COCA-COLA A SIP OF AMERICANA THINGS HAVE BEEN GOING BETTER WITH COKE SINCE 1886.

It would shock Doc Pemberton, no doubt, to learn what he started back in 1886.

One day, he stirred some syrup with an oar in his back yard, took the solution to his pharmacy in Atlanta and mixed it with soda water.

The potion was meant to cure hangovers. But it grew to become, in the words of journalist William Allen White, “the sublimated essence of all that America stands for.”

Now the handwritten record Pemberton made of his experiments is in a pavilion not far from where the pharmacy stood. Called “The World of Coca-Cola,” the pavilion features three floors and several generations worth of advertising. Admission: $2.50.

Wait a minute. Charging to look at advertising? The sublimated essence of all that America stands for? Isn’t this a commercial product we’re talking about?

But the product, universally available, affordable and always heavily advertised, has been with us so long it has become a piece of Americana. A tour through Coke’s advertising is like a trip through the popular culture of the United States in the 20th century.

Virginia Berney of Little Elm, Texas, left the pavilion reminded of the days when she was a soda jerk. The memories were worth the $2.50, she said.

Since the pavilion opened on Aug. 3, more than 120,000 people have visited — nearly 2,500 a day.

How did Doc Pemberton’s hangover cure turn into an American standard?

Popularity helps. In 1989, according to Beverage Digest, Coca-Cola products accounted for 41.1 percent of the U.S. market, significantly ahead of Pepsi, which had 31.1 percent. Worldwide, Coke is sold in more than 160 countries and served more than 400 million times a day.

To work its way into the culture, said Philip Mooney, archivist for Coca- Cola, a product needs “longevity, ubiquity and an ability to reach consumers on a level that becomes somewhat personal.”

It also requires an advertising department with a good grasp of what’s hot.

Consider the celebrities who have endorsed Coke since the company first enlisted vaudeville actress Hilda Clark near the turn of the century: Ty Cobb, Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Johnny Weismuller, Paul Newman.

And consider, too, the singers who have recorded Coke jingles through the years: Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Supremes, the Four Tops, Aretha Franklin, Loretta Lynn and Dione Warwick.

This reflection of the popular culture — of the dress, the manner, the style of the times — inspires some people to collect Coke memorabilia.

Alice Fisher moved to Atlanta from Cleveland, and much of what she read about her new hometown related to Coke. Asa Candler, who bought Doc Pemberton’s formula in 1891 for $2,300 (and who would sell it in 1919 for $25 million, the largest transaction to that date in the South) became mayor of Atlanta. The Atlanta zoo was started with Candler’s collection of animals. Emory University received $150 million in Coca-Cola money through the years.

So Fisher became a collector. Her house is filled with toy Coke trucks and Coke cans with nozzles that went into space, with clocks, posters, bottles, trays and turn-of-the-century coupons good for free cokes at a soda fountain.

She had to rebuild her collection after a fire destroyed her house in 1981. Only one item survived — an 1899 tray worth $20,000 painted with the portrait of vaudevillian Clark. It had been packed between some clothes.

“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she said.

Fisher is treasurer of the Coca-Cola Collectors Club, which has nearly 7,000 members.

Melba Caldwell, of St. Augustine, who with her late husband David was among the country’s best-known experts on dolphins, began collecting 20 years ago “before we knew anybody else collected.”

Caldwell thinks the product endeared itself to the American people because Robert Woodruff, who was head of the company most of this century, “understood the American psyche, and he never allowed the word ‘Coca-Cola’ to be associated with anything unpleasant. He wouldn’t ever let them advertise on the evening news, because there was too much that was unpleasant.”

The company advertised with newspapers when they were growing, with magazines as they were big and switched to television in the 1950s.

Along the way, the ads not only have reflected popular culture, but also have helped create it. Santa Claus, for example, used to be thought of as thinner and sterner until a commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom began painting Santa for Coke ads. The ads, depicting Santa as fat and jolly, often ran in the featured back-page spot in the Saturday Evening Post.

Sundblom painted the Santas from 1931 until 1966. Today, every department store Santa with a pillow stuffed down the front of his red suit is, to some extent, derivative of Sundblom’s work.

Another example, is the 1971 commercial with people from different countries singing on a hilltop in Italy. The words of the jingle were changed from “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” to “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” and the song made the top five on the pop charts.

The other most-remembered television ad is a 1979 commercial that showed a small boy following pro football player Joe Greene as he hobbled toward the locker room after a game. Mean Joe Greene is grumpy until the boy offers him his Coke. Greene downs it in a single gulp, then smiles and tosses the boy his football jersey.

“Wow! Thanks, Mean Joe,” the boy exclaims.

There have been unwholesome suspicions, through the years, that Doc Pemberton’s formula contained cocaine. The company denies it, saying that although the syrup includes an inactive extract of the coca leaf, it never contained active cocaine. Pemberton’s formula is still used today, Mooney said.

It was abandoned briefly in 1985, when, in what is now regarded as one of the great marketing blunders in history, the company changed the makeup of Coke. Consumers protested en masse. On the day the company announced that the original formula was returning as Coca-Cola Classic, ABC News interrupted General Hospital with a news bulletin, and 18,000 people called the company to express thanks.

What was happening to Coke has transcended the commercial market. This was something people cared about. This was news.