John T. Lupton II (July 23, 1926 – May 16, 2010) was an American heir to a Coca-Cola bottling fortune, businessman and philanthropist.[2][3][4][5][6][7]
In 1946, he worked as a loader of the bottle-washing machine at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Macon, Georgia.[1][4][6] He worked for Dixie Yarns for a couple of years, but returned to the family business when his father fell ill in 1956.[5] He sat on the Board of Directors of Coca-Cola from 1956 to 1982.[1][4][6] 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.[1][4][6] In 1986, he sold the bottling company to Coca-Cola Enterprises for US$1.4 billion.[2][4] He was one of the candidates to become the first Chairman of Coca-Cola Enterprises, but was turned down.[4]
A man who rarely gave interviews to the press, Lupton spoke with reporter Bill Dedman of The Chattanooga Times in 1986 about how he was a different kind of community philanthropist than his father, sponsoring the open community planning process then called Chattanooga Venture. "I've never had any skepticism about the community, about the river, or about the riverfront project. ... The biggest problem that Chattanooga has ever had, they've all buttoned it up at night and went home to their little bitty conclaves and nobody communicated with anybody--including him [he points at his father's photograph] and his cohorts. They wanted to keep this place a secret. They didn't want anybody knowing about what a nice little deal they had here."[10]
He was a member of the Mountain City Club, an invitation-only private club in Chattanooga.[6] After suffering from a debilitating stroke, he died in 2010.[5] His will included real estate in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida and at least $20 million in cash.[7]