Dick Stryker, in addition to being the former Mayor of Atlantic Highlands and first generation owner of the 60-year-old Bayshore Pharmacy in the Foodtown Shopping Plaza, is also a local historian who loves sharing stories from earlier ages, how things began, and other snippets of fun stories that make for entertaining reading.
Dick shared the story about how pharmacists not only invented Coca Cola and Pepsi, but also Dr. Pepper as well. And if that isn’t enough, it was pharmacists who first introduced the soda fountain!
Born in 1859, the soda fountain came about since it was the custom of people with any variety of physical ailments to seek out their pharmacist for a drunk to cure whatever they had. A quarter of a century later, in 1886, one of those concoctions made by John Stith Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta, Georgia, became the drink known as Coca Cola.
Patients with headaches and other mild but uncomfortable illnesses liked the concoction of flavored drugs like caffeine and cocaine, the popular cure at the time for headaches. People liked the formulas as each pharmacist concocted himself and came back again and again. So pharmacists started putting in ice cream sodas and milkshakes made with carbonated water, a raw egg, and sweetened flavored milk on their list of things to make.
In the meantime, two years earlier, over in Waco, Texas, yet another pharmacist, Charles Alderton, who worked in a pharmacy owned by Wade Morrison, created what is regarded as the oldest major soft drink in the United States, Dr. Pepper.
But in 1914, Harrison Narcotics Act banned the use of cocaine and opiates in over the counter products, so business fell off at the drug stores. Then Prohibition began in 1919, putting a closure to bars and pubs, so folks began to socialize at ice cream parlors instead of soda fountains and taverns, and business declined even more at drug stores.
It was a pharmacist who began manufacturing carbon dioxide in tanks that ice cream parlors could use for their soda fountains and the Soda Jerk was born.
The soda jerk could add fruit juices and syrups, along with flavorings, and make a Cherry Smash or an Orange Crush, Peach Fizz or similar carbonated drink which prompted syrup companies to give pharmacists free dispensers in exchange for advertising. Those dispensers also enabled pharmacists to mix their own therapeutic concoctions simply by mixing medicinal syrup with carbonated water for the sure to cure drink.
Not long after that, bottling soda companies came into people and soda fountains became less popular. But those Dr Pepper, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola names had been made famous in drug stores, so once bottled, they became popular purchases at markets.
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