This column originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle on April 28, 1985. Five days earlier, Coca-Cola had rolled out New Coke in what the company hoped would help it reclaim the large share of the soft-drink market it once commanded. Instead, New Coke turned out to be a failure and was discontinued in 2002. The original formula — called Classic Coke — returned in July 1985. Count Millar as one of those opposed to the change.

That's it. Hold the phone. Let's come to a screeching halt. The Coca-Cola Co. will proceed with its plan to change the formula of Coke at its considerable peril. Fool around with the taste of Coke and you guys have a good chance of losing me.

Roberto Goizueta, the CEO of the company, has announced that the 99-year-old "secret formula" of Coke will be altered so that the beverage will have a "smoother, rounder, yet bolder taste ... a more harmonious flavor." Coca-Cola ceremonialized the announcement at a press conference in New York at which the media soft-drink columnists ("It's a naive little lemon-lime, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption"), after sniffing the pull tabs of old Cokes cans and new, sluiced the beverages around in their mouth and then delicately spat them out, clearing their palates between sips with beef jerky and barbecue-flavored Doritos.

People in the beverage biz say that the move to reposition Coke was made because the company was worried about the market share being sliced away by dreaded Pepsi-Cola and — oh, irony — by the cannibalism of the company's own diet Coke. Upon Coke's announcement, the people at Pepsico pronounced the cola war won and gave all its employees a day off for a bacchanal. 

I am stricken and appalled by this abrupt and unsolicited change made upon a substance which is part of the American fiber. For decades, when I've wanted to supply some non-nutritive, empty-calorie entertainment for my mouth, I have reached for a Coke. Coke and I go back a long way — all the way back to five-cent Coke machines and 6-oz. bottles with the location of the bottling plant graven on the bottoms of the bottle. 

Like most Americans, I am steeped on Coke apocrypha: That if you put a tooth in Coke, it will dissolve in 15 minutes. That the 6-oz. classic bottle Coke is more highly carbonated and is the only way that hard-core Cokeheads consumed the product. That if you get a bottle that was bottled in Michigan, you'd better hold it up to the light before you drink it because a lady in Michigan found a dead baby rat in hers after she'd already drunk half of it. 

Stuffing a nickel into a Coke machine was a little like roulette. I checked the bottom before I opened it. I have thought myself a lucky boy indeed when I was dealt by fate a Coke from a far-off bottler: Phoenix ... Atlanta ... Baltimore ... San Francisco ... Each 12-bottle Family Pak carton sang the same song to me that railroad timetables did to earlier generations. 

And now, with the savage suddenness of a newspaper publisher who stands on a city room chair to announce that the paper has folded and the next edition will be the last, the Real Thing has been replaced by Another Thing. The company has said that the new-formula Coke will be in the stores within two weeks.

This means that Coke has already shut off the pipeline of original-recipe Coke. They might even — I almost can't even think this, much less write it  — have destroyed the "secret formula" which has been passed down from Coke executives to the subsequent generation of Coke executives. 

I accept the apocrypha of Coke's "secret formula" and the legend that no one Coke executive knows all of it; that they must all meet at one time for the ingredients to be combined, each executive putting into the vat the single ingredient he alone knows. I prefer to believe that in the face of logic which suggests that scenario just doesn't wash. I know that Coca-Cola emerges from the Atlanta sanctum in the form of highly concentrated syrup which local bottlers dilute with carbonated water. Unless Coke is grown for cultures, the corps of executives must meet in a Star Chamber to whip up all the syrup. That sounds like a more-than-24-hour-a-day job. More than 270 million doses of original-recipe Cokes are sold daily.

Coke just couldn't have thought all this through. What of legal and ethical issues? How can Coke continue its marketing campaign based upon "Coke is It" when, as the company has itself admitted, it is not but something else? I see the Food and Drug Administration getting involved. "This Coke is different from It" isn't quite as catchy, is it?

The instant I read of Coke's plans, I drove furiously to the supermarket, only to find a mob of Coke drinkers in a feral panic, fighting like starving jackals over the one remaining one-liter bottle of original recipe Coke. 

And this is only the beginning. 

I foresee a vast and corrupting system of original-recipe Coke black marketing. Even as I write, organized crime has strike forces buying up supermarket shelves of existing Cokes, shoving quarters into Coke machines, hijacking syrup trucks. Mark my words: Within three months, when all original-recipe Cokes are gone through legitimate sale and consumed, the only way you'll be able to get that reassuring whizz of high carbonation and 30-minute aftertaste of the Real Thing is through schoolyard pushers. Or at Hollywood parties where fast-lane producers have six-packs of them conspicuously displayed, along with the straws used to suck it up into your mouth ...