soft drink zealots kick off summer lecture series in Wolfeboro

It’s not hard to find the Wright Museum in Wolfeboro. It’s the only building on Central Avenue that has a World War II tank crashing through its brick façade.

But visitors last Tuesday had the advantage of an extra landmark to help them find the World War II museum. Parked outside the building on June 24 was a 1928 LaSalle Chassis with a white horse mounted on it and a Moxie insignia emblazoned on its side. 

“We’re old enough, we remember when those things were driving around,” said one man as he admired the automobile, recalling the days when “Moxiemobiles” rolled along New England streets to advertise the quirky soda.

A stack of dozens of 6-ounce Moxie cans greeted visitors as they entered the museum that evening. Beside that, a table manned by the New England Moxie Congress displayed vintage Moxie memorabilia, including T-shirts, aprons, bumper stickers and pictures of old-time Red Sox slugger Ted Williams endorsing the product.

An enthusiastic group of Moxie zealots filled the museum’s lobby, many sporting bright orange Moxie T-shirts. They had come to catch the Wright Museum’s first event in this year’s Tuesday night Summer Lecture Series, which was titled, “The Story of Moxie: How Moxie Helped Win World War II.”

The crowd, filling every available seat and standing in the aisles, appeared to consist mainly of old people and their parents. Many of these people grew up when Moxie was in its heyday, and the soft drink’s shifting marketing campaigns echoed the times they lived through.

When World War II began, for example, Moxie toted the slogan, “What this country needs is plenty of Moxie.” In 1943, as the war raged on, the slogan changed to, “It’s Moxie for me in ’43.” Then, when the war was over and the nation was celebrating, the slogan temporarily became, “Brace up with Moxie.”

But what is Moxie? Only a handful of privileged insiders really know. Among the soft drink’s present day ingredients are carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and/or sugar, caramel color, sodium benzoate, caffeine and citric acid. But the key ingredient that gives Moxie its distinctive (and, to some, repugnant) flavor is gentian root. The root’s bitter-sweet extract is difficult to describe, but you know it when you taste it.

“It’s in the root beer family, but with a special zing to it,” said Merrill Lewis, president of the New England Moxie Congress.

Established in 1991, the Congress is a band of Moxie enthusiasts who collect memorabilia, promote the drink’s availability and get together for Moxie-related shenanigans. “For lack of a better term, it’s a fan club of Moxie,” Lewis said.

Lewis detailed the history of Moxie with an accompanying slideshow that was like a walk through American history. Invented by Dr. Augustin Thompson, a Civil War veteran and “homeopathic surgeon” from Union, Maine, Moxie began as a medicinal elixir that came in liquid and lozenge form. In 1876, it was served by spoon as a syrup. Then, in the mid-1880s, it was carbonated and bottled as Moxie Nerve Food.

Labels on the soft drink’s early version boasted that it “contains not a drop of medicine, poison, stimulant or alcohol.” (That’s right, not a single drop of poison.) But the beverage was still touted mainly for its supposed medicinal qualities, which included recovery from “brain and nervous exhaustion, loss of manhood, imbecility,” and other common ailments of the time. The company claimed that Moxie came from a plant accidentally discovered by a hero named Lt. Moxie. 

The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act put a bit of a damper on Moxie’s marketing scheme, forbidding companies from making false claims of medicinal properties in their products. In response, Moxie dropped “Nerve Food” from its name and moved its headquarters from Lowell, Mass., to Boston, now advertising itself as a great drink for hot weather.

In the 1920s, Moxie actually outsold its top rival of the time—Coca-Cola. “They used to be very fierce competitors,” Lewis said.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Moxie engaged in a variety of unique marketing tactics, most of them spearheaded by a man named Frank Archer. Archer created the first Moxiemobile around 1916, consisting of an automobile with a horse mounted to the back. The driver would steer the vehicle while seated atop the fake horse, drawing the bemused attention of passersby. (The vehicle that was parked at the Wright Museum that day is the last remaining original of the two dozen or so that were created.)

Archer was also the brains behind the “Moxie Boy,” a logo that depicted a young man with a somber, brooding face, pointing directly at the consumer. Moxie Boy changed over the years, looking more like Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, but a smaller and subtler image of him still adorns Moxie cans.

Yet another piece of Archer genius was a gigantic, 38-foot model of a Moxie bottle, which was carted around to food fairs and carnivals. The bottle came to Manchester’s Pine Island Park in 1910 and remained there for 10 years before being relocated and attached to the back of a nearby cottage. There it remained until 1999, when members of the New England Moxie Congress carefully dismantled it and stored it away. Today, the disassembled Moxie bottle is in a guy’s garage in Bristol, Maine. 

Moxie sales began to decline in the 1940s. Coca-Cola was cheaper, and a switch to a sweeter flavor in the late ’40s only riled Moxie’s remaining devotees. But, with the help of Ted Williams’ endorsement and a marketing collaboration with Mad magazine, Moxie began to make a comeback, switching its slogan to “Mad about Moxie.” Moxie executives made deals with movie stars and even U.S. presidents to endorse their product, and sales climbed by 10 percent.

But the independent company sold out in the 1960s, and subsequent alterations to the Moxie recipe made for rocky times. By the late ’80s, Moxie was almost impossible to find on supermarket shelves. But some zealous Moxie fans never gave up hope. On March 22, 2007, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England purchased the trademark. (CCNNE is owned by Kirin Beer, of Japan.) With the boost in marketing and distribution, sales have increased by more than 20 percent in the last year.

There are now several books about Moxie, including “The Moxie Encyclopedia,” by Dave Bowers; “The Book of Moxie,” by Frank Potter; and “Moxietown,” by Jim Baumer. NEMC holds an annual Moxie meeting in Kennebunk, Maine, and there is an annual parade in Lisbon, Maine (Saturday, July 12, this year). NEMC also hosts occasional Moxie clam bakes.

“Nothing goes better with lobsters and clams than ice cold Moxie,” Lewis said.

Based on the crowd in Wolfeboro, the recent Moxie resurgence appears to be real. “This has been one of the best turnouts that we’ve ever had,” said Wright Museum executive director Mark Foynes.

But how, exactly, did Moxie help win World War II, as Lewis claimed? Although the assertion drew some dubious snickers from the audience, Lewis insists that the finger-pointing depiction of Uncle Sam on U.S. military recruiting posters was modeled after none other than Moxie Boy.

For more on the New England Moxie Congress, visit www.moxiecongress.org. For other events in the Wright Museum’s Summer Lecture Series, go to www.wrightmuseum.org.