Courtesy of the Lower Merion Historical Society
Courtesy of the Lower Merion Historical Society
If you grew up in or around Philadelphia, as I did, “Hires” is as familiar a soft drink name brand as Coca-Cola or 7-Up. Nothing hit the spot better on a steamy summer’s day by the Jersey shore than an overflowing mug of chilled Hires root beer and vanilla bean ice cream. Ahhhhh!
Charles Elmer Hires, a southern New Jersey farmer’s son, got his start at age twelve as a “drugstore boy.” His family was fairly well-off, but Hires insisted on independence: “I was not interested in farming and wanted to make my own way.” Training in a quaint country pharmacy, he earned his twelve-dollar-a-week pay by sweeping floors, cleaning out spittoons, polishing mirrors, cleaning mortars, and delivering medicines. He absorbed practical knowledge of chemicals and compounds while fulfilling his duties. After serving as a ten-dollar-a-week apprentice for four years, he became a clerk at a Philadelphia city drug store. Though he never went to college, he attended open lectures and night classes at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, learned the ropes of operating a small business, and saved up his earnings.
When Hires had amassed $400, he struck out on his own. He established an independent retail pharmacy, sleeping in a room above the storefront and taking his meals at a boarding home next door. He stretched every dollar to cover both fixtures and stock. Local historians differ on what exactly inspired Hires to pursue the woodsy, licorice-sarsaparilla-vanilla concoction. One legend has it that Hires borrowed his root tea recipe from a hostess he met at a farm while on his honeymoon with his new wife. Another version claims he teamed up with Reverend Dr. Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple University, to market a temperance-friendly drink that would appeal to blue-collar workers (thus the marketing name change from “root tea” to “root beer”).
Before Charles Hires hit it big in the beverage business, though, he first had to get his hands dirty.
Really dirty.
Hires shared the story of his earthy beginnings in business in an October 1913 essay, “Seeing Opportunities,” for the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record. His entrepreneurial wisdom is timeless and his work ethic is at the foundation of every successful American Dream. As the pharmacy journal’s editor wrote in his preface to Hires’s reflections, the beverage creator’s philosophy of success was rooted in a firm belief “that business life is full of opportunities for those who are shrewd enough to see them and energetic enough to grasp them.” He wanted to inspire the next generation of young American capitalists to open their eyes to the limitless, profit-making possibilities all around them.
For Hires, the road to prosperity began with a mundane hole in the ground.
With the savings he earned as a teenager, Hires bought a small lot of land in what is now Center City Philadelphia. With the help of a carpenter, he built with his own hands an eighteen-by-sixty-foot store at Sixth and Spruce Streets. “The interior of the store was fitted up in plain wood,” Hires recalled, “enameled white with a gold stripe around the border and paneling of the closets, cases, and shelving.” He built his counters and soda fountain out of Tennessee marble—a popular, pinkish gray limestone from the quarries of Knoxville. The soda fountain was topped with a Lippincott gas light fixture, which Hires later called “pretentious” for its time, “but which I imagine would not find room in a second or third class store of today.”
When business was slow at the pharmacy, Hires would grow restless. “I have always been active and energetic,” he confessed, “and the time spent behind the prescription counter, especially in the dull part of the day, often became irksome and I longed for greater things to do.” Outside, the neighborhood was bustling with construction. It was 1869 and Philadelphia boomed with immigrants, railroads, and streetcars. Laundries, dry goods, and other retail shops rose near churches, hospitals, medical publishing firms, tanneries, libraries, and homes.
“One day while walking out on Spruce Street, I noticed a cellar being dug,” Hires reminisced. Workers used hand picks, horse-drawn scrapers, graders, and steam-powered shovels. “From this excavation,” he said, “I noticed a lead colored claylike substance which attracted my attention, as it seemed almost of the consistence of putty. I picked some of it up and took it back to the store and after drying it and examining it I found it was fuller’s earth or potter’s clay.”
Many thousands of passers-by had walked past the chaotic construction site, three blocks from Hires’s store, in apathy or aggravation. It was loud, grimy, dusty, and dangerous. But Charles Hires paused when a shovelful of the dirt sullied his shoes. He saw what others did not or could not see.
And then he seized the moment.
“I returned to the place the next day and saw the contractor and asked him if I could have some of this clay.” The builder was glad to be rid of the nuisance and to off-load the dirt on someone much closer to the construction site than the company’s usual dumping grounds. “I had him bring it to my place, and after boarding up a passage way along the side of my cellar, I filled the entire balance of the cellar, up to the ceiling, with this clay.”
Fuller’s earth is a naturally occurring clay found across the United States. In Philadelphia, the brick clay was deposited in the region at the end of the last glacial period. It is highly absorbent and has been used since ancient times for cloth laundering or “fulling” (to soak up heavy oil and grease spots from soiled wool, flannel, or other textiles). The clay was also handy as a component in pharmaceuticals (to remedy food poisoning and stop hemorrhaging) and in various household cleaning chores. Manufacturers also used the clay to bleach edible oils and decolorize petroleum used in medicinal products (such as Vaseline oils).
Now that Hires had a cellar overflowing with the absorbent dirt, what was he going to do with it? “It occurred to me that I might put up potter’s clay in convenient-sized cakes that would be handy to retail and more convenient for people to use,” he explained, “as at that time potter’s clay was sold in a loose way in broken lumps and powder which caused a great deal of dirt and dust in handling.”
Once again, Hires turned to ordinary objects in his daily life taken for granted by others. He recalled seeing his female neighbors at the boarding home next door using “an iron ring on which to stand their irons on ironing day.” He repurposed the cast-iron rings to cut out and mold his clay disks—only after obtaining the ladies’ consent, of course, and only after “being charged very particularly to take care of them and return them in good order.”
Hires wet the clay, turned it into a paste, and transformed the piles of dirt into round cakes “about one inch thick and about three inches in diameter.” He set them out on a board to dry in the sun. “I was very much elated over my project and the possibilities of selling quantities of it,” he recounted with pride. He enlisted a metal-working friend to construct a crude stencil with die-cut lead letters spelling out “HIRES’ REFINED FULLER’S EARTH.” The imprints didn’t hold on the cakes, so he crafted a new stencil block out of cast iron.
Hires, an assistant, and a drugstore boy (serving the role Hires had played himself a decade ago) made the little clay cakes in their spare time at the pharmacy. They soon had several gross units (a dozen dozen or 144), and Hires filled up a commercial barrel, which held about ten gross. He was ready to put the dirt pies out for sale.
Now came the marketing campaign.
The promotion-savvy entrepreneur wrapped a few of the cakes in tissue paper. He approached a friend in the wholesale drug market, who embraced the product heartily “because it saved a great deal of weighing out and dirty work that the old method of dispensing Fuller’s earth necessitated.” He arranged to sell the dirt pies at $3.50 per gross to wholesalers, who turned around and sold them for thirty-five or forty cents a dozen. Multiple orders of between three and twenty-five barrels per call came in as word spread. Every wholesale druggist in town wanted in. One of his biggest clients, Smith, Kline & Co., founded in Philadelphia in 1830 as an apothecary and later to become one of the world’s dominant pharmaceutical conglomerates (now GlaxoSmithKline).
Hires arranged to be paid in trade by his wholesale drug clients. “From these sales I was better able to stock my store, and after selling this supply of clay, I renewed it several times from cellar excavations, because I found that nearly all Philadelphia is underlaid with a strata of three or four feet of potter’s clay.” Hires took his product to New York and met similar success. Eventually, competitors caught on and contractors “stopped giving away fuller’s earth to every Tom, Dick or Harry who came along.” But Hires reaped the benefits of being first and happily turned to his next venture. The side business made $5,000, which provided the starting capital for the root beer project that would bring him worldwide fame and fortune.
“It is one thing to design and conceive a good article,” Hires counseled, “and another to successfully introduce it to humanity.” He famously quipped that “doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark: you know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” Just as he had aggressively branded and marketed his clay cakes, Hires set about perfecting and publicizing the root beer concoction he had been blending at his pharmacy since 1870. He used his fuller’s earth profits to fund his research and development over the next five years.
A childhood friend, rags-to-riches publisher George W. Childs, loved Hires’s root beer so much he carried free promotional ads for the product in his newspaper, the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Like Hires, Childs had started out as a young clerk in his industry at the age of twelve and worked his way up through unrelenting ambition and infectious character. They were kindred spirits.
“Mr. Hires, why don’t you advertise that root beer extract of yours? It is good stuff,” Childs challenged him.
When Hires told his pal he had no budget for advertising, Childs cooked up a “sweet” deal.
“I’ll tell you what to do,” he offered. “You advertise in the Ledger, beginning right away, and I’ll tell the bookkeeper not to send you any bills unless you ask for them.”
The campaign caught fire. Hires quickly paid off his debt to Childs. He pioneered aggressive advertising on streetcars, benches, and barn signs, and in color advertising cards, lithographic postcards, magazines, and full-page, large-circulation city daily newspapers.
The legendary American soda debuted at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philly, along with the Westinghouse air brake, Libbey cut glass, a Roebling cable prototype to be used in the Brooklyn Bridge, the Otis steam elevator, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Heinz ketchup, the Statue of Liberty’s arm and torch, and the massive Corliss steam engine. Nine million people attended the world’s fair, including future Crown Cork & Seal founder William Painter and his young son. Hires gave away free samples of his root beer to thirsty attendees. Once he reeled them in, he offered twenty-five-cent packets of his dry herb mix or tiny bottles of condensed extract. The beloved root-and-berry-derived drink is still sold today online and at select retail stores by Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
Thirteen years after he launched his soda company, the drugstore entrepreneur itemized not only the blood, sweat, advertising dollars, and promotional sense that went into selling his products, but also the wider benefits reaped to other private businesses and to Uncle Sam’s coffers:
Over fifty thousand pounds of barks, roots, berries, and flowers went into the composition of Hires Root Beer Extract made last year.
Two hundred thousand pretty little looking glasses advertising the Extract were given away last year.
Four million beautiful picture cards, printed in ten colors, gladdened as many persons, brightening their homes and lives, and carrying messages of the Extract, last year. . . .
Twenty five thousand dollars were paid out to printing-houses last year. . . .
A good many thousand daily and weekly newspapers, periodicals, and journals each year contain the advertisements of Hires’ Root Beer[; and]
Uncle Sam derive[d] a yearly revenue of over six thousand dollars paid by the Charles E. Hires Company as postage on mailing circulars and similar matter.
Even as Hires turned his $5,000 dirt-born investment into $5 million in root beer revenue, he relentlessly pursued myriad “sideline businesses.” These inspired endeavors boosted his financial security, employed more workers, generated more tax revenue, and provided goods and services that consumers wanted. In addition to the glass works and clay cakes, Hires founded a Cuban sugar plantation, a condensed milk business (which he later sold to the Nestlé Company), a flavoring extract enterprise, and corporate partnerships with both U.S. and foreign potteries to produce stoneware mugs and bottles. He expanded beverage sales to London, Copenhagen, Canada, and Australia.
Everywhere he looked, starting with that shovelful of clay at his feet on Spruce Street, Charles Hires saw an opening for enterprise. Fortune didn’t find him. He created a fortune from chance encounter after chance encounter. He believed firmly in the free market and in the ability of consumers to discern quality and integrity. His personal and business motto was simply: “Merit will win.”
Reflecting on his own career road of risks, failures, and ultimate triumphs, Hires rejected tired excuses and lamentations from naysayers and capitalism-bashers:
I have often thought when I have heard of the difficulties of a young man in getting along, that surely the reason for their not getting along is because of their lack of initiative or the lack of making or seizing opportunities when they come, because I think a business life is continually full of opportunities if one can grasp and utilize them. [Emphasis added.]
To grasp opportunities, one must see them first. And therein lies the lesson Charles Hires wanted so passionately to get across in his proud retelling of how he came to make clay cakes:
Sometimes, seekers of success, the pay dirt is right in front of you.
• • •
This anonymous and thoroughly fitting poem ran alongside the 1913 American Druggist profile of Charles Hires.
Strike while the iron is heated
Pause and the iron’s cold.
If you strike too late on a hardened plate,
The weld will never hold.
Seek, and success will follow;
Wait, and it passes by.
Be quick to grasp, then hold it fast
And trust for a better try.
Serve, and the world serves with you;
Loaf, and you loaf alone.
This strenuous world is a continuous whirl—
It offers no room for the drone.
Life is an undertaking;
Death is a silent thought.
So let life’s light illumine the night