7-Up vs. Coke, Part 1: From dot-com darling to disaster, the spectacular flameout of Andrew Gladney. Heir to a fortune, Andrew Gladney went from John Burroughs to Yale and came home to found Savvis Inc. Then he squandered it all.

Told such a scenario would likely be impossible to arrange, Gladney promises to call the paper within the week and conduct an interview by telephone. "Will it be a cover article?" he asks, his tone brightening. "Oh boy, I hope not. But if it is, at least get a picture from my wife!"

In 1921, St. Louisans C.L. Grigg, Edmund Ridgway and Franklin Gladney incorporated the Howdy Corporation, named for the crowd-pleasing soda Howdy Orange, which Grigg had created in 1920. It was a twilight career for all three men: The mixologist Grigg was a longtime advertising man, Ridgway was a financier and Gladney a preeminent patent lawyer who'd argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and penned articles for the Saturday Evening Post.

Carbonated beverages were commonplace by then, and the 52-year-old Grigg was looking for something that could separate his company from the pack. In those days soda makers trumpeted their products as feel-good formulas — Coca-Cola was commonly known to contain traces of the stimulant cocaine. Grigg envisioned a lemon-lime drink spiked with lithium citrate (a chemical touted at the time as a mild antidepressant) that could be marketed as a hangover cure. "Takes the 'ouch' out of grouch," the advertising would eventually boast.

Two days before the stock market crashed in October 1929, Howdy rolled out its newfangled product, Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Clunky moniker notwithstanding, the drink found a thirsty niche, and not long afterward the company rechristened the beverage 7-Up. The origins of the new name are unknown, but the product proved so successful that Howdy reincorporated in 1936 as the Seven-Up Company, and by the 1940s, 7-Up was the third best-selling soft drink in the world.

Born on a farm in Auburn, about 25 miles north of Wentzville, Franklin Gladney was a self-made man in the purest sense. He went to high school in his own home, studying for state exams in the hope of earning a scholarship to the University of Missouri. Later, while working toward a law degree at Columbia University in New York, he toiled weekends as a trolley conductor on Coney Island. He didn't retire until 1960, when he was 83, and he died a year later a very wealthy man. Family legend has it that Gladney even had the foresight to leave behind a surprise: 1 million dollars in cash, plus some securities, tucked in a safe-deposit box to cover the estate tax tab.

Franklin Gladney's three children would go on to leave their own mark on St. Louis.

Before she died in 2003, Katherine Gladney Wells, known as "Katch," was a devoted benefactor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. A composer, too — nearly every year during the '70s, '80s and much of the '90s, she'd take up the baton and conduct the full orchestra through a piece she'd written for the occasion. Her husband, Ben Wells, went to work for 7-Up in 1938 and rose from advertising copywriter to CEO, a post he held from 1974 until his retirement in 1979.

Lucianna Gladney Ross, meanwhile, is best known as the benefactress of Kimmswick, where she owns numerous acres and since the late 1960s has fought to preserve the town's heritage. Her husband, Walter Ross, was a longtime newsman for the Post-Dispatch.

Franklin Gladney's only son, Graves Gladney, was no less colorful. An illustrator for the 1930s pulp series The Shadow, Gladney was better known around St. Louis as a war hero. He parachuted onto the Normandy beaches with the 82nd Airborne Division on June 6, 1944. He was nationally ranked in trapshooting and reveled in big-game hunting expeditions in Africa. Twice married, Gladney fathered six children by three different women.

"My father was discreet in his associations," recalls Frank Gladney, who didn't meet one of his half-brothers until the boy was in his mid-teens. "But I guess you can't deny that he saw other women."

Gladney says that after trying unsuccessfully to divorce his mother in the late 1950s, his father established residency in Nevada, where it was permissible to extract oneself from a marriage without a spouse's consent. Graves Gladney then married Nancy Meeks, a 26-year-old secretary at the Washington University School of Fine Arts (where he was an instructor until 1961). The couple had two children. Nancy Hope Gladney was born in 1960, Andrew Graves Gladney in 1962.

"Was it a happy family? Well, there were tensions, I suppose," recalls Frank Gladney, who was 26 when Andrew was born. "My father, being a senior person already in his fifties, pushing sixty, maybe left much of the childcare to the mother. Because, you know, he was busy playing golf, shooting guns, playing bridge — things like that. I would not call that a special, tranquil family as far as I knew."

A natural linguist and skilled golfer, articulate and charismatic, Andrew Gladney took after his dad in many ways. But the two didn't have long to get to know one another. On March 24, 1976, at the age of 68, Graves Gladney died during heart surgery. Andrew, his youngest child, was thirteen.

Still, by most standards, Andrew led a charmed youth, highlighted by ski trips to Steamboat Springs and boating vacations in Naples, Florida. As a high school student at John Burroughs, he was the kid who got dropped off each morning in the family Rolls-Royce, won the lead role in several school plays and was a National Merit Semifinalist.