Today's Looking Back can be found here.

From the May 9, 1985 News-Miner:

Coke pops open new formula

ATLANTA (AP)—Coca-Cola Co. officials returned Wednesday to the area where the first Coke was sold exactly 99 years ago for a home-town introduction of the new formula they hope will keep the soft drink atop the industry.

Thousands of Atlantans emptied out of downtown office buildings for the celebration, which included free samples of the "new taste of Coke," performances by the Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus, a fireworks display and red and white balloons.

Protesters also were present, saying they preferred the original formula.

"No product has ever been as much a part of the fiber of a city than Coke has been with Atlanta," Bill Hoffman, president of the Atlanta Coca-Cola Bottling Co., told the crowd.

The celebration was held in Atlanta's Central City Park, which had been renamed just two days earlier in honor of Robert W. Woodruff, the late Coca-Cola chairman credited with the aggressive marketing that made the soft drink an international product.

Just one block away from the park, the first Coke was sold May 8, 1886, at what then was Jacob's Pharmacy. The formula, which remained the same until the new formula was introduced April 24 in New York, was developed by Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton.

While Coke officials invoked the company's history in kicking off its new formula, loyalists to the old Coke formula turned to the same history for slogans to protest the change.

"Dr. Pemberton, where are you when we need you?" read a sign carried by Posty Duncan of Atlanta. On the flip side of her sign was the message, "Our children will never know refreshment," a reference to the earliest Coke advertisements that billed the drink as "delicious and refreshing."

"I just don't like it at all," Duncan said. "To me, it tastes like a Diet Pepsi. It has a metallic aftertaste."

Duncan was one of more than a dozen sign-toting loyalists to the original formula who turned out.

One woman, who refused to give her name but identified herself as the president of the Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing, carried a sign which said: "Forgive them, Mr. Woodruff. They know not what they do."

The "new taste of Coke," however, was advertised on banners strung from office towers and pulled behind airplanes, on flags flapping from every utility pole in sight, on 75,000 souvenir bottons passed out to the crowd, on a blimp and on a car and robot.