Eulogy for Gatorade Inventor Robert Cade - December 6, 2007
Greetings and welcome!
I know a lot of people have been swapping stories about Dr. Robert Cade since he left us last Tuesday. I have a few to tell as well.
But, first, I want to extend regrets on behalf of a couple of men who cannot be present today. Bruce Kone, dean of the College of Medicine, and Rick Johnson, Dr. Cade's personal physician and close friend, are both unavoidably out of town. I am pleased to say that Dr. Ed Block, chairman of the department of medicine, will give a tribute, as well as Dr. and Mary Cade's daughter, Phoebe Miles.
I want to begin with one of Dr. Cade's own stories, told in an oral history he gave to the late UF historian Sam Proctor. Longtime Gainesville residents may remember that, about four decades ago, public school teachers walked off the job. Dr. Cade supported the teachers, but he disagreed with the strike because he felt the teachers should uphold their contract.
So, rather than report to Shands for his work as Gainesville's leading kidney specialist, Dr. Cade went over to Terwilliger Elementary School. There, he spent his morning teaching elementary students. When the kids went home for the day at 2 p.m., Dr. Cade put down his chalk and eraser and went back to the hospital to make his rounds.
This was the man the world knows as the inventor of Gatorade. He steadfastly pursued his own road, confounding all doubters. More than once, colleagues called his ideas "quirky." But, with Dr. Cade, that word translated as brilliance.
Dr. Cade's contributions cannot be overstated. In his leadership of the team of four researchers who, in 1965, invented Gatorade, he created the sports drink industry, while also coming up with a therapeutic beverage. Gatorade has earned the University of Florida more than $150 million in royalties. It also put this university on the map as a national research institution.
But, this was not the work of a coldly methodical scientist bent over his laboratory equipment. Dr. Cade was a Renaissance Man, a physician, a crack scientist, and a creative thinker who followed his own path. All were apparent early on.
He loved history and knew so much of it by high school, boredom in class led him to try to pass by just one point. He ran the marathon, the real one in Greece, from Marathon to Athens while he was touring the world aboard a Navy destroyer. Dr. Cade was an avid sports fan who chose St. Louis for his medical internship for one reason – so he could see the Cardinals play. He played the violin from childhood. He once ran for the Alachua County school board on a platform of integration. With his son, Stephen, he restored an old Volkswagen bug, using a Chilton's repair manual. When it ran, he said, and I quote, "It was a bigger thrill than when we did our first kidney transplant."
When Dr. Cade was on a postgraduate fellowship at Cornell Medical School in Manhattan, he and his wife, Mary, drove a 1957 Studebaker. He said he liked that car because it belched out clouds of oil smoke, frustrating New York's tailgaters. You can see that car, one of 61 in Dr. Cade's collection, outside University Auditorium today.
So, Dr. Cade was a sports fan, a devout Lutheran, a musician, an amateur mechanic and – did I mention? – a poetry buff who turned a few verses of his own.
But, here's what really counts: He had a tinkerer's curiosity and child's sense of wonder.
Early in his career as chief of renal medicine at UF's medical college, workers were moving rats into the animal quarters above his lab when they accidentally broke a crate. The rats took off everywhere. So, Dr. Cade promptly invented a live trap with doors that opened in, but not out. That trap caught all the escapees.
He invented a high protein popsicle, the Ten Plus Bar, to provide nutrition with the sweets. That popsicle evolved into something called Gator Go!, a high-protein milk drink. Dr. Cade came up with a low alcohol beer, Hop N' Gator, which was supposed to prevent hangovers. He crafted a hydraulic football helmet that protected players from concussions.
A few of Dr. Cade's inventions seem on the whimsical side. That is not beside the point. It is the point! He never strived to be important. He simply followed his curiosity into whatever nooks or crannies it led him.
So, when a volunteer football coach named Dwayne Douglass asked why Gator football players didn't urinate during games, Dr. Cade was not going to brush off the question. With Jim Free, Dana Shires and Alex DeQuesada, he set about teasing out the mystery. It's a rich story after that, but the short version is that Dr. Cade and his colleagues came up with a drink to keep athletes healthy and energized. The Gators started using their concoction in all their games, and by 1966 it had made headlines around the world.
The University of Georgia quickly came out with "Bulldog Punch." Florida State, if you can believe it, weighed in with "Seminole-ade."
But, there was really no stopping what Jim Free named "Gatorade." More than four decades later, the sports and energy drink industry is worth $19 billion and dominated by Gatorade.
Before I close, I want to say a word about Dr. Cade and the university.
Our relationship was strained in the early years. But what matters today is not that conflict, but the fact that we resolved it, to both of our benefits. From our experience with Gatorade, we learned a lot about the right ways to support our faculty in nurturing their inventions. Dr. Cade, for his part, maintained an active research career here until near the end of his life. It is thanks to his generosity that we were able to create an endowed chair, the Cade Professor of Physiology. We are deeply thankful for all Dr. Cade has done for the University of Florida.
At the request of the Cade family, I want to close with some brief words penned for this memorial by Neil Amdur, a former sports editor of the New York Times. It was Amdur who, as a reporter for The Miami Herald, wrote the first international news story about Gatorade 41 years ago. Writes Mr. Amdur...
"As a writer, I have spent a lifetime stringing words together into stories and sometimes editing the thoughts of others. But, the words don't fall into perfect order when trying to define a man like Dr. Robert Cade.
The simplest explanation might be that he was a Renaissance Man, a quiet visionary who managed to push all the right buttons in pursuit of happiness. How else to explain someone who could be so generous on so many different levels?
Ray Graves, the former head football coach at the University of Florida, told me the other day that Dr. Cade "was doing what God intended for him to do but didn't brag about it." Equally as important, I would say, is that Dr. Cade was "true to himself," which is really the measure of a person.
He served on so many levels–as a father, doctor, inventor, care giver–that the joy he got out of collecting Studebaker cars seems almost like a small gift to himself. What always struck me about Robert Cade was his self-effacing nature. So soft-spoken that I could barely hear him on the telephone. So sincere that you could feel his integrity. Yet woe to those who crossed him, especially when he knew he was right or felt he was being taken advantage of because of his beliefs.
I have always felt the true measure of a person's greatness–whether on a football field, in a classroom, or in the operating room–is whether they have enriched the world by their presence. Are we better off because of their contributions? Did they leave their business or profession or, in a cosmic sense, the world, better than it was before they served?
Dr. Robert Cade is one of my heroes. He enriched us with his gifts. He gave us his intelligence and grace. But, just as important, he gave us his humanity, his heart AND his soul. His legacy will live beyond this day. Among family, friends, and his dearly beloved university, and the countless millions whose lives he has touched in ways they may not even realize now. For that, we should be forever grateful."
Bernie Machen