No Pepsi. Coke!

Ever drive through one of those little out-of-the-way villages and wonder just what it is that people do there?  I mean, some towns just seem run down at the heels, and some have that brand-new shoe look, and sometimes it's something that people did a long time ago that makes their burg so nice.

Bankers, as you know, have a way with money (some of them get away with a lot of it!) and back in the depths of the Great Depression in America, down in Quincy, Florida, Pat Munroe was the banker who noticed that even when people were down to their last nickel, they would spend that five cents on an ice-cold bottle of Coca-Cola.

And even though they were selling millions of bottles of nickel Cokes, they weren't taking in millions of dollars, and Coca-Cola stock was priced rather low - around $19 a share.  Munroe wanted in, and bought himself a pile of shares, and encouraged friends and customers to do the same. 

Quincy is a farm town, but because dividends from those stock purchases kept coming in even when farm income didn't, the town was prosperous.

Even when crops failed, stock payoffs didn't, over the years.

Here's the part where we get to say "if only!" just like those who turned down the chance to buy oceanfront acreage just before everybody and his brother bought a condo down there...

The townspeople, the descendants of those who bought those Coke stocks, own 7.5 million shares valued at $375 million. Adjusted for splits, the stock cost them 2 cents a share.

The stock went public, and has split 10 times. $40 worth, purchased in 1919, is now 4,608 shares worth about $220,000.

As a result, the town is well off, with a fancied-up downtown, a restored theatre and church, and the ability to raise $150,000 to restore that theatre by making just a couple of phone calls to some of the 25 "Coke millionaires" who are so happy that their parents and grandparents invested wisely way back when.

It's said that when the tobacco business started to decline because people aren't smoking so much, the town saw unemployment soar to 38% for a time, and still, the locals took care of the college tuition and kiddie Christmas gifts for those out of work until they got back up.

Some locals were guilty of making bad deals. There were those who traded a few shares of stock for new Cadillacs, only to realize later they essentially paid half a million bucks for a new ride.

SunTrust Banks Inc., an Atlanta firm, took $110,000 worth of the stock in lieu of cash as payment for services rendered in taking the company public. Now, that stake comes to 48,266,496 shares. That's 2 percent of all Coke's stock, and it's valued at more than $2.4 billion.

What's even harder than finding an honest man on a golf course? Finding a Pepsi machine in Quincy, Florida.