John T. Lupton II
| John T. Lupton II | |
|---|---|
| Born |
July 23, 1926 Chattanooga, Tennessee |
| Died | May 16, 2010 (aged 83) Lookout Mountain, Tennessee |
John T. Lupton II, a.k.a. Jack Lupton, (1926-2010) was an American heir to a Coca-Cola bottling fortune, businessman and philanthropist.
His grandfather was John Thomas Lupton, founder of the Dixie Coca-Cola Bottling Company Plant, later known as the JTL Corporation, Coca-Cola's largest bottler. His father, Thomas Cartter Lupton, was the founder of the Lyndhurst Foundation. He had a brother, Joe Henderson, and a sister, Elizabeth Lupton Davenport. He was born on July 23, 1926, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and attended the Baylor School, where he was captain of the swimming team as well as a letterman in varsity football, basketball and baseball. He served in the United States Navy during the Second World War and spent a year in the Pacific Ocean as a radioman. He enrolled at the University of North Carolina, where he majored in business administration.
In 1946, he worked as a loader of the bottle-washing machine at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Macon, Georgia. He worked for Dixie Yarns for a couple of years, but returned to the family business when his father fell ill in 1956. He sat on the Board of Directors of Coca-Cola from 1956 to 1982. When his father died in 1977, he inherited the family business, JTL Corp., and quadrupled the business by acquiring bottlers in Florida, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere. In 1986, he sold the bottling company to Coca-Cola Enterprises for US$1.4 billion. He was one of the candidates to become the first Chairman of Coca-Cola Enterprises, but was turned down.
...
Wikipedia