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Jack McKinney, executive director of the Waco museum, surmised that Alderton might have been giving customers something for their stomachs and added some Dr Pepper syrup to make it taste better. "I don't guess there's any definitive answer. It's got to be the only one of its kind," Riley said. McKinney said the ledger book was bound to be popular with Dr Pepper collectors because it's from the time the drink was invented. Riley said the book was probably started around 1880 and used through the 1890s. It's not known who wrote the Dr Pepper recipe in the book, but they don't think it was the handwriting of Alderton or Morrison. Some of the formulas have Alderton's name after them. At first, Alderton's drink inspired by the smells in the drugstore was called "a Waco." "People would come in and say,
'Shoot me a Waco,'" Riley said. Soon renamed Dr Pepper, the drink caught on and other stores in town began selling it. Eventually, Alderton got out of the Dr Pepper business and Morrison and a man named Robert Lazenby started a bottling company in 1891. Flipping through the pages of the ledger book takes one back to a time when drugstores were neighborhood hubs, selling everything from health remedies to beauty products mixed up by the stores' chemists. And among the formulas being mixed up in drugstores were treats for the soda fountain. A two-page spread in Waters' book has recipes for "Soda Water Syrups," including pineapple, lemon and strawberry. "There were very few national brands," Riley said. "Their lifeblood was all their formulas." ___ On the Net: Heritage Auction Galleries: http://www.ha.com/ Dr Pepper Museum:
http://www.drpeppermuseum.com/
[Associated
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