It began with a well, a seemingly ordinary 210-foot-deep well. But as it turned out, the water in William Tillman Jr.’s well was anything but ordinary.
For starters, the water shot six feet into the air without being pumped. Propelling it was hydrostatic pressure from a crack in a layer of permeable rock positioned between two layers of impermeable rock.
“Great-grandfather’s well was a true artesian well. And like other wells of this type, this one produced water that had an unusually good taste and was free from organic impurities,” said Warner Tillman, president of Highland Park-based Sparkling Spring Mineral Water Co.
In fact, the water from Tillman’s well was so clear that it seemed to sparkle. “The name Sparkling Spring was a natural,” Tillman said. “And even though the term `sparkling’ is now typically used to denote water that’s been carbonated, we see no reason to change it.”
Warner Tillman, 43, began working full time in the water business in 1973, a year after he graduated from Northern Illinois University. He became sole owner of the company in 1984, when he bought out his father, Burton, 67, who still occupies the house next door to the bottling plant, where he and his late wife, Cora, lived throughout their 44-year marriage. Warner, wife, Diane, and their four children recently moved from Highland Park to Libertyville.
Wiry, his snow-white hair clipped in a precise crew cut, Burton remembers Sparkling Spring’s early years. “We used to do all the bottling on Saturdays,” he recalled. “There were six brothers-I was the youngest-and everyone had a job to do. We did the bottling and virtually all of the bottle washing by hand in those days. My job was to carry the filled bottles over to the packing crates one bottle at a time until I got big enough to handle two.
“The old suction pump used to freeze, and we’d have to haul hot water in 10-gallon tanks from the family home two miles away to thaw it out. A coal-fired, pot-bellied stove provided the only heat in the bottling room, and by the time we finished our work on some of the colder Saturdays, we were dog tired and chilled to the bone.”
Small though it was, the business had grown considerably since William Jr. founded the company in 1896. His grandfather, Frederick Wilhelm Tillman, a German immigrant, bought the family farm in 1866 from the widow of the man who had acquired it through a federal land grant 20 years earlier.
Of the original 200 acres, only five acres situated west of U.S. Highway 41 on the north side of Park Avenue are still owned by the Tillmans. Because the surrounding area is largely residential, most of the company’s trucks are housed at a separate facility in nearby Lake Bluff. Sparkling Spring also operates a second well and bottling plant in Plano, Ill., and has its corporate office in the Opportunities Inc. building on Old Skokie Highway in Highland Park.
The company’s first customers were workers building Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park. William Jr. was hired to bring in the sand and gravel needed for making bricks and mortar, and because the workers were thirsty, he supplied them with water from his well.
Rave reviews on the taste of the water resulted in Exmoor’s management buying it for use at the club. Members subsequently began ordering water for delivery at both their North Shore residences and their summer homes in Lake Geneva.
Picking up the story, Burton said, “The new (public) filtration plant was finished just as the Depression was picking up steam, and the combination really hurt our business. But a few years later, Chicago-based Hinckley & Schmitt stopped bottling Waukesha water, which came from an artesian well in Waukesha, Wis., and had become famous when it was used in the drinking fountains at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. That opened up the market, since people in the area still wanted to buy bottled water.”
Returning from overseas military duty in 1946, Burton married and went into the water business. “I never really thought about any other kind of career,” he said. “My wife was active in the 1st United Evangelical Congregational Church (now Evangelical Congregational Church) in Highland Park, so staying in the area seemed like a good idea.”
Burton said his father was ready to retire by the time he came along. Only Burton’s brother Laurence joined him in the business, and Burton bought him out in 1977.
A business major in college, Warner was eager to put his theories into practice. But, cautious by nature, he developed a long-term plan before making his move. Head-on competition with Hinckley & Schmitt, which sells purified water, makes him reluctant to get overly specific, though he does indicate that changes in marketing strategy have been primarily responsible for the company’s growth.
“Tracking our advertising so we could target our market was the first step,” he said. “We decided how much growth we could handle each year and then did our best to achieve it.”
A smile breaking across his face, he added, “We did a 20-year plan in 1980, and all I’ll tell you is that we’re at least a year ahead of schedule.”
Help in developing the plan came from John Dillon, now vice president of marketing. Dillon, 73, joined the firm 13 years ago, bringing with him many years of experience in the water industry with the Mountain Valley Water Company and Sierra Water Company.
“You use advertising to create an impression,” he said. “In our case, when people think about bottled water, we want them to think Sparkling Spring.”
About 100,000 customers currently have Sparkling Spring water delivered to their home or office, either in one- or five-gallon containers. Supermarket sales, primarily in Sunset Food’s three locations on the North Shore, are only a tiny percentage of the company’s business, though Tillman doesn’t rule out expanding into the single-serving, flavored or sparkling segments of the water industry. When it comes to sales figures, all he’ll say is that “the company now does as much business in a week as it did in all of 1974.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re the Sunset Foods of the water business. Like us, they give quality, value and service,” said Ron Bernardi, store manager for Sunset Foods in Northbrook.
Route salesman George Pett, 46, added, “When I started with the company in 1967, I delivered 120 one-gallon bottles a day. Now I average 180 to 200 5-gallon bottles a day, nearly 10 times the volume.”
Evelyn Chellman’s parents became Sparkling Spring customers in 1941. When she married in 1949, Sparkling Spring gained a new customer, just as they did when one of her own daughters married. “My late husband was a real water drinker,” the 68-year-old Mundelein resident said. “And we’d always say that if we wanted to make a really good cup of coffee, we had to use Sparkling Spring water.”
Increasing concerns about the public water supply have also had a positive impact on the company’s balance sheet. As John Dillon observed, “Our timing was perfect.”
Concerns about the local water were what prompted Betty Jackson to begin having Sparkling Spring delivered to her South Side home. “I started buying bottled water at the grocery store when our tap water began looking really strange,” she recalled. “A family of four with two growing children can drink a lot of water, and lugging the bottles back and forth was very inconvenient. Then my sister-in-law told me she’d started having Sparkling Spring delivered to the house, and my husband and I decided to try it.”
To accommodate the growth, the company made changes in equipment and office procedures. It also stopped bottling water under the Purity label for a local water broker. The water table under the original well had fallen long ago to the point where pumping was required, and by 1977 the amount of water necessary to fill the company’s needs through the existing two-inch pipe casing was next to impossible.
To solve the problem, a second well fitted with a five-inch pipe casing was drilled six feet away, and the original was capped.
Burton and his dad drove to Toledo in 1955 to buy the company’s first automatic bottle washer. A conveyor belt followed, but this purchase made his brother Laurence angry.
Convinced that it was neither financially wise nor necessary to make that kind of expenditure, he insisted on carrying cases to the trucks by hand, until the wisdom of the purchase became all too apparent.
“Even I remember filling the five-gallon containers with a hose because the only machines then available were for the one-gallon bottles,” Warner said. “Next we bought a suction filler that actually sucked water from a holding tank connected to the well. The tank operated on a float system, so it was continually being filled. A gravity filler that would actually fill six one-gallon bottles at a time was the next step, followed by the (more efficient) rotary fillers used today.”
Just as important as changes in the production end were the changes in the company’s billing process. A completely computerized system was in place by the late 1970s, making it possible to keep up with the sharp increase in customers.
As for the number of people currently employed by Sparkling Spring, Warner will say only that there are “somewhere in the neighborhood of 100.”
Alicia Jordan, 21, joined the company in early February as a customer service representative. Asked what it was about Sparkling Spring that made the job attractive, she answered, “This is a stable but growing company. There’s lots of room for advancement, and it’s a wonderful work environment.”
Carol Martin, 38, Warner’s sister and only sibling, works in accounts receivable; her husband, Earl, is in cooler maintenance. “Despite the growth, our attitude toward customer service has remained the same,” she said. “When I was a kid, the business phone was also our home number, and customers were always calling.”
Although much of his life is consumed by Sparkling Spring, Warner still finds time to play golf and pilot a small aircraft. Even more important to him is his work with missions such as the Evangelical Child and Family Agency and the Slavic Gospel Association.
Now chairman of the board for the latter organization, he traveled to Russia on its behalf in 1985 and 1992. His negative feelings about abortion prompted participation in the first group, which concentrates on finding foster or adoptive parents for unwanted children.
Warner Tillman’s interest in mission work dates to his childhood. “My parents always had a spare bedroom available for missionaries who came to speak at our church,” he explained. “The first one I remember was Mae Royer, a woman who ran an orphanage in Mexico. She made a tremendous impression on me, and I can still hear her telling us about the work she was doing.”
In college, he led Bible study groups for Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and it was at one of the group’s social events that he met his wife, Diane, 42. The gathering was supposed to be a surprise birthday party in his honor, although he didn’t arrive until shortly before it ended. Even so, there was still ample time for the couple to meet, even if two years passed before they went on their first date.
But three weeks after the date, they were engaged.
The wedding took place six months after their first date and just days after Warner returned from several months spent criss-crossing Orange County, Calif., as a salesman for Southwestern Publishing, of Nashville, a publisher of dictionaries and religious books.
“Warner never really asked me to marry him,” Diane said with a laugh. “He’d learned in salesmanship class that you don’t give someone an opportunity to say no. So he didn’t. He just asked if I’d like to get married in June or September. I chose June, but we ended up waiting until September because it really was the only time that fit into both our schedules.”
Twenty years, four children, two cats and a dog later, the couple are still happily married. Eldest son Joshua, 15, is the only one of the children currently interested in entering the business. But as Warner pointed out, Jenny, 13, Julie, 11, and Joel, 9, may yet express interest.
Seated in an office furnished with his grandfather’s refurbished rolltop desk, Warner observed, “This is one of the few businesses where you actually produce, market, distribute, bill and collect for the product. You have an opportunity to participate in all aspects of a business, and for that reason, it’s especially challenging. I’m never bored; I’m always learning something new. But I’m not an expert, and I don’t hesitate to go and get help when I need it.
“I was lucky to have an opportunity to put my theories into practice, and I’m grateful to both my dad and my uncle for giving it to me.”
