Aug. 21--Roy Gurvey built Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer into a strong brand in the era before giants like Coke and Pepsi came to dominate the bottling and marketing of soft drinks.
"He was able to build these personal relationships with the independent bottlers," said his son Scott. "It was basically a lot of hard work in the days when there were a lot of independent soft drink flavors and independent bottling plants."
Gurvey, 92, died of heart failure Aug. 12 at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, Calif., his son said. He and his wife, Natalie, lived for many years in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood before moving to California in 2006, the year she died.
Gurvey was born in New York, where his father, a Chicago lawyer, was trying to establish a practice. But the family soon moved back to Chicago, and Gurvey grew up here.
He attended Roosevelt High School on the Northwest Side before going on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But he left school in his second year to join the Army during World War II.
After serving stateside, much of the time in Washington, D.C., he returned to Chicago at war's end. In 1946, he and the former Natalie Raffel married, and he went to work in her father's tobacco business.
After that business folded in the early 1950s, Gurvey was hired as sales manager for Chicago-based Dad's, run then by members of the Klapman and Berns families that founded it in the late 1930s.
Scott Gurvey described Dad's as a regional powerhouse when his father became sales manager. For many years, the company made its products in a turreted brick factory building dominated by a large Dad's sign alongside the Kennedy Expressway on North Talman Avenue, north of Diversey Avenue.
Gurvey helped build the company into a national and international brand, eventually pushing sales to 12 million cases a year. That put the company right behind A W in the root beer category, but Gurvey liked to point out that A W sold directly from roadside stands, while all of Dad's sales came from sales of bottled and canned drinks.
Gurvey was a strong proponent of what he called the franchise system, his son said. Dad's and similar smaller brands could grant franchises to independent bottlers to package and distribute their products in an exclusive territory.
In 1971, Dad's was bought by what later became IC Industries, a holding company that grew out of the Illinois Central Railroad, and Gurvey became president and CEO of Dad's. In 1973, IC added another soft drink to the Dad's lineup, buying lemon-lime soft drink Bubble Up.
A 1987 Tribune story reported IC's sale of Dad's to Monarch. The story noted that before buying Dad's, IC had acquired Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers and said Dad's had "never quite escaped the shadow of the (larger) bottling operations." It was reported at the time of the sale that Dad's and Bubble Up together had about 0.5 percent of the soft drink market.
Gurvey stayed with the company until 1988, when a Tribune story said he would step down to take on a consulting role.
"My father got out at the end of the era," Scott Gurvey said, as the major brands continued to dominate bottling operations and space on retailers' shelves.
In 2007, Hedinger Brands bought Dad's, along with other brands, including Bubble Up, and licensed the products to The Dad's Root Beer Company, now headquartered in Jasper, Ind.
In retirement, Gurvey and his wife were enthusiastic supporters of Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra summer season at the Ravinia Festival, his son said.
Survivors include another son, Mark; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Services were held.
Graydon Megan is a freelance reporter.
