The 98-Year Quest to Tickle Our Innards

Mountain Dew’s evolution as a concept

Even if you’ve never dared to try it, you know what Mountain Dew is. Its sci-fi nuclear-green color and barely legal caffeine content give it a reputation as one of the more extreme soft drinks, at least before the energy-drink era. By now, I bet, many people also know its name was a joking reference to the previous meaning of the term, “mountain dew,” a very old nickname for moonshine. The whimsical country song, “That Good Old Mountain Dew,” popular since its first known recording in 1928 (and said to be inspired by a much older Irish tune, “That Rare Old Mountain Dew”) is entirely about moonshine.

There’s also a good chance that you’ve also heard that the soft drink has some Knoxville origins. If you don’t, there’s now an official state historical marker on Magnolia Avenue that tells the story of how the Hartman Bottling Co. introduced a lemon-lime soda in the adjacent brick building in 1948, called it Mountain Dew, and promoted it with a hillbilly motif. Brothers Bernard and Aloysius Hartman, who moved to Knoxville in 1931, appeared on the beverage’s early labels as hillbillies Barney and Ally.

But as acknowledged on the plaque, there are complications to the story that add some asterisks to the “Birthplace” claim. Just a few years after coming up with the concept, without being able to do much with it, the Hartman company sold the trademark and general idea to another company called the Tip Corporation in Marion, Va., about 150 miles northeast of Knoxville. By 1961, the idea was further enhanced with a different flavor combination, eerie greenish color, and perhaps most notably, lots of caffeine. Tip kept the name and the hillbilly motif, and had more success with it than the Hartmans did. When “The Beverly Hillbillies” was America’s most popular sitcom, Mountain Dew exploded, the fastest-growing soft drink in America. In 1966, Pepsi acquired it. At the time, its motto was “It’ll Tickle Yore Innards!” To my knowledge, that claim has never been challenged.

 

 

By the late 1970s, new marketing, including jettisoning the whole hillbilly thing and emphasizing it as an outdoorsy energy drink, sort of hipster Gatorade but with caffeine and none of the health-boosting claims, made it more popular than ever.

 

A lot of folks have heard that much of the story. In fact, early this month, a trendy young New York food blogger emailed me asking for me to tell it. In prepping for her show, I was just scanning trying to find the first reference to the Hartmans’ version of Mountain Dew when I ran across a surprise.

As it turns out, the Hartmans actually weren’t the first to bottle a carbonated soft drink called Mountain Dew in Knoxville. About 20 years before Barney and Ally Hartman envisioned that concoction and put a hillbilly label on it, another Knoxville family was making a citrus soft drink they called Mountain Dew.

But in exploring this new information, I learned a few surprises about the Hartmans’ story, too.

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Bernard Hartman, born in 1894, and his little brother Aloysius Hartman, seven years younger, were an interesting pair. They arrived in Knoxville in 1931, reported at the time to be from Columbus, Ga., and/or Augusta, Ga., depending on the source, though they apparently had deeper roots in Quincy, Ill., their family home. Their main purpose in arriving in Depression-era Knoxville was to bottle Orange Crush, the Chicago invention that had been catching on in the 1920s. When beer became legal in 1933, the Hartmans were already established as a soft-drink bottling company in Knoxville, and they naturally began distributing beer on a wholesale basis, as well, handling the local market for Cincinnati brand Oertel’s.

 

 

Bernard was a big, stocky guy, with a big personality. The outgoing brother made a lot of friends, and he was well-known at the Commerce Street Bowling Alley, playing for his Orange Crush team. He got to newspapermen like Bert Vincent and Bob Wilson, who quoted him. He played golf competitively at Holston Hills, went hunting with Gov. Browning, sometimes led American Legion parades, sponsored a girls’ softball team. A deacon in the Catholic church, he contributed to the construction of Catholic High, not far from his bottling plant. Before the end of the 1930s, the Hartmans were the official local bottler of Pepsi Cola.

In 1935 he invited his industry and political chums to a beer party at the Orange Crush place on 1921 E. Magnolia in 1935, welcoming a new beer to the Knoxville market, Nashville’s Gerst brand. It was said that some attendees drank five to six pints of it that night. Hartman also carried Burger Beer, Champagne Velvet, Stag Beer, and others.

At the same time Hartman, whom newspapermen sometimes called a “beer baron,” made enemies, and got in trouble with local authorities, especially during his early years here. They had hardly begun distributing Oertel’s in the Knoxville market before Hartman was accused of selling a brand of Oertel’s 92 advertised as “Extra Strength.”

The end of national prohibition elicited a patchwork of responses in Tennessee. Some parts of the state kept the beer ban in effect, but Knoxville allowed the sale of 3.2 percent beer, something slightly less than most modern Budweiser and other mainstream brands.

Oertel’s 92 clocked in at 6 percent, an amount closer to some wines. Knoxville’s safety director arrested Hartman and three truck drivers and seized 300 cases of it. In a contentious hearing, Hartman presented witnesses who testified that they’d enjoyed Oertel’s 92 without getting drunk. Hartman was eventually fined $50.

 

A little more than two years later, Hartman was facing a much more serious charge: that he was a ringleader of a “protection racket” in a Knoxville “beer war,” as evidenced by his alleged effort to intimidate a rival beer distributor into firing an employee Hartman found uncooperative. The “beer war” had implicated at least two Knoxville police officers who were said to be part of the ring.

 

In March, 1936, a grand jury indicted Hartman for felony extortion. After a few days of big headlines, a criminal-court judge quashed the indictment, on the grounds that no one was provably harmed by Hartman’s actions. The state appealed, taking the case to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which agreed with the defense and sustained the quash.

The restrictions on beer assured that Knoxville’s old bootlegging and speakeasy culture would keep operating as it had before. Because whiskey sales were still illegal here, moonshine was around. Even in parts of the country where some liquor was legal, a national market for high-potency moonshine survived. It didn’t always taste great, but it was popular because it was available. In 1940, reporter Ernie Pyle spent some time in Knoxville describing the major national market for it. Pyle remarked on how it had some other nicknames, like “splo.” Some news stories used the phrase “mountain dew,” lower case. It was a matter-of-fact reference to moonshine that everyone understood.

Hartman was admittedly interested in moonshine, and in ways to make it more palatable.

***

It’s not surprising that “mountain dew” might have presented itself as a tongue-in-cheek term for soft drink to mix with moonshine—even more than once, as the case may have been. Or that using hillbilly motif would be a winner in 1948. More than any time in history, the postwar era was seeing a hillbilly vogue. On the “funny pages,” moonshiner Snuffy Smith and Li’l Abner, both introduced in 1934, were more popular than ever  popular than ever in the 1940s; Li’l Abner was so popular it became a hit Broadway show and even a movie.

The Egg and I, which introduced the popular comedy duo of Ma and Pa Kettle, came out in 1947, commencing a chain of popular comedies. The classic Bugs Bunny cartoon “Hillbilly Hare” was on its way. The Grand Ole Opry, featuring Roy Acuff, Homer and Jethro, the Delmore Brothers, Uncle Dave Macon, and Minnie Pearl, was more and more playing with the hillbilly motif, with blacked-out teeth and overalls, in sharp contrast to a previous generation of performers, who would never have stepped onto a stage without a suit and tie. (They even called the genre “hillbilly” in those days.) It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to see the unfettered, uninhibited jeans-wearing hillbillies of the 1940s as a precursor to the unfettered, uninhibited jeans-wearing hippies of the 1960s.

Of course, lot of those early tongue-in-cheek “hillbillies” on the national stage were from Knoxville, and pretty much all of them had performed to big crowds here.

Nashville’s Grandpa Jones, the banjoist who modeled his style after Uncle Dave Macon, recorded a nationally popular version of “Good Old Mountain Dew” (“Those that refuse it are few”) the same year as the Hartmans came out with their beverage.

And it was during that late-‘40s era that the Tennessee Vols began experimenting with hillbilly imagery, including a hillbilly character with a shootin’ iron and a blue-tick hound called Smoky—and even caricatures on some postwar football programs depicting Snuffy Smith as a Vol fan.

In 1948, even for good Catholic boys from Illinois, hillbillies and their potential were hard to ignore. Any market-savvy entrepreneur in 1948 Knoxville would be tempted by the hillbilly option. Early bottles presenting the Hartmans’ new lemon-lime soda proudly, “by Barney and Ally” with pictures of cartoon hillbillies, one firing a shootin’ iron, one with a moonshine jug cork firing right through the brim of his hillbilly hat. Twenty years later, all America would recognize that image.

The Smoky Mountains likely played a role, too. Never had they seemed so close, with completion of roads all the way up to Newfound Gap, where President Roosevelt himself had appeared in 1940 to “dedicate” the national park—which had evicted a lot of the hill people we were suddenly so smitten with. Thousands of tourists were flowing through Knoxville weekly, tempted by hillbilly imagery at souvenir shops along the way.

The Hartmans were frank about the fact that they intended their Mountain Dew as a mixer, in a time when liquor, licensed or unlicensed, remained officially illegal in Knoxville. The new soda pop was to make corn moonshine more tolerable to civilized palates.

Alas, the Hartmans had a solid reputation as bottlers, but had never launched a successful soft drink of their own. Despite the genius marketing, the beverage was not a success. Of course, that original version didn’t offer either caffeine or garish colors. The Hartmans had plenty to keep themselves busy, anyway, and we can’t tell how hard they tried with the new idea.

Barney Hartman, sportsman, Orange Crush and Pepsi bottler, “beer baron,” philanthropist, succeeded with a lot of other things. He lived large, hunting and fishing, traveling to the Kentucky Derby the year Assault won the Triple Crown, traveling to Miami for the dog races, taking his wife on vacations to Jamaica.

He never knew, and would likely not have imagined that he would be remembered mainly as the author of Mountain Dew. The big guy had been suffering heart problems for years. Just 54 when he died of a heart attack in May 1949, a few months after they introduced Mountain Dew, he left some friends. An unsigned story in the News-Sentinel described him as a “big, likeable businessman and sportsman.”

It was a tragic month for the Hartmans, as their father and sister, back in Quincy, died about the same time. It’s unclear whether the traumas may have knocked some wind out of the Mountain Dew idea. But by one family account quoted many years later, it was just not a cost-effective product.

Succeeding Bernard as president was his younger brother, Aloysius, a milder-mannered fellow whose name never appeared in the papers nearly as much as Barney’s.  Although called “Ally” on the label, reporters, when they mentioned him at all, tended to treat him more formally, as “A.A. Hartman.”

He was in charge when the Hartman company sold Mountain Dew to the Tip Corporation of tiny Marion, Va., for only $1,500, but he also held an interest in that company. It was after that that Mountain Dew got pumped up with caffeine and color and a pseudo-fruitier flavor, in fact most of the aspects for which it’s known today. But they kept the hillbilly imagery, with TV commercials later animating the Hartmans’ caricatures.

By some accounts, Knoxville’s Hartman parted ways with Mountain Dew’s management in 1960, as Aloysius Hartman presided over Knoxville’s more conventional Pepsi bottling operation, which in 1964 moved out west, to Middlebrook Pike. Hartman had become the local bottler of the peculiar soft drink they played a role in creating—though Hartman was still participating in creative marketing of Mountain Dew, planning hillbilly ads. A 1966 ad promised a “new speshul bottle that you swig—and then throw away!” (Was it a Mountain Dew hillbilly who first told us we didn’t have to recycle pop bottles anymore?)

In 1969, Hartman ran an ad promoting an unusual premium: a miniature Model T, intended for children, with a “3-hoss-power” gasoline engine.

But in late 1970, Aloysius “Ally” Hartman was leaving work at the Pepsi plant when drove across the railroad tracks at the wrong time. The Southern freight train hit his new Buick, and he died in the collision, at that still-problematic railroad crossing between Middlebrook and the eastern end of Papermill Road.

Although some sources claim Mountain Dew dispensed with its hillbilly motif soon after Pepsi purchased the company in 1966, distributors all over the nation were still using the cork-shot hat motif and the “It’ll Tickle Yore Innards!” motto into the mid-1970s.

Neither of the newspaper obituary stories for “Barney” and “Ally” mentioned Mountain Dew. For a long time, the Hartmans’ early association with the origins of Mountain Dew was mostly forgotten, even in the city where it happened.

***

But as I learned only last month, there’s some even earlier prehistory to the story.

Back in 1927, four years before the Hartmans moved to Knoxville, another family introduced another carbonated citrus soft drink called Mountain Dew.

It was the creation of Max Licht. Born in 1869 in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, he migrated at age 14 to America, settling first in Zanesville, Ohio. After suffering some health problems, a doctor advised him to move south—I’m not sure they do that anymore—and he arrived in rapidly growing 1880s Knoxville, first opening a grocery store on the east side of town in 1889. The hardworking immigrant tried a lot of things, including selling condiments like mustard and ketchup in a stall in Market Square. He tried creating a small chain of groceries, for economy, but eventually sold them and went into manufacturing. From his youth in Hungary, where he had worked for a sauerkraut maker, he knew some basics, and developed his own version of the regional relish known as chow chow, in several different varieties.

It was the era when Coca-Cola bottling was just getting off the ground, exalting that Atlanta-based company to new heights of popularity. Pepsi, created in North Carolina, was catching on, too. Entrepreneurs in several cities in the south, including Knoxville, were looking toward soft drinks as the next big thing.

With the help of a $500 loan from the old East Tennessee National Bank, around 1903, Licht built a small factory on South Broadway, a mostly industrial lane in the Second Creek valley, parallel to Henley Street. By family accounts, it was near what many years later became the site of the Sunsphere. There, in a big, plain building, he began bottling cider and, by 1909, soft drinks, mostly with fruit flavors, like peach, grape, orange, strawberry, but also their own version of ginger ale.

Max Licht’s son, Leonard, became a partner in the business. The Lichts’ bottling process then involved machinery operated by foot pedal. For years, the Lichts used 12-ounce beer bottles to deliver their product. But during Prohibition, there was such demand for beer bottles by home brewers that Licht found it more economical to order eight-ounce glass pop bottles. But at their height, in 1927, M. Licht & Son were producing about 250 cases of soft drinks per day.

The name “Dew” was attached to some of them. One was called “Hun-Nee Dew” claiming that “It’s pure honey and orange juice.”

In 1927, Licht created what he may have thought would be his flagship brand, Mountain Dew: “the pure lemon thirst-quencher (It’s sparkling white!).”

***

The timing is interesting, for a few reasons. In the mid-1920s, people in Knoxville were thinking of the mountains more than ever in the 1920s, as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park project was making progress. It was in 1925 that the Knoxville Pioneers minor-league baseball team changed their name to the Smokies. In 1926, Knoxville’s biggest candy manufacturer, Littlefield and Steere—whose main facility was in the World’s Fair Park building known as “the Candy Factory”—introduced a product called “Smoky Mountain Dew,” a candy bar made from sugar, honey, and almonds. It was sold in town, but also, for double the regular price, on the very top of Mount LeConte—in 1926, before it was officially a national park.

The company claimed to sell more than 2 million Smoky Mountain Dew bars in the first year of production, but it seemed to evaporate after that.

And, coincidentally, the simple phrase “mountain dew” was in the news more in the 1920s than in any decade before. It was Prohibition, and revenuers were always out destroying stills; it made good newspaper copy, and Knoxville reporters liked to use the tongue-in-cheek phrase “mountain dew.” During the 1920s, “mountain dew,” referring to moonshine, appeared in a Knoxville newspaper on average every two or three days.

It’s often been assumed that the humorous country song “Good Old Mountain Dew” had something to do with prompting the name that Barney and Ally Hartman chose for marketing their beverage in 1948. Maybe it did. But the first known recording of that song, by folklorist Bascom Lunsford, who’s also credited with writing the song, came out in 1928—much earlier than its most popular recordings, but some months after Max Licht introduced his own Mountain Dew.

Richard Licht says his family looked into copyrighting the name “Mountain Dew,” around 1927—but were told they couldn’t, because it was such a common term for moonshine. The Hartmans apparently had a different lawyer.

Instead, Max Licht thought it was important to patent the distinctive bottles he sold it in. He advertised his bottles’ unique shape as much as the beverage itself: “In a Bottle like a Barrel,” was Mountain Dew’s motto. It might seem odd to make a big deal of it, and in retrospect, the bottle he designed, with glass staves and hoops, can’t be called pretty, but one of the decade’s many fads were these unusual “deco” pop bottles that made them stand out on the shelves.  The Lichts advertised their Mountain Dew intensively in the hot summer of 1928, as Ruth, Gehrig and Durocher’s Yankees were sweeping the American League, and Herbert Hoover and Al Smith squared off for the presidency, and the Tennessee Theatre was under construction. As the Lichts saw it, Mountain Dew was obviously a hot-weather drink.

The Lichts manufactured Mountain Dew for about three years.

By 1931, as the Depression hit, Max Licht, now in his 60s, shifted his business plan to something more practical. The fact that the national brands—Coca-Cola, but also Pepsi, RC, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up—were encroaching on all the old local soft-drink factories likely had a discouraging effect on small entrepreneurs. Specifically, Nehi, a newer company out of Columbus, Ga., specializing in the sweet fruit-flavored sodas that had been Lichts’ specialty, entered the Knoxville market about the same time as the Lichts began advertising their Mountain Dew. It was a dog-eat-dog era, and the big dogs were eating all the little dogs. Most of the nation’s distinctive regional soft drinks lost their sparkle.

The Lichts seem to have gotten out of the soda-pop business around 1931—the same year the Hartmans arrived in town to bottle Orange Crush. I’ve learned that a few scholars before me have noticed the coincidence. A few years ago, vintage pop-bottle collector Joseph T. Lee III proposed that the Hartmans might have purchased Lichts’ machinery to use for their new Orange Crush operation—and, later, borrowed one of their once-cherished ideas for a new soda pop.

Meanwhile, at their old factory, on South Broadway, with the same pedal-pump machines, the Lichts began to make something more familiar and practical. Licht had been around vinegar for years, through his friendship with the Spiro family, Jewish refugees from Austria who had first arrived in Knoxville soon after the Civil War. The Licht’s vinegar came in small glass bottles. The small factory that had once made the 1920s version of Mountain Dew became known downtown as “the vinegar works.” But they diversified within the vinegar-based field, with a range of products, including “Red Hot Sauce,” sweet chow chow, hot chow chow, sour chow chow, horseradish, and “Compound Sugar and Distilled Vinegar.”

It’s unknown what he might have thought of the Hartmans, and their modest project, but he didn’t live to see another Mountain Dew become a national brand.

Richard Licht was the final member of the family to be in the food business. Until 2015, Licht and Son still operated on Hall of Fame Drive, manufacturing a sugar-free liquid sweetener.

He’s not old enough to remember it, but he’s heard tales of the family’s adventures in soft drinks.

But he says his father, Leonard Licht—the “& Son” in the business title—knew Barney Hartman, and used to have lunch with him at the old Elks’ Club on State Street. He’s not aware that they ever made any formal agreement about the use of the name, but he doesn’t seem to have been bothered by it.

Living on West Vine, near Temple Beth El, Max Licht, the immigrant from the Kingdom of Austria-Hungary, kept the business going until his death at age 84 in 1953. It was just a few years before Mountain Dew, an idea he had every right to have forgotten by then, became a national brand.

The Licht company remained in business, best known in its later years for an unusual sugar-free sweetener, until 2015, when it was located on Hall of Fame Drive. Richard Licht, grandson of the immigrant Max, is still living in Knoxville, but comfortably retired, and happy to tell the story.

By Jack Neely