History minute

Grapette first found fame in Arkansas

Summertime is a thirsty time in the South. Whether people call it a soft drink, soda, pop, coke, or a cold drink, most people have a favorite. While many companies set up operations across Arkansas, one of the most famous Arkansas brands was Grapette, founded by Benjamin Tyndle Fooks.

Fooks was the son of Kentucky farmers, born in 1901. He originally called his drinks “Fooks Flavors” when he bought an old bottling plant in Camden in 1926. He offered a wide variety of unique flavors. The Great Depression, however, nearly destroyed his business. Once he mastered the grape flavor by 1938, sales exploded. In 1940, the Grapette name began appearing on bottles across the nation.

Fooks hired chemist Francis Brooker in 1941 to devise new flavors. As a result, Orangette went on the market in 1942, followed by Lemonette and Lymette. Sales grew steadily in the 1950s, with 300 bottlers in 38 states producing the different Grapette flavors. In 1961, the company branched out again and introduced “Mr. Cola.”

He eventually served as head of the Camden Chamber of Commerce and served as a board member for the National Association of Manufacturers and two universities. Fooks sold the business to a rival in 1970 and retired.

Grapette, however, all but disappeared by the late 1970s until Brooks Rice took control. In the 1980s, he approached WalMart owner Sam Walton about producing a generic brand for the company. Walton, long a Grapette fan himself, leapt at the chance. Since Rice did not yet have the rights to the name, Grapette returned in 1989 as Ozarks Farms, along with the orange, cola, and lime flavors, all from the famed Fooks formula. By 2000, Rice was able to reacquire the naming rights, reviving the classic names.

In spite of the immense success of Fooks, he faced strong competition across Arkansas. In 1911, a Coca-Cola bottling plant opened in Nashville, owned by father-son team W. W. and Forrest Wilson. This plant also produced the local brand Hot-Shot, devised by Nashville resident Hence Wilder. The Nashville facility also began bottling competing soda Dr. Pepper in 1988 and became the soda company’s largest per-capita bottler by 1999. The plant still operates and includes a small museum open to the public.

In Arkansas, bottling plants for Coke would also open in Mena, Pine Bluff, Blytheville, Magnolia, Jonesboro, West Memphis, and numerous other locations across the state. Bottlers would proudly stamp their city’s name on the bottom of each bottle made. Monticello’s Coca-Cola bottling plant operated from 1935 until 1990 and continued until 2003 as a distribution plant. A Coca-Cola bottling plant in Morrilton opened in 1929 but shut down in the 1960s. Today, the City of Morrilton uses it as a government office, and it is registered as a historic site on the National Register of Historic Places.

Dr. Pepper also operated dozens of its own plants in the state in such locales as Hot Springs, Searcy, Rogers, Fort Smith, and Little Rock. A smaller national brand, Royal Crown Cola (or just “R-C Cola”), had a bottling plant in El Dorado in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fooks had risen from selling his cold his drinks from the back of his car to producing the seventh most popular soft drink in the nation by the 1960s. Many of his rivals faced their own difficulties as transportation and manufacturing changed, leading to many bottlers shutting down, starting in the 1960s. In spite of this, soft drinks remain a multi-billion dollar business globally. Arkansans still drink all brands, as Fooks used to say in his ads, “thirsty or not.”

Ken Bridges, a history professor at South Arkansas Community College in El Dorado, can be reached at kbridges@southark.edu. The South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society is dedicated to educating the public about the state’s rich history. The SAHPS can be contacted at PO Box 144, El Dorado, AR, 71730, at (870) 862-9890 or at http:// soarkhistory.com.