Steve VanderVeen: Holland's very own 7-Up franchise
Phillips Brooks was a free-spirited preacher’s child with a dream to start his own family business.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1893, his parents, Reverend Jesse and Louise Bissel Upham Brooks, named him after one of Jesse’s friends, Reverend Phillips Brooks, who, among other things, wrote the Christmas carol “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem.”
In the 1900s, the Jesse Brooks family moved to Chicago and began vacationing in Macatawa Park.
Phillips' older brother was Ernest. Born in 1891, Ernest attended Hope College, where he played football, then the University of Chicago. In 1913, he married Margaret Walsh, the daughter of Walter and Jenny Walsh of Holland. After he served in World War I and taught and coached at Hope, he became a principal in the Visscher Brooks Insurance Company. Later, Ernest served as Holland’s mayor and, following Lida Rogers’ lead, helped promote Holland’s initial tulip festival.
Instead of attending Hope College like his brother, Phillips attended Wheaton College, then Ohio State. But he left school early when his father passed away in 1920. In 1923, he married Ruth Fitch, the daughter of a physician in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Phillips and Ruth honeymooned in Holland, then returned to Ohio where their son James F. Brooks was born and Phillips served as plant manager at the Dracket Chemical Company, maker of Drano. Then he discovered, in a garage behind his father-in-law’s medical practice, a distributor bottling and peddling 7-Up, a lithium-infused lemon-lime soda drink.
After the stock market crash in 1929, Phillips moved his family to Holland and took a job selling insurance for his brother, a difficult task during a time of bank “holidays” and closures. Financially, Ruth’s father helped Phillips’ family by purchasing for them a home at 56 E. 25th St. and Ruth a fur coat. Seeking to earn extra money and wanting his own business, Phillips invented a game combining bowling and golf, which he called bolo-golf. But it didn’t catch on.
Then, remembering the 7-Up franchisee in Ohio. In 1934, Phillips wrote the 7-Up franchisor in St. Louis, Missouri. When he discovered there were territories available in Michigan and Florida, he asked and received them. But lacking capital, Phillips gave back most of the area, except nine counties in Southwest Michigan, where he launched the 7-Up Bottling Company of Western Michigan.
To purchase machinery, bottles and cases, Phillips sold his home on 25th Street and bought a less expensive one at 35 E. 20th St. He also sold Ruth’s fur coat, much to her father’s dismay. To bottle his product, he rented the Underwood Bottling Company at night and employed his family to label his product in the basement of their home. Then, to distribute his product, he removed the back seat of his 1929 Buick, loaded his car with cases of 7-Up and went door-to-door trying to sell it.
Subscribe: Get unlimited access to our local coverage
But the Great Depression hindered his success. In his first year of business, Phillips lost $600. Although he made $600 the next year, out of frustration, he sold his business to the owner of the Holland City Bottling Works, a pre-prohibition beer brewer, for $400.
Fortunately, a year later, in 1937, the brewer agreed to sell the business back to him at the same price. Then, with a large billboard near the bridge over the Kalamazoo River (now Blue Star Highway) and advertising slogans such as “Dispels Hangovers” and “Takes the Ouch out of Grouch,” 7-Up started to catch on.
When the Underwood Bottling Company didn't have the production capacity to meet demand, Phillips rented the Grand Rapids Bottling Company’s facility, which he used at night. Later, Phillips borrowed money to purchase an empty furniture showroom building at 99 River Avenue and, later, with a loan from banker Henry Maentz of the Holland State Bank, purchased used equipment, with which he could bottle up to 60 cases of 7-Up per hour. Then he moved his family to 99 W. 11th St.
Due to shortages of labor, sugar, and supplies, during World War II, Phillips’ business struggled. To ensure he would have at least a little sugar with which to bottle 7-Up, Phillips joined the Ottawa County Rationing Board. Then, after the war, with the end of rationing, Phillips’ business boomed. It also benefited when Phillips’ son joined the business. We’ll tell James’ story next week.
— Steve VanderVeen is a resident of Holland. You may reach him at skvveen@gmail.com. His book, "The Holland Area's First Entrepreneurs," is available at Reader’s World.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Holland History: Holland's very own 7-Up franchise
