In his account, Hull said, "The intention of the new stockholders was to market Tip as best they could, and to add other flavors until a full line of flavors could be offered for sale."

Hull went on to say that Bill Jones then developed a lemon-lime drink somewhat similar to 7-Up, and set about selling it. "Most of his customers were Pepsi-Cola bottlers, as were all of his original stockholders," Hull wrote, adding that several of these bottlers did sell the lemon-lime type Mountain Dew with a moderate degree of success.  Hull stated that this second Mountain Dew soon became the leading product manufactured by the Tip Corp.

Slagle recalled and Hull wrote that the success of the second Mountain Dew was short-lived. In no time at all the Pepsi-Cola Co. had come out with a lemon-lime drink called Teem.  Backed by an advertising campaign with national coverage, it wasn't long before the Pepsi bottlers were abandoning the second Mountain Dew to take on the Teem franchise which prohibited them from bottling any other lemon-lime drink.

The fortunes of the Tip Corp. ebbed and sunk to a new low, Hull wrote.

"At the time, Daddy was advised that the best thing to do would be to file corporation bankruptcy, reorganize and start over again," Francis Alice said, "but Daddy did not want to do this because he knew a lot of people would be out of a job and that they would be left holding the bag. Daddy contacted those the Tip Corp. owed money and a long-term payment plan was developed."

Francis Alice also recalled that her daddy put a lot of what little income he earned into paying off the Tip Corp. debts.  "My mother worked at Flossie Richardson's Florist because she had to, basically, because Daddy made the decision to pay back the debts of the Tip Corp. We lived on a tight shoestring budget for years," she said. She also recalled the first formula her father came up with that was marketed as Mountain Dew and that it had ended up not a good seller.  "It was a great little drink," she said, "and Daddy had some ideas about what had gone wrong."

Mary Linda, the oldest Jones daughter, remembers these years.  "I used to think Daddy was a chemist in disguise," she said. "The upstairs in the Tip building was like a little lab with beakers and scales and Dad was always ordering all this stuff.  He would tell me that he was going to invent a drink that would be straight out of the berry patch. He was constantly coming up with some new flavor that he wanted to try out on the family." Even during the lean years when her mother and father were still struggling, Mary Linda said, her father was always doing something to help others who were less fortunate. "At Christmas time he would gather up boxes and boxes of toys and clothing and carry them to families where there would have been no presents. He did this quietly and without any thought of seeking recognition."

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These were also the years that Henry Thompson remembers that Bill Jones would discourage his wife, Alice, from purchasing some item she thought she absolutely had to have by reminding her, "Alice, we don't have to keep up with the Jones' - we are the Jones'."

"Every day Dad would line my grandmother and me up at the kitchen counter which he had filled with little teeny paper cups that would be marked with numbers and we would have to taste test the drinks in those cups," Francis Alice said. "We would tell Daddy which of the soft drinks we liked best.  Some of those cups would be filled with flavors offered by the competition, some with flavors sold by the Tip Corp., and some with the newest flavor that Dad was working on and only he knew by the codes on the cups which was which.  When the drink that Grandmother and I picked was not the flavor he was working on at the time, Daddy would go back and work on his formula some more."

Mary Linda said that her father wanted to come up with a refreshing drink that would provide a pickup during the energy lull that occurs around 2:30 in the afternoon for most people.  "Daddy said he wanted to make people feel good, he wanted to give them a lift.  So he used sugar and he used caffeine."

Slagle recalls one of Jones' earlier mixtures that had so much caffeine in it that when bottled the caffeine crystallized forming what looked like slivers of ice or glass.  "Of course," Slagle added, "Bill Jones made some adjustments and he came up with a number of mixtures before he concocted the syrup that became today's Mountain Dew."

Hull told the story this way. Jones, he said, was busy compounding other flavors to offer bottlers. "One of these," he added "was a drink similar to Sun Drop, a trade-marked beverage then owned by Charles F. Lazier Co. of St. Louis. Although this drink resembled the lemon-lime drinks somewhat, it contained enough orange juice to remove it from the lemon-lime classifications, and thereby allowed bottlers to produce it even though they had franchises that prohibited the bottling of another lemon-lime drink."

Still talking to Herman Minges, John Sauls wrote in his "Follow the Clues to Mountain Dew" story, that Jones started out with a lemon-lime base, the same base used by a number of successful soft drinks, but that he added goodly quantities of orange juice and sugar "among other things."

Jones himself stated during one interview that after he had developed what he considered to be a good formula that he spent approximately three years in fine-tuning that formula.

Wythe Hull recalled that Jones used a very low carbonation rate for his latest drink but upped the sugar content and that he took precautions to protect his invention. At the Tip building, the ingredients were numbered and coded so that the mixers knew how much of each to add, but, even they did not know the name of the ingredients they were using.  After much testing, tasting and sampling, Hull wrote, Jones was ready to offer the drink to the public.

In a personal interview, Jones told Sauls that it was convenient to have Wythe Hull's old Pepsi plant located half a block down the street from the Tip Corp. which had no bottling facilities. When he wanted to try out a new flavor, Jones told Sauls, he would go down to Wythe Hull's plant, get the men to shut down the production line, and run off a few cases of his latest experimental drink.

Jones also told Sauls during the interview that Hull eventually got a little testy about having his production lines interrupted so often.  Jones said in this interview that he developed the habit of watching out his window at Tip for Hull to leave his plant and drive away.  He would then stroll down to the Marion Bottling Co. Inc. facilities, Jones said, run off some drinks and share his latest formula with plant employees.

Slagle recalled that Alice and Bill Jones were ordinary, down-to-earth people; they rented a little brick house just east of the jail," he said. "They didn't always live in Atkins Woodland."

Slagle also stated that Bill Jones took his latest formula down to Wythe Hull's Pepsi plant on Main Street where there was one line capable of mixing the extract with carbonated water at high speed and another line that mixed at a lower speed. "He used the low carbonation line for his final mix," Slagle said, and then he came back out to the office with marked cups."

Carol Hicks, an employee of Marion Bottling at th etime, recalled recently that the people who worked there knew Bill Jones well.  "He stopped in often," she said.

This is how it happened that the lines at the old Marion Bottling Co. plant were the first to bottle the new Mountain Dew formula that has been a world-wide best seller for 30 years.  Before Bill Jones could have his new drink taste-tested, he had to have several cases bottled.  Once a new formula had been run, Jones immediately got out his coded cups and had the employees of the Marion Bottling Co. perform the first taste-test.  If the new formula made it through the first sampling, the drink went home for Alice and the girls to try.

Bill then took his testing procedures to the employees at Tip, and Alice took bottles of the new formula to Flossie Richardson's Florist where the drink was tried out on her fellow employees there.  The small coded cups became a routine here, also.  If the new formula was the drink of choice at Tip and Flossie's, Bill Jones began trying it on his friends and other bottlers.  According to Sauls, Jones took his newest formula through 15 or 16 such tests.  In the meantime, Jones would be sending variations of the drink he was working on down to Herman and Charles Minges in North Carolina for their comments.

Henry Thomson was working at the time at Florence Richardson's Florist with Bill's wife, Alice.  According to Thompson, it was shortly after the first taste test at the Pepsi and Tip buildings that Alice brought in a gallon jug of Bill's new drink for her coworkers to try. The same as her husband, Thompson said, Alice used coded paper cups on her coworkers. When the vote was in, it was Bill's new formula that won the raves, he said.

"It was a good drink and it tasted much the same as it does now," Thompson said.  "While I may not have been the very first to give his stamp of approval to this third version of Mountain Dew," he added, I was certainly among the first few."