The Schmidt Museum closes, and we remember a magical visit with Jan Schmidt in 2009

August 19, 2011 - If you've been following along in the pages of the Cola Conquest magazine and the Soda Spectrum magazine, you know that the Schmidt family has decided to close the museum and will be auctioning their collection off over the next few years.

In honor of this monumental event, I'm reprinting the story I wrote for Issue #5 of the Cola Conquest magazine about the Schmidt family and my trip to the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia back in 2009. Enjoy!

Coca-Cola Dreams... at the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia
By Blair Matthews

For Coca-Cola collectors, the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola Memorabilia is 32,000 sq. ft. filled with historical wonders. The largest private Coca-Cola collection in the world, it represents a lifetime of dedication to a company by a family who has seen ups and downs in an industry unlike any other. Building an enormous and priceless collection of memorabilia certainly wasn’t the intention when Bill and Jan Schmidt began their journey with The Coca-Cola Company more than 40 years ago. In fact, their collection started out the same way most collections do... with a single piece.

For most of the years that they were associated with The Coca-Cola Company collecting was secondary to bottling Coke at their Elizabethtown Coca-Cola plant.

The Early Days
The history of Coca-Cola and the Schmidt family goes back to 1901 when Bill Schmidt’s grandfather began bottling in Louisville, Kentucky, one of only five plants that had been granted bottling rights at that time.

As it turned out, the territory served by the Louisville plant was too large to service and it was eventually split in the 1920s, with one son going to establish a plant in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Bill’s father Luke was sent to run a plant in Elizabethtown.
When Bill was just 13-years-old, his father passed away. While the other two sons were planning to absorb operations of the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling plant, Luke’s wife Irene stepped in and took over its management instead.

In those days, says Jan Schmidt, it was unheard of for a woman to be in that position of authority. “She ran that plant all through World War II which was quite a feat because of Fort Knox. There was a mandate that any soldier (at Fort Knox) was to be supplied with Coca-Cola. So she had to bottle night and day to supply the troops of Fort Knox.”

And in a time when sugar and supplies were being rationed Irene was being granted extra sugar and syrup to keep up with demand.

While Irene kept things going with the Elizabethtown plant, Bill was growing up; he finished high school, went on to attend MIT and learned to fly. That skill landed him in the Airforce as a pilot in the Korean War for nearly 5 years.

It was during a 13-couple blind date in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in November 1953 that Bill and Jan first met. They were married 4 months later. At the end of his term in the Airforce, Bill and his new bride returned to Elizabethtown along with their young son.
Admittedly, Jan says, as a big city girl (she had previously lived in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles) moving to the small town of Elizabethtown was a shock.

She recalls one of her first days in Elizabethtown when she pushed the baby buggy down to the local market and asked for artichokes; no one knew what she was talking about. Then, at the drugstore she asked for The New Yorker magazine and was met with a look of confusion.

She wheeled the buggy back home as fast as she could. Bill, who would come home for lunch since their house was right across the street from the plant, was greeted by his wife in tears. “I said, ‘nobody’s going to like me and it’s such a small town if they don’t like me there’s nowhere to go’.”

Eventually she learned that even though she was in a small town where everyone knew her, she realized it was a very friendly place to live, work, and raise their children; and people genuinely cared.

Building a brand
When Bill took over as president at the Elizabethtown plant there were 35 employees, the machinery was worn out, wages were extremely low and moral even lower. There was much work for Bill to do at the time. The first thing he did was expand the plant.

“He told me when we married, ‘you know Jan, my father left me a Coca-Cola plant and it’s doing well. I could play a lot of golf, but I feel I owe it to my father to make more of what he left me just as my father did with the plant his father left him’.”
Bill added onto the plant, he hired more people, he raised wages, and just when things were going well, he did something that made their situation even better.

He decided he wanted to add a canning line.

For a plant the size of the one in Elizabethtown, implementing a canning line in those days was virtually unheard of. The expense alone could be crippling if it didn’t succeed. At that time, there were only three independent Coca-Cola bottling plants in the U.S. with can lines - Los Angeles, New York, and Norfolk.

“Bill called American Can Company and he said, ‘my name is Bill Schmidt, I live in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and I want to put in a can line.’ The man on the other end of the phone said, ‘absolutely Mr. Schmidt we will send some people down to talk to you next week,” Jan says.

When he hung up, everyone in the office at American Can Company ran and got an Atlas since they’d never heard of Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

When they saw where it was and the size of the town they figured he was out of his mind.

Nevertheless, they came down to Elizabethtown and met with the Schmidts. True to his word, Bill pursued it and had it installed. “Some of it - the conveyor - was second hand... we really did it on the cheap, as cheap as you can, but can lines are very expensive. We went very heavily into debt to build the business,” she says.

“The night that the can line became operational - it was maybe 1:00 am when they were going to roll off that first can. I remember looking around and here were all our drivers and they’d all come in because they wanted to load their trucks the minute those cans came off... they were so excited.”

Because the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling company was only the fourth plant to put Coke in cans, they were servicing a huge area including Texas, Michigan, and many points in between.

They quickly outgrew their little red brick plant and Bill, who might have become an architect had he not gone into the family business, designed the new plant himself. He hired an engineer to make sure that his plans were feasible.

By the time the new plant was complete Jan was working with Bill in the office. When their boys were in school full time she worked alongside her husband doing public relations and eventually worked her way up to become vice-president.

Being the business-savy entrepreneurs that they were, Bill and Jan saw the wisdom of branching out into the trucking business. Afterall, they were trucking Coca-Cola to towns and cities in a number of U.S. states. It didn’t make sense from a financial standpoint to have those trucks coming back empty. So Cardinal Carriers was born.

And when various factories in the Elizabethtown territory were looking for a vending company to bring food into their lunch rooms, the Schmidts started up Vendomat vending company. The logic was that if another vending company was hired there was a possibility that they might bring Pepsi on board as the brand they offered rather than Coca-Cola. Having a vending company allowed the Coke in Elizabethtown to keep flowing in key areas.

Getting bitten by the collecting bug
The first incarnation of the Schmidt Coca-Cola Museum was a shelf in Bill’s office at the bottling plant. They’d been to visit a collegue who had a few older Coca-Cola pieces on display and it seemed like a novel idea.

Bill and Jan decided to fly to Indianna for the first-ever antique advertising show, thinking they might find a few things to fill their modest shelf. When they got there they were amazed at the number of items that Coca-Cola had put their name on.

“The collecting bug bit,” Jan says. “It’s a disease. When it bites you, there’s no hope for you. The next day we got into our station wagon and drove back to Indianapolis and bought everything we could afford. That was the beginning of our collection.”

In 1977 a call from a collector in Georgia asking if he and his group of a dozen or so Coca-Cola collectors could come up and see the Schmidt’s collection prompted Bill to build a room above the packaging area in the plant to display their items.
Bill, like most other Coca-Cola bottlers at that time, had always encouraged people to be able to come into the plant to see how the product was made. At the Elizabethtown plant, visitors could walk along a balcony and watch the bottling line in action and then continue on into the museum room.

When the time came for the visit from the Georgia collectors the group of a dozen had grown to nearly 100 instead.

In the meantime, the single room was overflowing to the point that it took up two rooms and some items had to be stored.

Bill and Jan started going to auctions to add to their collection and then as people started to become more aware that they were serious collectors, people started calling them with pieces they were selling. “If there was a significant auction going on somewhere in the country we would go to it. The thing is, as we collected, at first we collected things that were pretty or attractive to look at. But then we discovered that these artifacts were telling us the history of this country while Coca-Cola was evolving. Then we began looking for things that would fill in the historical gaps,” Jan says.

Pieces from the Depression era, things from World War I & II were artifacts that were of particular interest as Coca-Cola was becoming more popular.

As they attended auctions around the country they began to get a reputation that they’d bid as high as it took to get a particular item. Jan says many times, that just wasn’t the case. “We knew what we thought it was worth to us to buy and if it went beyond that we didn’t buy it. People would be bidding against us and they thought we would just keep going until we bought it, and we would not have. If we would have gone to a certain point where we felt it wasn’t worth it, we would have quit. But people didn’t seem to know that so they would drop out. That was unfortunate because we felt a little badly.”

The One That Got Away
Visitors might tour through the Schmidt Museum now and wonder if they own one of every vintage piece that was ever made. Schmidt says that’s not so. She tells the story of the Boudoir Clock.

A woman in Virginia sent the Schmidts a photograph of some old Coca-Cola trays that she wanted to sell. In the photograph were trays that they neither wanted or needed - by that point they already had a complete set of vintage trays. “In the background of the photo was this little Coca-Cola clock, and Bill and I got our magnifying glasses out and I said, ‘my golly Bill, we’ve never seen that before’. He said, ‘We need to go to Virginia’.”

As luck would have it, they were already scheduled to attend a bottlers meeting in Washington D.C. After the meeting they rented a car and drove down to Virginia to see the mysterious clock. “The first thing we saw when we pulled up in front of this little bitty house - and there’s nothing wrong with little bitty if it’s neat and clean - but the first thing we saw was a collection of, as we say in the south, commodes, on the front lawn. And the house went downhill from there,” Jan remembers. The woman had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 cats roaming around inside the house.

“She had laid out these Coca-Cola trays, and of course we knew we didn’t want those trays. Back on a table was this absolutely incredible clock with a girl in a blue dress, and we knew immediately it was from the 1800s and we were just blown away,” she says. They very casually looked at the trays and then Jan brought up the Coca-Cola clock in the corner. The woman nonchalantly picked it up and plunked it down for them to see, as both Jan and Bill cringed at how she was handling it.
Bill told the woman that he thought the clock was kind of interesting and that it would fill a spot in their collection, an understatement of the year, Jan says. The woman thought for a moment, then asked them what they’d give her for it.
“Bill named a very fair price - my husband was the most straight-arrow man in the world - her eyes just lit up because she had no idea. But he was not the kind of man who would say ‘I’ll give you $50 for it’ - he was not the kind of man that could do that.”
Then the woman realized she might just be sitting on a gold mine.

Jan says the woman got this cunning look on her face and suggested that she put it up for bids - and asked Bill what his next offer would be. He asked her for a piece of paper and a pencil; he wrote down a price on the paper, folded it up, and handed it back to the woman. “He wrote down the exact same price,” Jan says. “Of course, we didn’t get the clock.”

Years later, the Schmidts bought a significant Coca-Cola collection from a man who lived in Washington State. In that collection was an almost identical clock... everything was the same except the woman’s dress was a different color. “I know it’s out there somewhere. Someone may have it and not even know what they have.”

Jan says that although they didn’t get the clock they had gone to see in Virginia, they never regretted walking away from a potential gem for their collection. “That’s just the way Bill was. He offered her a fair price, she owned it, if she didn’t want to sell it for that then so be it.”

But when you lose some pieces, you gain others unexpectedly.

The Schmidts received a letter from someone in Quincy, Illinois, who had a 1914 tin Betty Girl. They sent a photograph of the ‘Betty’ that was in really good shape, along with their asking price. “They were so far off, it was just a pitiful little amount, it just wasn’t right. Bill wrote back and he said, ‘I would like to buy it, but quite frankly I could not send you that amount of money because it’s worth much more than that.’ So he wrote a check for a very fair amount for that tin Betty. We didn’t hear from them again, and then this crate arrived. In it was the tin Betty and a cardboard sign that they also had and they said, ‘You’ve been so honest with us we want to give you this’.”

As it turned out, the cardboard sign was worth much more than the Betty.

Embroiled in a battle
In the early 1980s, The Coca-Cola Company decided they didn’t like the fact that their bottlers were so independent, Jan says. The company tried several times over the years to take over the bottlers and the bottlers, being very independent, had worked hard to build their business and were proudly entrenched in their communities.

“All of a sudden they switched from a sugar-based syrup to a high fructose corn syrup,” Jan says. “That cost way less than the sugar syrup but they raised the price of the syrup to the bottlers because they were trying to weed them out. That wasn’t fair, that wasn’t right. According to the contract, you paid on a sliding scale for your syrup - as sugar prices went up you paid more for your syrup and the bottlers were very willing to do that. But to pay more for a syrup that was never going to slide up and also was so much less to produce, it was shocking to the bottlers. It was the way the company was going to try to squeeze out the smaller bottlers.”

Bill was on the Board of Governors of the Coca-Cola Bottlers Association for nearly 40 years and was well-respected among his bottling peers. A fellow bottler wrote to Bill asking for his opinion on what the company was trying to do to them. Bill quickly found himself as the spokesperson of a group of bottlers that were of the same mindset, and eventually, he and several other bottlers met with the high brass, including president Don Keogh, at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, to voice their concerns.

The meeting did not go well.

The three men pleaded with company executives to listen to the bottlers’ concerns, to understand their problems, to see what the changes were doing to them, and to find a compromise that could satisfy everyone involved.

“They just looked at us and said, ‘no’. And Bill said, ‘I really don’t want to say this, but I am authorized to say this... in that case, we may have to go to court’. That was the hardest thing for my husband to say because he grew up in the business. Coca-Cola was in his blood. To turn against the company was something that was so hard for him,” Jan says.

A class action suit was filed and 70 other Coca-Cola bottlers joined the crusade. But along the way, The Coca-Cola Company started buying out some of those bottlers in the lawsuit. “It was horrendous. A bottler called Bill one night, we had known him for so long, and he was crying. He said, ‘Bill, I believe in everything we’re trying to do, but I can’t afford it. They’ve offered me more money than I knew existed. I’m going to sell’. All of these bottlers were families, it was in their hearts and in their blood... and (the court battle) was terribly expensive.”

The expenses mounted quickly. Since the lawsuit was filed in Delaware, the bottlers had to have legal representation from Delaware. The Schmidts, who were now at the heart of the process, rented a dreary little apartment there so that they could be available for court dates and appearances.

At first things were seemingly going their way; the judge found in their favor at a number of points along the way.
As the litigation dragged on, The Coca-Cola Company introduced diet Coke to their portfolio. Suddenly the bottlers had another bone of contention: there was no high fructose corn syrup in diet Coke and thus it wasn’t contained in the bottlers’ contract. Coca-Cola was seemingly able to charge its bottlers whatever price it set for the syrup to produce it.

Jan says it was a perfect addition to their lawsuit because it illustrated nicely the point they were trying to prove.

Closing arguments finally came for the trial; the end - either way - was coming. As both sides awaited the verdict something strange happened. Judge Schwartz mysteriously disappeared, citing an undisclosed illness.

Four or five months later, a new judge (Judge Joseph J. Farnan, Jr.) was assigned the case. “I will never forget walking in, sitting down, and here is this new judge who says, ‘well I don’t know anything about Coca-Cola. We’re going to have to start over.’ I got up quietly, walked into the Ladies’ room and balled my eyes out.”

Judge Schwartz eventually returned to the bench, but not to oversee the Coca-Cola case.

Finally the end came, 11 years after the trial had begun, and the judge awarded the bottlers $1 in damages and he found totally in favor of The Coca-Cola Company.

The bottlers appealed the decision in appellate court but they lost.

“That took a great deal out of Bill because he had to be constantly standing up and fighting against people he had known since he was a child. He didn’t want to do anything that would make The Coca-Cola Company look bad even though they were being bad. His loyalty was such to the brand itself.”

When Bill and Jan were first married, there were over 1,250 independent bottlers in the United States. Today there are slightly more than 100 left.

Despite years of fighting against the company that they helped build, both Bill and Jan still adored the brand itself. “It was two separate things for sure,” Jan says. “We were never bitter. I felt that Bill and I had spent 11 years fighting a battle that was David and Goliath. We knew that there was a huge chance that we wouldn’t be able to succeed against the company, but it was the right thing to do. Here in the South they have a saying about the Civil War and that is ‘The South stood up when it should have shut up’. And people have told us that, but I don’t believe that, Bill didn’t believe that, and the bottlers who hung in there with us didn’t believe that either - and I’m real proud of all of it. My only regret is that we drew a line, and then had to fight across that line.”

Ultimately, the Schmidt family sold the Elizabethtown Coca-Cola bottling franchise in 1999, citing outrageous demands from the company on the bottler. They did, however, include a provision in the sale stating no employee from the Elizabethtown bottling plant would lose their job.

Selling the Coca-Cola franchise was a heart-breaking decision for the Schmidts.

“Being a Coca-Cola bottler had a very special something about it that was not like being four generations of selling automobiles or something like that. There was just something about it because it was so engrained in the community; scoreboards, the logo was everywhere. Now the schools make you pay to put in a Coke machine. Before they would beg you for a Coke machine because they make huge profits from it. And then all the food police people coming along going to tax soft drinks... nobody ever said that Coca-Cola was a food, nobody ever said it did anything for you except give you a moment of pleasure. That’s the way it was marketed and that’s the way it is. During the Depression it cost 5 cents; it was one small pleasure you could afford to buy for yourself. It was a luxury. It wasn’t shoes, it wasn’t food, it was a little 5 cent luxury at the end of the week you could find a nickel and buy a Coke. It was something that was not a neccesity and that made you feel like a real person again.”

The Schmidt family kept the bottling plant itself, at first bottling private label sodas. Soon after, they sold the plant to the Cott Corporation, a private-label giant in the soft drink market. Time passed, and Cott, Jan says, ran their operations and the bottling plant into the ground. It was a shell of what Bill had once designed it to be.

“We had a big Koi pond in the lobby (of the bottling plant) and Cott people called us one day and they said, ‘do you want to buy your fish?’ The fish were a symbol to us because when Bill was building the plant, the whole thing in our minds was when we put the koi in the pond we know that plant will be finished,” Jan says.

The koi eventually found a home at the Nashville Zoo.

The museum closes - temporarily
Not long before the sale of the Elizabethtown franchise, the rules for allowing the public into a bottling facility were changed by the State for health and safety reasons, which spelled the end of tours through the Schmidt’s museum display in their plant.
This did not sit well with Coca-Cola collectors who were eager to visit the Schmidt’s still-growing collection, so two years later, a deal was struck with the Elizabethtown Tourism Bureau to have a small portion of their artifacts on display there as a temporary setup. It wasn’t long before Bill and Jan decided that they’d build a separate building dedicated solely to house their collection, but it was an ambitious project that took 5 years to realize.

Around that same time Bill’s health began to fail as the project was beginning to take shape. Fortunately, he was able to see the finished museum before he passed away in 2007.

Currently the museum has about one-third of their total collection available for viewing. The rest is stored, some of it too fragile even to see the constant light of day.

These days the sheer mass of artifacts they’ve acquired over the years still surprises Jan. “When we were building this building and then when we began putting the artifacts out Bill and I would come in late at night when there wasn’t anybody here and we’d walk along and he’d look at me and he’d put his arm around me and say, ‘what in the world were we thinking about?’ If we’d had any idea of the scope of this, I’m sure we would have said, ‘we don’t the time or the money to do that, let’s just take care of the shelves.’ Of course we never regretted doing it. Ever.”

The most interesting and valuable pieces found a place among the many displays throughout the museum.
One piece that always grabs the attention of collectors is the mechanical Coca-Cola clown from Texas. “He’s from the 30s. When we bought him we had to have him shipped home by air. He was going to come in a cargo plane but they discovered when they got him to the airport, crated up, that he wouldn’t fit (through the cargo doors). They had to uncrate him, wrap him up in bubble wrap and put him in sideways. He had a hard time getting here but he’s here, and so is his dog.”

Picking a favorite
Of all the Coca-Cola artifacts that they’ve collected over the years, Jan says, if she had to pick a favorite, it would be the festoons.

Festoons, for those unfamiliar, were cardboard signs that were made to hang on the tops of back bars of soda fountains.

Jan points to a festoon listed in Petretti’s Coca-Cola Collectibles Price Guide (12th Edition) that hangs in the Schmidt Museum. “When we drove back up to Indianapolis that second day we bought three of these for $25 each. We gave one to our cousin (the bottler in Shelbyville) and we kept two,” she says. Petretti currently lists the value for that festoon in question at over $8,000.

“Almost always when the phone calls would come in about items that people wanted to sell, they would be put through to my desk. A man called and he had this particular festoon; from the minute he described it I knew how rare it must be. I knew The Coca-Cola Company had one, but we certainly had not and I had never seen one other than in Atlanta. Always, if something came to me by telephone that I thought we would like to have I would say, ‘well let me call you back’, and then I would talk to Bill about it. But this was so rare, I thought if I don’t say ‘yes’ right now, then we’ll lose it - I just knew it. So I told him ‘yes’.

“I went into Bill’s office and I said, ‘for the first time I bought something significant and I haven’t even asked you what you think.’ He sort of leaned back and then he got this smile - because he knew it was a done deal - I described it to him and he said, ‘YES, that’s good, that’s really good!’”

And when the Schmidts added pieces to their collection they always went to auctions together and travelled together; rarely did they go off in search of pieces separately. “We always did everything together, and it worked. We had a very close marriage, he was very special and he thought I was very special; we were very lucky to have each other.”

Admittedly, Jan says since Bill’s passing two years ago, her life has changed dramatically. “I found it difficult to come out here for a long time because everything I see, I remember when we bought it. I remember a story behind it, and of course sometimes we went on wild goose chases. A man called us one time and described a calendar to us and oh my gosh, it’s really old and it’s really rare... Bill asked him questions about it that would make sure that it was what he said it was. We decided to go and take a look at it and if it was what we thought it was we would buy it. We drove about 300 miles and it was a calendar that we ourselves had put out as a reproduction calendar - it said ‘reproduction’ on it, but he was so sure it was old. So you know, it didn’t always work out.”

“We’re very proud of what we have and we’re very proud of our collection - it’s the finest and largest privately owned collection in the world,” she says. “We have quite a few things that (The Coca-Cola Company) doesn’t even have in their collection.”

As for the museum adding more vintage pieces to their collection, Jan says they’re not actively looking. “Nothing really really rare has come our way. I think to add more at this point would be a little bit greedy,” she says with a smile.

Perhaps there is a cure for ‘the sickness’ afterall.

Then again, when she agrees that you don’t generally hear about old Coca-Cola pieces being unearthed in attics or basements anymore, she says, with a touch of hope in her voice, “But you never know.”