Tuesday afternoon, in a warehouse in Fayette, Alabama, Kimberly Bowling, a 45-year-old mother of three, Auburn University graduate and business owner, maneuvered a pallet jack up the ramp of a semi-trailer and pushed it under a listing tower of glass jars. The jars, $20,000 worth of them, had just arrived by truck from Jonesboro, Arkansas.
Half an hour later, the jars unloaded, Bowling; her business partner, John Blevins; her 82-year-old father, Willard Tyner; and two older women, Annie Wright and Martha Kimbrell began readying for what has become for her a twice-a-week ritual: filling jars with Golden Eagle Syrup.
Several months ago I happened upon the company’s headquarters and bottling plant when working on a travel piece for Catfish Alley. The yellow and blue logo painted on the side of a white brick building evoked memories of a distant time and place: Joe Rumore and the WVOK Shower of Stars.
Rumore was a wildly popular disc jockey for WVOK, a 50,000 watt AM radio station in Birmingham, who was forever talking about “good ole Golden Eagle Sopping Syrup.” Throughout the 1960s, WVOK sponsored the Shower of Stars, a several-times-a-year musical showcase with a line-up that sounded more like a rock festival that a concert in an auditorium.
A May 7, 1965, SoS featured The Rolling Stones, The Righteous Brothers, The Beach Boys, Marty Robbins, The Mexican Lads, Cannibal & the Headhunters, Skeeter Davis, Archie Campbell, Del Reeves and Sonny James.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, The Who, Herman’s Hermits, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Question Mark and the Mysterians, Jan and Dean, Patsy Cline all played the Shower of Stars.
The concerts attracted carloads of raucous teens, many of whom were driven by and stayed in motels with their parents.
Rumore was friends with Victor and Lucy Patterson, founders of Golden Eagle Syrup; he ate Sunday lunch with them sometimes, says Bowling. An autographed 8×10 publicity shot of the d.j. hangs in the lobby of the company.
According to company lore, the table syrups available in the 20s upset Victor Patterson’s stomach, so he began experimenting, trying to come up with a milder concoction. He hit upon a combination of cane sugar, corn syrup, honey and molasses that suited him, and he and his wife started cooking and canning the syrup in their kitchen.
By 1944, the Pattersons’ syrup enterprise had outgrown the add-on to their house, and they purchased a brick building that occupies half a block in downtown Fayette that had been a stable and a grocery warehouse.
Since then “every single jar has been made in this building, stored in this building and shipped from this building,” said Bowling. The syrup — the “Pride of Alabama,” as it is called — is the company’s only product. It’s sold in Piggly Wigglys, Krogers and Walmarts across the Southeast.
Golden Eagle had been through a succession of owners when in 2011 Bowling’s husband, Temple, and Blevins, both of whom worked for the same Birmingham construction company, decided to buy the company.
“It was like buying a little bit of Alabama history,” Blevins said.
When Kimberly’s husband asked her if she thought buying the company was a good idea, the 39-year-old stay-at-home mom said, “sure.”
“I had no idea he was about to hand me the keys,” she says five years later. “I knew how to make Valentine cupcakes and wash dirty football uniforms. I knew nothing about running a syrup plant.”
From the looks of it, she now knows plenty, with unloading trucks, managing a production line and giving tours.
“I am quality control,” she says. “For five years I’ve tasted a little of every batch.”
“They do leave the recipe with you when you buy the company,” she said.
That recipe is mixed in a heated vat, transferred to a cooling tank, from which warm syrup supplies a single conveyor of jars. The company “cooks” on Tuesdays and Thursdays, about 500 gallons each day.
On this Tuesday afternoon a crew of five is filling 40-ounce jars. Kimbrell blows out each of the jars; Wright monitors the “bottling” process; Tyner makes sure jar lids go on properly while Blevins oversees the labeling. Bowling, whose job is the most physically demanding, fills cardboard boxes with six jars of syrup, daubs glue on the box flaps and then stacks the boxes on a pallet. The work is monotonous and unrelenting.
When I get ready to go Bowling walks me to the lobby of the building — she’s been relieved by her teenage son. “Do you wear T-shirts,” she asks. “Do you want a T-shirt?”
Not one to refuse a bit of Alabama history, I say, “Sure.”
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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