Free Enterprise Institute from J. Conrad Dunagan, once the chair of the Coca-Cola board: “It can truly be said that carbonated soft drinks are modern America’s most popular contribution to the diet of the people of the world.”
5th Street façade of the Dr Pepper Museum.What the museum doesn’t say is that that’s for better and for worse. You don’t want to bum any visitors out or turn any sponsors away, but there are no self-critical exhibits on, say, childhood obesity or Type 2 diabetes. Or on landfills. Or on the impact on American farms of the proliferation of high fructose corn syrup. As I made my way up and then back down through the 108-year-old building, the nostalgic, naive images I had of locals saying "Shoot me a Waco!" at the soda fountain inside the Old Corner Drugstore were replaced by ones of trash islands of plastic bottles and styrofoam cups floating on the Pacific.
One block over from the museum is the campus of the Live Oak Classical School. Some uniformed kids were outside having recess, jumping into a sandpit. I couldn't help wondering how often they take field trips to the Free Enterprise Institute. And are they allowed to have an ice-cold Dr Pepper with their lunches? Or is it restricted, as at Houston ISD schools? The Dr Pepper Museum is actively seeking to create an endowment to grow its annual operating budget and planning to reorganize the campus, connecting the original building to the recently renovated Kellum-Rotan Building with a long concourse that should create additional exhibition space. These are signs of the museum's health. I wonder whether the museum will become healthy enough that it can also be self-critical. Right now, it tells a particularly American story, but the best stories are complex.
