If you've lived in the Orlando area even a little while, you have surely heard Doc's name; it's on everything from a high school to the CineDome at the Orlando Science Center.
But you may not have known that in the years before World War II, it was Doc Phillips who made Florida synonymous with orange juice, the "liquid sunshine" most Americans take for granted as a boost to good health.
Philip Phillips was Orlando's own citrus baron. At one time, his enterprises grew and sold a hundred million oranges a year, more than any other citrus business in the world.
And in the days before refrigeration was common, he made great strides toward solving an image problem that had bedeviled the citrus industry. Orange juice may have been good for you, but it didn't taste very good in a can.
"Always a careful planner and an excellent judge of men," according to Orlando agricultural historian Henry Swanson, Phillips put together a team about 1929 to build a market for canned juice.
Phillips bought a large building at Princeton Street, beside the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad tracks, and converted it into a processing plant.
Between 1929 and 1931, his team members ran countless experiments, often setting out batches of fruit and juice on the roof to see how they responded to outdoor exposure.
Eventually Phillips' team came up with a "flash" pasteurization process that greatly improved the taste and appeal of single-strength orange juice, and Phillips followed up with a five-state marketing blitz.
The frozen-concentrate orange juice revolution was still years away, but Dr. Phillips' processing breakthroughs in the early '30s "helped establish the confidence in citrus juice products that later paved the way" toward public acceptance of such products as concentrate and packaged, chilled juice, Swanson writes.
As good an innovator as he was, Dr. Phillips might have been an even better salesman.
Marketing, in fact, was one of his specialties. In oral-history interviews, Phillips' son Howard remembered that during the mid-1920s -- a tough period for marketing Florida citrus -- his father sent him to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois with trainloads of fruit in tow.
The idea was to open up new markets in areas dominated by California interests. Howard put aside his literature degree from Harvard and donned his salesman's cloak.