Easy Go

I feel bad for John Simmons Roberts. Whatever good qualities he may have had, he is known in our family simply as the guy who let a fortune slip away.

John Simmons Roberts

I don't have many details about Roberts, my great-great-grandfather. Born in 1848 in Georgia, at some point he made his way to Texas, where he spent the rest of his life.

He was a pharmacist and, in the early 1900s, owned three drug stores in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. Like many drug stores of the time, his had soda fountains and sold Coca-Cola. When the soft-drink company went public, according to family legend, Roberts bought 100 shares of the original stock. Within a few months, he decided he didn't like the taste of "The Real Thing" and had it pulled from his stores. He also sold the stock, at a loss. He died in 1926 in Lyford, Texas.

As for what Roberts did or didn't do, I only have the story as told by my uncle, Mackley McCurdy, who himself passed away in 2008. But I have found enough details about Coca-Cola stock to play an interesting game of what if. The initial public offering (IPO) took place in 1919, with an opening price of $40 per share. If Roberts really did buy 100 shares, he must have been a wealthy man--that's $4,000. For perspective, $40 in 1919 would be the equivalent of $569 in 2015, so that $4,000 investment would have been like spending $56,900 today.

But let's say he only bought one share--what would that have meant for the family fortunes? In 2012, the website DailyFinance.com ran an article stating that one share of original Coke stock would, 93 years later, be worth $9.8 million. Quite a return for anyone lucky--or prescient--enough to hold on to it.

Coca-Cola ad from 1921; full credit below.

Which is not without precedent. In fact, according to the Motley Fool, dozens of Coke millionaires inhabit the town of Quincy, Florida, thanks to the advice of a banker who told his neighbors to buy, buy, buy back in 1919. Lucky for them, they did. Several families in Quincy reportedly still hold hundreds of millions worth of Coke stock.

Another long-term stockholder was SunTrust Banks, which helped Coca-Cola with the IPO in 1919. In return, SunTrust nabbed a few shares for itself. In 2012, Forbes reported that SunTrust was selling its stock--all 60 million shares of it--for $1.9 billion.

To be fair to my great-great-grandfather, picking stocks is hard. Holding on to them is risky. Making millions from them is rare. And if you don't like the product, maybe that's reason enough to sell your stock in a company.

Or maybe playing the market just made him nervous. It's true that the stock took a nosedive after the IPO; within a few months, problems in the sugar industry knocked the price from $40/share down to less than $20/share.

But it's still fun to imagine what could have been.

I hope to learn more about John Simmons Roberts. I want to believe there's more to him than one bad business decision. But I would also like to have a time machine, so I could go back to when he sold his shares and tell him, "Keep just one."

More:

• DailyFinance.com article about the price of Coke stock: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/08/14/coca-cola-stock-share-worth-millions/
• Motley Fool article about Quincy, Florida: http://www.fool.com.au/2013/06/25/the-town-of-coke-millionaires-why-long-term-investing-works/#
• Forbes article about SunTrust: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2012/09/07/suntrust-dumps-93-year-old-stake-in-coca-cola-collects-a-tidy-two-million-percent-return/
• Coca-Cola ad from The Evening World. (New York, N.Y.), 07 June 1921. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/1921-06-07/ed-1/seq-17/