Remembering a Renaissance man

Folks here in Gainesville, Fla., who knew Dr. J. Robert Cade recall him as an intensely practical man—a good-natured but no-nonsense problem solver, they say, who drove hard to find solutions to puzzles others either ignored or had given up on.

So such folks tend to be surprised to learn that Cade was also an avid collector of classic Studebaker automobiles and that an old barn just outside Gainesville is home to 60 of his cars. Or that the first thing you see when you step into the home where he lived until his death in 2007 is part of a collection of violins arrayed high on the facing wall. Cade had played them all.

This very practical man was also a poet. He could recite long passages of the Psalms and other biblical literature, of Shakespeare, and of Tennyson. He wrote his own poetry as well—vivid, passionate, lilting, but realistic.

Yet there’s probably nothing more fascinating you’ll learn about Robert Cade than this: that 50 years ago this year, he led a small band of scientists who invented Gatorade, the sports drink now sold around the world. In 1961, Cade had joined the faculty of the school of medicine at the University of Florida. Especially because he was a kidney specialist, he developed an early concern for the dehydration that regularly afflicted the Florida Gators football team.

Others helped develop the winning chemical concoction, but it was Robert Cade (and his wife Mary, who suggested making the drink palatable by adding lemon and lime juice) who introduced it in such a creative and practical way that coach Ray Graves made it a part of the team’s regimen.

It was so crucial an achievement that opposing coaches, like Bobby Dodd of Georgia Tech, openly credited Gatorade in those days for Florida’s growing success on the gridiron. Dodd was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying bluntly that “the Gators won because they had Gatorade and our team didn’t.”

That was 1965. Now, in 2015, the Gainesville–University of Florida community is getting a new 50th anniversary exposure to this very favorite son. Plans for a strikingly designed and highly visible science museum—named for Robert Cade—are moving ahead on the historic Main Street site where Gainesville’s train station used to stand. Billboards on the city’s major thoroughfares highlight the museum. One of Cade’s adult daughters is featured on the cover of a recent Gainesville magazine as one of the town’s “Spirit of Gainesville” award winners.

Central in the thinking behind the project is the goal of instilling in visitors—and especially among children—the same creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial spirit that throughout Cade’s 80 years kept spilling over to improve and enhance the lives of others. “They obviously want this place,” says the museum’s program director Patty Lipka, “to reflect Dr. Cade’s creative, outlandish spirit, and his zest for life and new ideas.”

With that goal in mind, for example, Lipka coordinates a monthly “Living Inventor Series” through which real-life inventors are brought to the museum’s “Creativity Lab” to lead young students through the creative process. “It’s an obviously contagious approach,” Lipka told WORLD. Other kid-friendly classes advertised on the intriguing schedule include “Is It Music or Is It Noise?,” “Rocket Building Camp,” and “Zombie Laser Tag.”

Most of these activities take place now in cramped, temporary quarters right across Main Street from where the museum is slated to be built. “Some consultants told us to ‘build it, and they will come,’” said Phoebe Cade Miles, daughter of Dr. Cade and a driving force for the big project. “But we thought it was better to demonstrate the validity of the programs themselves, and have a program ready to move into the new building as soon as it’s completed.”

Still another dimension to this Renaissance man’s legacy is the rugged Christian faith that quietly tended so much to shape his personal agenda. The gifted physician, inquisitive inventor, and expressive artist is not remembered by those who knew him best as an in-your-face proselytizer. Instead, and in keeping with his early Lutheran roots, he was a believer who found it easy and natural to spell out his God-centered view of life in simple, sometimes indirect declarations.

Right in the middle of a technical medical explanation, for example, describing the research leading to the formulation of Gatorade, Cade wrote—without affectation—“… God knew more sugar would be needed by the working muscles, so He built in several mechanisms to be sure enough sugar was available.”

In similar fashion, the new museum will not go out of its way to serve as an explicit or dogmatic apologetic for a Christian worldview. That simply wasn’t the Cade style. The museum’s worldview will instead be quiet, unforced, and implicit. If the emphasis on innovation and creativity notes that such qualities spring from the truth that humans are made “in God’s image,” the assertion is likely to be as gentle and unargumentative as Cade’s reputation is here in Gainesville.

Funding for the $9 million museum is not yet fully committed. Some in the Gainesville-university community suggest that the Cade family, amply blessed through the years by Gatorade royalties, ought simply to get on with the project on its own. But others agree with the argument that the community will value more deeply a project in which it has added its own investment.

The community debt to the Cades is substantial. Following tough litigation in the late 1960s, the University of Florida itself gets some 20 percent of all Gatorade royalties. Last year alone, that 20 percent amounted to $17 million.

The university, of course, values such a relationship—and has even tried to enhance it. Phoebe Miles told WORLD that the museum had turned down an offer of acreage for the museum right on the university campus. “Our saying ‘no’ had mostly to do with our eagerness to be closer to the needier part of Gainesville on the east side of the city,” she said. “But it also had to do with our desire to keep our independence and freedom to shape the museum’s message however its board wants.”

Not that anybody in Gainesville seems too worried about being embarrassed by the new Cade Museum. Most communities would dearly love a chance to live in the long shadow of a man like Robert Cade.