MemoriesandMiscellany

No, the doctor replies, “You have been drinking; you are supposed to see PINK elephants. A WHITE elephant is defined as something that is useless or troublesome.” But Doc, I reply, these are saloons named “White Elephant” and they are all over the pre-Prohibition landscape. Why?

It seems no one really knows. For example, in the late 1800s White Elephant saloons proliferated in Texas. They could be found in Austin, San Antonio, Denison, Mobeetie, Panhandle, Fredericksburg, El Paso, and Lampasas — with the most infamous one in Fort Worth, represented here by its logo.

The history of the White Elephant Saloon in Ft. Worth spans from 1884 to about 1914. It was located at two different spots on Main Street during that time, first at 308-310 Main St. and later at 606-608 Main St. After a series of owners, about 1886 it fell into the hands of Bill Ward, a man who knew the saloon could prosper by expanding into gambling and as his concessionaire a gunslinger named Luke Short. One night Short was confronted by “Longhaired Jim” Courtright. They dueled it out in front of the White Elephant where Short got five shots off before Courtright could fire and killed him. Short was put in jail overnight, then released and never brought to trial.

While the White Elephant Saloon of San Antonio has no dramatic shoot on premises, it has been described as a “rough and rowdy” premier drinking establishment in town. It was located on San Antonio’s Main Plaza, close to city hall and the stockyards. Popular at night, the saloon was adjacent to the north side of the plaza where “scuffles, skirmishes and shootings were commonplace.”

Only several years after it opened, this White Elephant was forced to close by a crackdown on gambling in San Antonio. The local newspaper commented: “When the boys to San Antone, they can not milk the elephant any more.”

The White Elephant in Bryan, Texas, has not been as prominent as the other two Texas saloons. Represented here by a jug that indicates it sold whiskey — “pure liquor — at retail as well as over the bar. Part of a land grant by the Spanish to Stephen A. Austin and named for his nephew, Bryan was the seat of Brazos County in west central Texas. Its history seems less identified with violence and thus not as elaborately recorded.

As noted here on an ad, the White Elephant Saloon of Dennison regarded itself as “The largest and most elegant resort in North Texas.” Founded in 1884 this “watering hole” was in business under a series of owners. The saloon, billards and restaurant were on the first floor of the building on Dennison’s West Main Street. Gambling and sleeping rooms were on the second floor. In 1884 the establishment harbored a man named Jim McIntire, wanted for murdering two French squatter on ranch land in New Mexico. When the law came to get McIntire in Bryan, he was tipped off and hired a horse from the White Elephant livery stables and escaped to New Orleans.

Not only Texas harbored saloons under the sign of the white elephant. They could be found throughout the West and South. W. R. Monroe owned one in Kansas City, Missouri. As many saloonkeepers of the times did, Monroe issued bar tokens good for drinks at his bar. The one shown here for his White Elephant Saloon was worth five cents in trade. This token is distinguished among representations of the pachyderm by the predominance given to one (unmentionable) physical attribute.

I am still puzzling over why Wichman would name a saloon White Elephant and then represent it with a ceramic pig big bottle. As it turns out Wichman in addition to selling whiskey over the bar also was retailing liquor to customers in glass and ceramic containers. Obviously a figural elephant likely would have held more booze than the proprietor might have wanted to give away, so Wichman chose a pig to convey a slug or two of his whiskey.

Another Tennessee White Elephant saloon artifact is a stoneware jug covered in dark Albany slip glaze into which has been scratched a rather primitive elephant. The crudeness of the design indicates that it was created relatively early in the 1800s. The saloon apparently belonged to Querna Clerk, about whom I can find nothing. Nor does the jug given any clue as to the city or town in which the White Elephant was located.

Two cities named Richmond, one in Virginia and one in Kentucky both harbored White Elephant Saloons. The Virginia example is unusual since this establishment was owned and operated by a woman, Mrs. Mary Enright. Directories show her in business at 420 Louisiana during the early 1900s. In addition to serving drinks at the bar she was blending her own whiskeys and selling them at both wholesale and retail. Like the prior jug, this one too is scratched into brown Albany slip, but is legible.

Called a “scratch jug” when it was offered at auction, the Albany slip covered beehive-shaped container shown here actually was covered by a stencil that masked the glaze from the body to create the letters. It appears to be quart size. Details about this White Elephant Saloon are similarly masked in history.

In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the White Elephant was selling whiskey in a wide variety of ceramic jugs. The one shown here offered a discount of ten cents on a refill of the jug when brought back to the saloon. This was a popular Tuscaloosa watering hole. Locals are said to have ridden horseback up to the place at Sixth Street and 24th Avenue of a morning to get cold glass of beer. In 1932, workmen excavating at a construction site unearthed 75 brown and white jugs that bore the name of the White Elephant.

We still have not unraveled the prevalence of the name. Several explanations have emerged as possibilities. After the Civil War, a cliche’ was common in the U.S. referring to a neophyte having traveled afar and bragging about seeing something common to experienced travelers. Such was called “seeing the elephant.” It also has been suggested that white paint was readily available and a pachyderm painted on a portico would have been an eye-catching graphic.

The name might also have had a racial connotation. In states with “Jim Crow” laws such as the word “white” would warn all blacks away from the establishment. Those would include Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Notably, Ft. Worth had a Black Elephant Saloon whose clientele was limited to those of African origin.

Foreword: Occasionally on this blog I take the opportunity to “wander down memory lane.” This post is one of those times. By actual count (for security clearance purposes) I took eighty trips abroad during my working career spanning fifty-four years. Only one — my first abroad — was an out and out boondoggle. It is chronicled here.

While still in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, in 1962 I went to Washington, D.C., as the chief of staff for a Wisconsin congressman named Clem Zablocki. There I became acquainted with the 9999th, an Air Force Reserve unit on Capitol Hill, composed of members of Congress and congressional staffers. The commanding general of the 9999th was was future Republican nominee for President, Senator Barry Goldwater. I was allowed to participate as the only enlisted man (turning off the lights for the slide briefings) and promised a captain’s rank. I also was allowed to join the group on a 1962 “study mission” to Mexico, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Panama.

Our plane was a C-118, a Douglas Aircraft cargo plane with four propeller-driven engines, a kind of lumbering workhorse of the Air Force that had been around since before the Korean War. Shown here, it had been modified into a passenger plane called the “Liftmaster.” Between 1947 and 1959, Douglas built a total of 704 DC-6s, 167 of them military versions.

We had six members of Congress on board the C-118, five representatives and one senator. Among them, shown here from left, are Zablocki, second; Rep. William Scranton of Pennsylvania, later a presidential candidate, fourth; and Senator Peter Dominick of Arizona, fifth. A large group of male staff members rounded out the contingent.

While flying across the Caribbean to Mexico City, we encountered a fierce squall line. The C-118 was tossed around, lightening was striking all around us, and ice built up on the wings. There was absolute silence in the cabin and sweat trickled down my side as I prayed. After we had made it through the storm and landed safely in Mexico City, I ate with the co-pilot, who confessed to being scared, but noted that our pilot, called “Lobby,” shown here, kept cool but ducked his head at every lightening strike.

Mexico City proved a revelation. Here was a huge city bustling with energy on the scale of New York City. As a Midwest kid I had never imagined such a place existed “south of the border.” Our group was treated to a bullfight, my first, one in which the matador made a tactical error, was severely gored in the groin, and according to next day’s newspaper, remained hanging to life by a thread. I never saw another bullfight.

Every stop was an excuse for the group to go shopping. Zablocki often was leading the way with me tagging along. When he asked me to examine a piece of jewelry he had picked out, I was effusive about it. He took me aside, explained that one haggled for price outside the U.S. and that my response hereafter was to be: “Looks like rough work.” Have used that line many times since.

Our next stop was the Panama Canal Zone where our group was taken by boat half-way up the canal by the operating authority to the town of Gamboa. Along the way we saw American troop ships going home after being deployed during the recently-ended Cuban Crisis. I had in mind going the rest of the way by train to Colon, on the Pacific side. The train left Gamboa just as I got to the station and I was forced to hitchhike back. My luck was to be picked up and taken back to Panama City by Hula Sanchez, our lovely hostess on the boat. She refused my dinner invitation, however.

Our next stop was Puerto Rico where the military duties of the day included a fishing trip in the northern Caribbean. That is me, the handsome devil catching some rays while deep sea fishing off San Juan. Then there was a quick side trip to St. Thomas where our hosts were Gen. Donald Dawson, former aide to President Truman, and film star, Ilona Massey. She had been an idol of my youth and now she was right there to talk to.

Our final stop was Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba where Fidel Castro had tried to get Russian nukes only a short time before. Although we traveled mostly in civvies, on Gitmo, as the Marines call it, we were in uniform and my meager two stripes there for all to see. They emboldened the enlisted Marines to ask me who this high-powered delegation might be. Shown here is Tom Hughes, my airplane seatmate as we look from the base boundary line down into Cuba itself.

Upon return to the United States, I never received captain’s bars and ended my Air Force affiliation as an airman 2nd class several years later. Before I could be commissioned, President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, took aim at the 9999th and like units on the Hill sponsored by the Army and Navy, disbanding them all. My first boondoggle, in effect, turned out to be my last.

In the days before National Prohibition when women, at least respectable women, were barred from saloons, proprietors felt free to distribute trade cards advertising their establishments that often included “double entrendre” messages, often provided in verse. Shown here are seven such offerings from watering holes across America and reaching into Mexico.

The first example comes from Becker’s Saloon in Reno, Nevada, a place where one might get a limburger cheese sandwich and a beer for 15 cents. It was located in the Becker Building on Commercial Row in Reno and held the saloon, a restaurant and a card playing center. Its trade card depicted a comely woman with a monkey shaking hands with a farm boy and reads:

The boys all like Mary, and

Like her monkey too,

And when they play so

Nice with it, what can

Mary do?

The 1911 city directory of Springfield, Illinois, lists almost three full pages of saloons, indicating that the competition for customers among them must have been fierce. That may explain the number of trade cards from that city that carried suggestive poetry. Zimmerman & Co was the proprietary of the Budweiser, an establishment whose name suggests a “tied” saloon, that is, one that served only a single kind of beer in return for financial support from a brewer.

Its “poem” read:

With fond regret I now remember,

Those happy days of youthful fun,

When all my limbs were lithe and limber,

Did I say all? Yes all but one.

Those glorious days have ceased forever,

The happy days of youthful fun,

All limbs are daily growing stiffer

Did I say all? Yes all but one.

Another saloon was the Sullivan Bar on Springfield’s North Sixth Street. But Sullivan was not there. Instead the proprietor was another Irishman named William Greenhalgh. Noting that Sullivan’s “thirst parlor” also had “rooms in connection” a question arises about what additional activities might have been going on there. The verse on the card back side may give a clue:

Tis said that in these days of progress and push,

That ONE bird in the hand is worth TWO in the bush;

But the summer girls says, if birdie will stand,

ONE bird in her bush is worth TWO in her hand.

William J. Cordier, the cravated chap shown here and proprietor of the Schlitz Forum & Cafe, right down the street from Sullivan’s in Springfield, felt compelled to issue two risqué’ cards. One of them contains eight suggestive quatrains, of which the following are two:

Here’s to the girl that dresses in the sailor hat,

Pink shirtwaist and white cravat,

Patent leather shoes and blue parasol,

And a little brown spot that pays for them all.

Here’s to the girl that dresses in black,

She alway looks neat and never looks slack,

But when she kisses, she kisses so sweet,

She makes things stand that have no feet.

Cordier also issued a second card that featured a story in verse about a fly that intrudes into a grocery store and, after defecating on a piece of ham, proceeds to elude the storekeeper and then:

When he had done his deadly work

He flew right over to the lady clerk

And up her leg he took a stroll

And took bath in her hole.

Proprieties deteriorate further in subsequent stanzas until the fly meets an untimely — and unseemly — death.

Tommy Sookiasian, an Armenian, was proprietor of a saloon in Juarez, Mexico, a short distance over the Rio Grande River from El Paso, Texas. He issued a trade card that, while ostensibly involving cattle and their tails is meant to remind us of the deterioration in the male organ of generation as the years take their toll. Tommy’s was a bar and cafe featuring a fish menu but also a wholesale liquor dealer.

Contemplating the unusual name of “The Humorist Saloon,” perhaps it was the proprietor, T. E. Tobin, depicted on the trade card, who fancied himself a funny man. His St. Louis watering hole seems never to have closed, being open”night and day.” His rhyme on the reverse while not having sexual overtones, was laced with profanity, as per the stanza that follows:

Beer is a beverage,

That works upon the mind;

It makes men and women talk,

When they are not inclined.

It works like a figure,

And works without a rule,

And make people think they are smart

When they are a G—D—d Fool.

This is just a small sample of the artistic achievements left to the American lexicon by the Nation’s saloonkeepers. Their contribution seldom receives attention, particularly in literary (as opposed to drinking) circles. I am happy to remedy that omission here.

I continually finding advertising, particularly vintage advertising, a fascinating subject for exploration. After it occurred to me that a number of ads, particularly for alcoholic beverages, employed monkeys and apes to sell products, I began to collect their images in an effort to understand why the primate humans were using their genetic cousins in the process of doing business.

The Brown Thompson distillers of Louisville issued a trade card, now more than a century old, that depicted three monkeys, all with long tails, climbing up a bottle of their “Old Forester” whiskey. One has a corkscrew and presumably will be opening the whiskey with an eye to drinking it. Unaccountably, the artist has dressed these monkeys in human garments, shirt and pants but no shoes.

The issuing distillery had been founded by George Garvin Brown who had been joined by his cousin from Northern Ireland, James Thompson. They named their flagship brand after a well-known Louisville physician, Dr. William Forrester. When Thompson decamped to start his own distillery, Brown added George Foreman as his partner and the firm became Brown-Foreman. The monkeys persisted in the advertising in the company’s “Bottom’s Up” Kentucky straight bourbon.

The Roxbury Distilling Company used the face of a menacing monkey for its celluloid score keeping card, advertising “Roxbury Rye” as America’s purest whiskey. Its offices were in Baltimore and its distillery in Roxbury, Maryland. This outfit was owned by George T. Gambrill, a man frequently in trouble with the law. Convicted of fraud, through his own cleverness, he avoided going to jail for years and died without ever spending a day behind bars.

Monkeys and alcohol are not just an American phenomenon. Anisetta Evangelisti is a very sweet anise flavored liquor that is made in a Santelpidio, a small town in Southeastern Italy. As noted on the trade card here, it is meant to be drunk in small glasses as a dessert liqueur. The monkey on the shipping crate apparently had no glass and is taking it wholesale.

Pabst Beer had a reputation for unusual advertising and this trade card qualifies. It purports to show a dog and money act in which the simian loads a barrel of beer on a car being pulled by a dog. In vain I have sought to find more about

Dekkin’s pantomime act, likely a vaudeville attraction appropriated by Pabst for its merchandising purposes.

Another brewery, this one the Norwich Brewing Co. of Norwich, New York, has given us a studious looking monkey who is carrying a sign suggesting that the reader not “monkey” with inferior beers but drink “White’s Sparkling Ale. This brew claims to be “Good for Bad Health and Not Bad for Good Health.” The brewery opened in 1904 and operated for eleven years until shut down in 1915.

Spoofing Darwin’s for theory of evolution was common everywhere Merchant’s Gargling Oil, sold as fit for man and beast, found a natural foil in the English scientist and his ideas. Its Victorian trade card shows a mandrill-like beast pouring the gargling oil on his leg while intoning a quatrain: “If I am Darwin’s grandpa, It follows, don’t you see, That what is going for man and beast, Is doubly good for me.”

Monkey Brand soap was introduced in the 1880s as a household scouring and polishing soap, in bar form, the product of Sidney and Henry Gross of Philadelphia. Pumice was its primary ingredient. After Lever bought the company in 1899. The name ‘Brooke” was used to promote the Monkey Brand soap both in the States and in Britain. In George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion”(“My Fair Lady”) Henry Higgins tells his housekeeper to take Eliza Doolittle upstairs and clean her up, and to use "...Monkey Brand, if it won't come off any other way.”

In a riffle on the “dogs playing cards” theme, the Star Shoe Store of Coalinga, California, issued a glass paperweight with two dogs in a card game with a monkey. The canines seem annoyed at the antics of the rhesus and the admonition is twice repeated on the weight: “No Monkeying.”

The last two examples appear linked. The first is a modern ad for “Gorilla Tape” featuring the face of a formidable looking ape holding a box of the product, said to be “incredibly strong.” A second tape ad is from “Bear Tape Brand.” Instead of showing us a bear, however, it features a cartoonish gorilla bending a pipe.

The ad, it seems evident, is a spoof on Gorilla Tape as it describes this simian as a native of West Africa and the Congo, gives its dimensions and ends by saying: “It beats its chest when excited and can be extremely dangerous when aroused.” Bear Tape was an Australian-made line that featured a “teddy bear” figure in its advertising. While the Aussie boardroom may have been chuckling at this joke, Gorilla Tape executives likely were not laughing.

There they are — eleven examples of the monkeys in advertising. Everything from whiskey and beer to gargling oil, pumice soap, and tape. “Monkey business” is defined in the dictionary as “frivolous or mischievous behavior, trickery.” But “monkeys IN business” — that is something else again.

When a group of color lithographs come along from a bygone day that seem to want preserving, I often try to give them a measure of future existence by placing them on this blog. Thus it was of particular interest to find group of late 19th Century illustrations of Milwaukee’s Empire Brewery, later known as the Best Brewery and even later as Pabst Brewery.

As a former resident of Milwaukee, I am very familiar with the brewery complex that in my day was known as Pabst. As a college student I have taken the brewery tour there on several occasions and my favorite local watering hole was the Forstkeller, a saloon in a former Methodist church adjacent to and owned by the brewery. With the brewery and Forstkeller now closed, I have collected two glass paperweights issued by the company. Shown here, top, is a weight that shows the Best complex in central Milwaukee that became Pabst. Below is a weight with a scene that introduces the Empire Brewery and Philip Best.

Phillip Best, shown in a lithograph below was the son of Jacob Best (1786-1861), a German born brewer who immigrated to the the U.S. in 1844 to join his four sons in Milwaukee. There he founded a brewery on Chestnut Street Hill that he called the Empire Brewery and ran it with his sons. After Jacob retired in 1853, Philip headed the operation and the company became known as Philip Best & Company. Philip died in 1869 and was memorialized in an illustration from a company booklet prepared for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.

In the meantime Best’s daughter, Maria had met steamship captain named Frederick Pabst in 1860 and married him two years later. In 1864, Pabst purchased a half interest in the brewing company for $21,057.05 and became vice president. After the marriage of Best’s second daughter, Lisette in 1866, her husband,Emil Schandein also purchased the remaining half interest from Phillip Best. After Philip’s death Frederick took control of the brewery.

The 1869 purchase of the Melms Brewery by the Phillip Best & Co. would prove profitable. Phillip Best (1814-1869) died that same year and Pabst and Schandein took over management of the business. In the next two decades the Best Brewery, later Pabst, would grow at a spectacular rate. Helping to trigger this growth was a fluke of history, the Chicago fire of 1871, which would provide a new market for Milwaukee’s breweries as Chicago competitors would never recover. By 1874 Phillip Best Brewing Co. was the nation’s largest brewer.

When the Philadelphia exposition occurred two years later Pabst — at the height of its ascendance — was responsible for putting out a promotion booklet there in German, English and French. Among scenes were three of the earlier Empire Distillery, as seen below.

In addition to its north side Milwaukee location, the company subsequently opened a second brewery on the city’s heavily ethnic South Side. This facility had the advantage of being both on a water source and a railroad spur. It is shown below on three lithographs.

Pabst (1836-1904) was also a pioneer in providing his own bottling plant on premises at a time when beer rolled out of a brewery only in barrels, to be decanted into bottles by the distributors or other independent firms. A picture of that facility also was among the lithographs. Note the proximity to rail.

The final illustration in the booklet was a picture of the Frederick Pabst home, then on Grand Avenue, soon to be renamed Wisconsin Avenue. Later the Pabst family would sell the residence to the Catholic Diocese of Wisconsin and for years it was the residence of the Archbishop. Since 1998, it has been known as the Pabst Mansion and open to the public for tourist. Inside the decor is of the late 1900s and well worth a visit.

The Best Centennial booklet sold on eBay early in 2018 for $150 although far from pristine. It clearly is a prize in someone’s collection. I am happy that through the use of the computer and Internet it is possible to bring these lithographs to a wider audience.

Let me say right off that I am a sucker for blue and white pottery. That is why it still hurts to think back several years when I spotted an unusual stein at a bargain price that ultimately escaped my owning it.

The stein has a puzzling but intriguing motif. On one side it displays a molded image of a thin twenty-story building, a structure clearly patterned after the Flatiron Building on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Completed in 1902 and accounted the first skyscraper, the building had captured the imagination of the Nation.

On the other side of the stein in molded blue and white is the figure of a woman, out in the weather and dressed for winter. Her relationship to the building is unclear. The front of the stein is a narrow leafy design. Although I had seen this item before, it had always been priced too steeply.

That is why, coming across it for $11 upon entering a large flea market, I was interested. But then the “what if” syndrome set in. It happens to every collector:

“What if there is something better on the tables ahead and I have dissipated my cash? I can always come back.” Yes, and some other sharp eyed collector will have bought it. That’s just what happened.

Subsequently I did some research on Robinson Clay Products Co., creator of the stein, and found that the Akron based-pottery has its origins back to 1856 when the company of Whitmore, Robinson & Co. was established to manufacture a wide variety of ceramic items. Over time, with many management changes, Robinson Clay Products emerged.

The company made such mundane items as sewer pipe, drain tile, slop bowls, chamber pots, and horse troughs. Along side this utilitarian production, however, Robinson created fine glazed specialties such as “Blue Flemish Ware” and “Akron Ware.” Many of the items bore a pottery markto identify the manufacturer.

The stein I missed has a counterpart piece in a pitcher with a woman molded on it in in blue and white. Comparing the two it is clear that the latter is more finely molded and the blowing of her garments more expressive. Note too that the handle, while similar shaped, has been made to look more like a twig.

Robinson water coolers have a particular fascination for me. The intricacy of the molded images of two deer in a forest on one is impressive. So too is the “woman at a well” scene found on another cooler Completing these illustrations is a crock or bowl that might have held pickles or hard boiled eggs on a pre-Prohibition bar. A clue lies in the hooded monk with a wine jug in one hand and a cup in the other, held out to the beholder. It provides another reminder of the rich legacy of Akron’s Robinson Clay Products Co.

Foreword: In 1908 the Robert Smith Brewery commissioned Philadelphia painter and illustrator James Moore Preston to provide it with a series of works depicting pre-Revolutionary taverns and inns in or near the “City of Brotherly Love” to promote its brand of beer. Although he has been considered a member of the Ashcan Group and exhibited in the famous 1913 Armory Show, Preston was an artist who could work in many modes. Thus he created color lithographs that memorialized the founding of the Smith Brewery in 1774 and eleven early Philadelphia “watering holes.” I find the pictures striking and believe they deserve preservation through this blog, along with some inkling of the histories of each tavern and inn. Some of that information was provided by the Smith lithos — and that will be quoted. Other material and illustrations are the result of my own research.

The first illustration here is of the original brewery in Philadelphia, owned by a man named Joseph Potts and later by Henry Pepper. In 1845 he sold out to Robert Smith who had come to America in 1837 from England after having served an apprenticeship with the Bass Brewery there. He died at 86 in 1893 and the business was reorganized as the Robert Smith Ale Brewing Co., owned by Schmidt’s Brewery of Philadelphia. Shown here as it looked about 1908, this was the brewing entity that commissioned the artworks.

The London Coffee House was built in 1702, at Front and Market Streets, and remained intact until it was torn down in 1883. Given that Preston was drawing its a quarter century later, how did he know what it looked like? The answer lies in earlier contemporary lithographs that the artist clearly drew on to create his version. The one shown here served as a model, right down to the four horse carriage at right. The caption tells us: “London Coffee House was…the center of pre-Revolutionary life in Philadelphia…where cargoes were bought and sold, slaves and good were auctioned, and the news of the day discussed.”

Amazingly, the Penny Pot Housederived its name from the fact that a customer could buy a container holding about a pint of beer at the tavern for a single cent. Considered the second oldest tavern in the Philadelphia area, it was a landmark that stood near the docks on the Delaware River. A Maryland guest was shocked by the seditionary talk he heard there:“The Delegates rage windily against the King’s Blessed Majesty, which shall stand as firm as the House that was founded on the Rock.” Preston’s recreation of the Penny Pot may been taken in part from a 1700 lithograph shown here. Note that he has put the landing point closer to the water than the earlier version.

Completed about 1770, City Tavern was in Walnut Street above Second. The Continental Congress met there in 1774, two years before the Revolution.“It was early an important place, and after the Revolution succeeded the London Coffee House as the central place of Philadelphia.” During succeeding years the establishment underwent several name changes until the building was demolished in 1852. My assumption is that Preston relied on a old lithograph to guide him. In recent years the City Tavern has been reconstructed at the original site. It is said to be historically accurate. Shown here, however, the building looks quite different than the brewery drawing.

Indian Queen was a hotel noted for the importance of its residents. It was the home of Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, and lodging for both George Washington and John Adams. “Jefferson had his study in the south front room of the second story, from which arose the erroneous tradition that in this room he drafted the Declaration of Independence.” Preston’s depiction echoes a contemporary print of the Indian Queen but features a different sign over the door.

Opened as the Washington Tavern about 1790 at Sixth and Jayne Streets, the name was changed to theFalstaff Inn in 1830. Owned by William Warren, an actor and former theater manager, he renamed it to commemorate his own stage portrayal of Falstaff. Not only that, he had himself painted as Shakespeare’s fat rogue on the sign that can be seen at the second floor corner. The accompanying motto reads: “Shall I not take mine ease at my inn?” Over the years the hotel deteriorated into little more than a flop house, as shown here, and eventually was torn down.

This completes the first installment of our remembrance of Philadelphia inns and taverns as provided through the colorful and well-drawn lithographs by James Moore Preston and commissioned by the Robert Smith brewery. They help bring to life the early history of our country and the establishments where important business was done.

Foreword: In 1908 the Robert Smith Brewery to promote its brand of beer commissioned Philadelphia painter and illustrator James Moore Preston to provide it with a series of works depicting pre-Revolutionary taverns and inns in or near the “City of Brotherly Love.” Preston created twelve color lithographs that memorialized those early Philadelphia “watering holes.” I find the pictures striking and believe they deserve preservation through this blog, along with some inkling of the histories of each tavern and inn. Six were presented in Part 1, posted on April 14. This post completes the series.

The Blue Anchor Inn on Front Street at Dock Creek was the oldest inn in Philadelphia, built in the decade between 1670 an 1680. William Penn is said to have supped there upon his first arrival in the city in 1683. Some believe that the Blue Anchor is the first structure built in Philadelphia. The lumber is thought to have come over in the first ships to dock there. The structure was timbered, filled in with small bricks and had the dimensions of twelve by twenty-two feet. It has been called “the only public building” in the city for a time, a place where ship-masters, merchants and other citizens could gather.

Where Preston got his model for the Blue Anchor is unclear. A newspaper illustration of the tavern shows a somewhat different building, isolated on the shore and approached by row boat. It depicts Indians with bows and arrow looking on. The scene in Preston’s 1908 color lithograph shows a building of at least three stories with structure around it. Because the contours of both are the same, my guess is that improvements over the years and the growth of Philadelphia around the tavern led to the changes.

Although the brewery-sponsored picture entitles it the State House Tavern, because of its location across from the government center, this Chestnut Street drinking establishment also was known at various times as the Half Moon, Coach and Horses, and foremost as Clarke’s Inn. “The table was good, and the inn became one of the chief centers of official activity.”

Although Preston’s picture gives the structure a jaunty look, including figures bowling on the lawn, an earlier lithograph shows a much more austere Clarke’s. Robert Smith, the namesake of the brewery, in his Journal relates that an apprentice had ruin his malt by over-heating: “I being gone to the Half Moon for dinner.”

An advertisement in the Pennsylvania Packet of March 9, 1772, by owner James Alexander announced the Black Horse Inn, located on Second Street near Callowhill, calling it a “Commodious Inn of Entertainment” and convenient for market people. He went on describe its livery stable as “good as any in the Province,” able to stable as many as fifty horses at a time and offering “a good yard for coaches, chaises,and wagons.” Preston has caught much of this in his drawing, with a carriage and horses as major elements.

Although Anderson did not detail the kind of entertainment the Black Horse provided, another source has described it: “In 1805 two live porpoises were exhibited at the Black Horse and the following year the learned African Horse, “Spotie,” which had a tail like an elephant’s and a knowledge of arithmetic. The same year two royal tigers from Surat in Asia and a living sea-dog, taken on the Delaware River near Trenton, were shown.” Although the Black Horse did brisk business through the mid-19th Century, by 1917, as shown here, it had badly deteriorated.

Depicted by Preston amidst a wintery scene, the Moon and Seven Stars, standing at the southwest corner of Fourth and Chestnut Street, was one of the best known inns of its day. Standing between the Delaware River wharves and the State House, it served both the maritime and commercial communities. In addition: “Several clubs made it their meeting place, and all the leaders of American thought and action enjoyed the hospitality of its tap-room or its ordinary at one time or another.” On the lithograph, the sign of the Moon and Seven Stars appears very small. A reproduction captures it much better.

The Three Crowns was a public house famed for the good food set by its owner, a Mistress Jones. It was housed in a two-story building adjoining the south end of the City Tavern (see Part 1). It fronted on both Second Street and Walnut with a spacious courtyard that stretched to Dock Creek. “At that house Richard Penn and other governors, generals and gentry used to be feasted.” Mistress Jones’ tavern took its named from the sign of the Three Crowns.

The final lithograph is of the Spread Eagle Inn. It was located fourteen miles west of Philadelphia on the Lancaster Pike, one of the first turnpikes to be built in America. The Spread Eagle was the first relay station and stage house west of the city. Customers traveling on their way west as far as Pittsburgh would leave Philadelphia early in the morning and stop at the Spread Eagle for an ample breakfast. Preston’s picture captures the moment of such an arrival as the proprietor stands in the doorway to welcome his guests. The artist apparently took his visual clues from an earlier illustration, adding color and detail.

This building was replaced circa 1800 by a large stone tavern, also called the Spread Eagle. About 1824, the hostelry was greet with controversy when the original signboard, shown here, was changed by a local artist who added another neck and head to the representation of the American eagle, leading to considerable “political excitement.” Neighbors and wagoners could not see why “our glorious bird of freedom” should be altered into a European-like symbol. The tavern was derided as the “Split Crow” by dissidents, causing the sign hastily to be repainted — “Americanized” once more.

James Moore Preston’s colorful and engaging 1908 art works have allow a brief exploration of Philadelphia’s earliest and most historic inns and taverns, all of them but one long since disappeared. The exception is City Tavern, seen in Part 1 of this series. Another City Tavern has been reconstructed on the earlier site. Said to be a replica of the original, the building appears to be significantly different from Preston’s representation. In any case we can be grateful to the farsighted individuals for the Robert Smith Brewery who in 1908 commissioned these fascinating images to capture a bygone day.

As I write this post, the image of a man on a barrel sits before me. It is decoration on a small Doulton pottery cream jug from the Cheshire Cheese tavern off Fleet Street in London, similar to the bas relief Doulton figure shown here. “The man on the barrel” is a familiar figure to anyone interested in English pottery. Who is he and what does he represent?

First of all, the barrel is not just an empty keg convenient for sitting. It holds something alcoholic, rum perhaps or “sack,” a fortified white wine from Spain much favored by Shakespeare’s Falstaff or, later, bourbon whiskey. The man on the barrel is a drinking man — sometimes depicted as a drunkard. For example, here is Brussels faience jug from the late 1700s that depicts a man in a blue coat and yellow pantaloons who clearly has had one too many sips from that wineskin he has next to him.

Other men on barrels of that era could be local heroes. The one right is a reproduction of an original jug created in 1770 by Ralph Wood of Wood & Sons Pottery in Burslem, England. The figure is identified as Admiral Lord Howe, the much maligned leader of British naval forces in the American Revolution. This may have been made before the war with Howe looking benign and holding a foaming pot of beer. Was it done by friend or foe?

Skipping forward to the 19th Century is a wood engraving of the man on the barrel by Jean Frederic Wentzel, a French print-maker, born in Wissenbourg, France, in 1807. He specialized in images of ordinary life as seen in the France of his time and was very popular. Here he has captured a happy French peasant on a barrel with a spigot conveniently located from which to refill his bottle and glass of wine.

We are back in England with the next example, a flask of a jolly toper dubbed “Old Tom” sitting on a barrel, said to be ware from Rockingham. Given the inscription on the base, this item is from the Victorian era, about 1850. Also known as a “reform flask” it celebrates the Reform Act of 1832 in England.

Although he is similarly shaped and dressed, the next two fisted drinker with an all-over brown glaze is attributed to a pottery at Bennington, Vermont, dating from the early 1800s. Bennington was a convenient location for producing pottery because of the close proximity to local clay deposits, as well as deposits along the Hudson River. Bennington also had an abundant supply of waterpower from local streams, which was necessary to power the machinery used at the time. Around 1804 stoneware pottery was introduced and achieved notable success, eventually employing hundreds of people.

The late 1800s brought this depiction of a man sitting on a barrel while drinking a glass of wine. It comes from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire before its demise in World War One. My guess is the gent portrayed was a political figure who would have been recognizable to the people of the day.

In 1896, Gustav Schafer and Gunther Vater founded a factory in Thuringa, Germany, with the purpose of making high quality porcelain items. By 1910 the reputation of the pottery for craftsmanship and design had grown to international proportions and Sears Roebuck was importing and selling large quantities of Shafer and Vater ceramics in the United States.

Among the pottery’s products were a host of small figural liquor bottles called “nips.” The term is taken from an Old English word nipperkin, meaning a container of liquor holding a half pint or less. These German giveaways were always imported empty, then filled by a distiller, whiskey distributor, or saloonkeeper and handed off to favored customers. An example is the “Old Sedgwick” ceramic figural that carries the image of a jolly old Dutchman. It advertised a brand of whiskey from the A. Bauer Distillery of Chicago,

When National Prohibition was adopted in the U.S. in 1920, Schafer & Vater lost a major element of its business and retaliated by creating an image of Uncle Sam as the man on the barrel — a barrel that proclaims “What We Want” and shows Sam filling a glass from a bottle. This figure also came in brown on a tray with four cups.

The final man-on-the-barrel is a contemporary image of a pirate with an eye patch and wearing a bandana. He appears to be daring anyone to come close to tapping the keg on which he sits. Thus we have come full circle from the jolly toper who is sitting on the barrel in order to be as near as possible to the wine or liquor that fuels his joviality.

Beginning in elementary school until just recently, I have composed poetry in a number of modes, sometimes comic, sometimes more serious. In high school I wrote verse for the student newspaper. In college, I was poetry editor of the university’s literary magazine. In adulthood, for years I regularly contributed poems to a Northern Virginia nature newsletter and read appropriate verse at my company’s celebrations.

This introduces a contribution I made in 1996 to “The National Library of Poetry,” an Owings Mills, Maryland, publisher that regularly advertised for poems to be selected for its annual volume. It cost nothing to submit a poem and have it selected by this outfit, but contributors were expected to buy a $50 copy to see their creation in print — or maybe multiple copies to present to relatives and friends.

The entire enterprise seemed to me to be a charade. The objective of the National Library was not so much a search for good literature but a way of selling expensive books. It remained to prove my point. As a result I set out to write as bad a poem as has ever passed through the human mind and send it in. I called it “Life with Thea” and it goes like this:

Thea, she takes me from heaven into hell,

Her smile, it is heaven. I know it so well.

Is it only for me? I wish I could tell.

She tells me always that her heart is true,

She pledges daily: “Honey, I love only you

Using me? Abusing me? I wish I knew.

Refusing to disbelieve, but wondering still

Eternally uncertain, weak of will,

Life is passing, thinking of Thea, a chill

Yeasts through my body, my knees go weak

If I utter her name, I can hardly speak,

She is my present but the future is bleak.

Be my lover, Thea, be my friend,

Unique our beginning , uncertain the end,

Lead me again to heaven, let us ascend

Let us go together, Thea, do not hold back.

Surely you will be true to our pact

Help me on the way, find the track

Is this an inspiration I feel? Yes!

Thea is true, I know — O bless, O Bless!

Now that you have finished “Life with Thea” you must admit that it is one of the worst pieces of verse you have ever read. (Still and all I am proud of the image of a chill “yeastlng” through a body — it is awful but perfectly so.) The folks at the National Library of Poetry, however, were positively ecstatic. Note below the reaction of “M M” to it:

Not only were they going to print my poem in their annual volume called “Sound of Poetry,” but they found it fully worthy to be printed as well in “what promises to be the most historically important collection of poetry we have ever published.” To be called “America at the Millennium,” this volume reputedly would drastically winnow down the 1.2 million contributions allegedly received by the Library over the years to a select few of the best poems and poets of the Twentieth Century. “Life with Thea” had been chosen for that honor! Wow! Eat your heart out Robert Frost!

Yet this business is not all fun and games, as explained by Peter Armenti, a librarian at the Library of Congress, in a March 2012 post on his blog “From the Catbird Seat.” The Library, he says gets about two hundred inquiries a year from people who mistakenly believe that the Library of Congress publishes and sells those anthologies.

Armenti says the National Library may encourage the confusion by naming the Library of Congress in its copyright page. Note it below. The insert seems to identify the Congressional library as cataloguing the volume and assigning an ISBN number to it. In truth, he says, the Library “only rarely” buys copies for its collection and that this ISBN number was arbitrarily assigned by the publisher.\

In the end, though tempted, I did not allow “Life with Thea” to be published. As part of my test for the poetry “judges,” I had engineered the first letter of each line, if read down, to spell out a sentence — just to see if anyone was paying attention. The letters read: “This surely is bullshit.” Check it out above. Somehow it seemed to go over the bounds of propriety to permit that to be printed. If someday someone would recognize the scam it might lead to the firing of some underling. In the meantime, anyone can feel free to reprint “Life with Thea” — if they dare.

Labels: National Library of Poetry, Peter Armenti Library of Congress, "Sound of Poetry"

The subtle humor of a trade card entitled “God Bless Our Union”first led me to the artist whose name appears below the image of a mismatched couple. A very large woman is looking possessively at smaller stick of a man who seems much less assured of that the pairing is beneficial. The illustrator was John Henry Bufford, the first employer and art teacher of Winslow Homer and in his time a successful competitor of Currier & Ives. Subsequently overshadowed by both, Bufford’s success as a prolific American lithographer and illustrator unfortunately largely has been forgotten.

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bufford apprenticed in Boston and, by 1835, briefly moved to New York, where he opened a lithography business. Five years later he returned to Boston and formed a partnership with his brother-in-law in a new lithographic printing firm, for which he did most of the drawing. The business, with and without his brother-in-law as partner, thrived for the next forty years.

Shown here is a billhead from 1859 in which Bufford describes himself as a “practical lithographer,” meaning that he was turning out not just attractive pictures but practical items such as maps, covers for sheet music, and “show cards,” usually referred to today as trade cards. Many of those images would fill the upper two-thirds of a cardboard leaving space on the bottom for a message by a tradesman like William Kaess, a Poughkeepsie agent for a beer company who supplied hotels, restaurants and even families with Boehmisch Lager Beer.

Kaess issued a second slyly humorous Bufford card entitled“Warbling at Eve.” In this one the male partner seems to have the upper-hand as his lady clings close to him. The look in his eye and her submissiveness indicates that the warbling may soon occur between the sheets. Observers have pointed out that as he matured Bufford’s drawings became less realistic in favor of a “sketchier” look that for me enhances their appeal.

An example is a Bufford trade card that shows an exasperated father attempting to lull his crying baby to sleep while the clock registers 1:15 AM. Entitled “Oh, Rest Thee My Babe,” only the father’s frustrated head and face are fully realized in the drawing. The baby and the background are only lightly sketched; the contrast contributes to the humor.

Similarly, the next illustration, “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep,” only the figure of the man is fleshed out. He is well dressed, with a cravat and a coat. The wrinkles in his trouser legs are evident as he appears ready to be pitched out of whatever he is sleeping in. Is it a row boat? A bureau drawer? Or perhaps, as advertised, a cradle? In any case he seems to be sleeping off a bout with the bottle.

As the company matured and lithographic techniques improved, Bufford remained among the leaders. A 1872 house trade card for his “lithographic establishment” showed a well executed railroad engine to emphasize the speed with which the company executed lithography. Bufford employed what he called “the best talent in the world” as his artists. Among those were Winslow Homer put to work in his studio at age 19 drawing covers for sheet music.

Increasingly the Boston lithographer was employing color in his trade cards. Among them was a chaotic scene in which a thief attempting to abduct piglet is being challenged by the adult hogs in the pen. The thief is said to be in a “Pig-A-Rious Position.” My efforts to find something about the advertiser, Henry Max, and his saloon have gone unrewarded.

A late series of trade cards from Bufford, issued about 1887, involved anthropomorphic renderings of fruits and vegetables. “An Orange Man” shows a dude with a citrus head and orange trousers posing in front of an orchard. It was issued by Mabley & Company, a department store located in Detroit, Michigan, that featured 62 departments selling a wide range of goods including clothing and shoes.

Bufford also gave the world a look at what a true cabbage head might look like, dressed with a top hat, three-button coat and beltless britches. Fittingly the figure is shown standing in front of a cabbage patch. On another card the head is of a man but his body is largely a potato shown bulging out of the checked pants the ma is wearing. Labeled“Potato Bug,” the illustration also shows a black man working in the potato fields behind the figure and looking on in astonishment.

The final trade card shown here continues the idea of a vegetable composing part of a human body — in this case, corn. The high-stepping gentleman playing the horn wears a skirt of corn silk and a leaf as a shawl. The caption is a bad pun, “Corn-et Dance,” a far cry from the subtle humor of Bufford’s earlier products. The master had died in 1870 and my assumption is that other, less subtle, artists were carrying on the work.

On June 15, 1882, the U.S. Patent Office received an application for a patent from William H. Maxwell of Rochester, Pennsylvania, a town not far from Pittsburgh. Maxwell, submitting the drawlng shown here, said he had invented “a new and useful improvement in the manufacure of Glass Paper-Weights and other Articles of Glass….” Granted a patent in September, Maxwell over the next six years produced myriad glass weights using his invention. As one writer has said: The Maxwell paperweight is a rare and treasured item for any collector to have in his possession.”

Although I do not own a Maxwell weight, they have always fascinated me by their unique qualities of design and the fact that after Maxwell’s firm disappeared in the late 1880s, no other glassmakers subsequently have tried to replicate the effects he was able to achieve with his distinctive concave base and varying motifs captured in solid glass. Maxwell’s products may be divided into three categories. One were one-of-a-kind portrait weights with actual photographs of unidentified people encased in them, as the one shown here. Unfortunately, because they bear no identification of the subject, they are of limited interest.

The second category were weights that featured a business. These were mass produced — and probably the major profit center for Maxwell — for businesses who provided them to their customers for advertising purposes. Among the most interesting of those paperweights is one commissioned by the B. W. Wood & Bros. Coal Merchants of New Orleans. The main feature is a tug boat, apparently one of two owned by the company and named for members of the Wood family. A New Orleans Times-Democrat article of March 9, 1882, featured the owner describing him thus: “Wood is the prince of gentlemen and will pass anywhere as pure gold.”

The next weight advertises the S. P. Shotter & Co, a businessman who began his company in Wilmington, North Carolina and later moved it to Savannah, Georgia. His company, among other things, made “brewer’s pitch” related to the yeast used in brewing. The major interest on the weight is the image of two small boys, possibly black, sitting on a barrel. Shotter probably would not pass as “pure gold” like B. W. Wood. According to news stories in May 1909, as chairman of the board of a company Shotter was sentenced to three months in jail and fined the equivalent today of $125,000 for violating the Sherman anti-trust law.

Residing in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the Metzger & Company roofers were neighbors to Maxwell’s glass blowing operation. One can imagine the owner visiting the factory to check out and approve the design, particularly the look of the roof feature. This weight, like others shown here was a large three inches in diameter and one and three quarters inches high. The pontil marks on these weights was smooth and fire polished, allowing some to bear Maxwell’s signature or a stamped maker’s mark.

A final weight in the advertising category is from the Amazon Fire Insurance Company of Cincinnati. It shows a man on horseback with a spear lancing a fiercesome creature on the ground, ala depictions of St. George and the dragon. This horseman, however, seems to be naked from the waist up. This firm was headed by a president with the unusual name of Gazam Gano and reported $847,000 in assets for 1871.

The last and perhaps most interesting category of Maxwell weights were those one of a kind paperweights ordered by an individual or perhaps a group to be given to a specific person as a memento. Prominent among them is a item that depicts a railroad train in considerable detail, down to the number 544 on the coal car. It appears to have been given to John H. Doyle by a Miss Maggie Tattersall. Why? Were they sweethearts? Was this an engagement gift? The speculation can be endless.

A second individualized Maxwell weight appears to have been made for a woman named Irene Zieg who apparently was competent enough in playing the coronet as to be allowed to play solos. The picture of the instrument seems well rendered and presented in two colors. It assuredly must have encouraged Irene on those dismal days when she brought her coronet to a party and no one asked her to play.

Another professional based paperweight was provided to R. T. Betzold who presumably was a pharmacist in Baltimore. My initial efforts to find this Betzold through city directories of the time have been unsuccessful. The major element here is the mortar and pestle, often a symbol of the druggist trade. Again we have two colors, with green plants, perhaps themselves symbols of medicinal remedies, flanking the mortar.

The final Maxwell paperweight was a gift to J. W. Hum, likely related to his activities as a Mason. I was able to trace him to a news item in which he is numbered among the men who founded a new Pittsburgh Masonic chapter, called the St. James Lodge. Hum subsequently was elected treasurer of the organization. This weight I consider the apex of Maxwell’s art. It is multi-colored, involving shades of yellow, brown and green, with a delicately crafted vegetative design. There are other weights with a similar motif, including one for “T.B. Wells, Chicago” and one with Maxwell’s own name on it and the date 1882 — marking when he first patented his invention.

Maxwell’s professional career was filled with mishaps. In 1879 a fire at his glassworks destroyed the entire factory. His second effort was thwarted in 1883 when a problem with a furnace shut down the plant and caused him to put it up for sale. Even though he patented a second invention for improving printing on glass, mention of his firm ceases in the late 1800s. Maxwell died in 1901, the cause described as alcoholism and exposure. For less than a decade, however, this inventive glassmaker provided hundreds of weights, now eagerly sought by collectors.

During the last 45 years from time to time people have given me magazine and newspaper cartoons that they believe have some particular relevance to my life. Sometimes the motivation is that the drawings cite my given or surname; sometimes because they are relevant to a particular chapter or event in my life. I have kept those cartoons and, exclusively in this post, now present them in what seems like a reasonable order.

The first cartoon is from Gary Larsen depicting two couples separated by tiny islands, one frolicking on an automobile tire hanging from a palm tree. The wife of the other couple, apparently critical, remarks: “Well, the Sullivans are out on their tire again.” This scene recalls those giddy years 1963-1965 when as newlyweds my wife, Paula, and I lived in Georgetown, D.C., and did at least our share of partying.

But ambition also had to have its day and a New Yorker cartoon seeming caught me at my desk as a young Congressional staffer — appropriately the sideburns, glasses and tie — admonishing my wife: “Paula, how many times have I told you not to bother me when I’m on the way up.” (She likely was calling to say one of the children had croup.)

Charles Rodrigues (1926-2004) did not know me when he penned the cartoon above for Playboy, using my surname. But the situation in my House Foreign Affairs Committee office with my colleague, Jack Brady, was highly pertinent. The other prisoner wants to spring Sullivan “in the faint hope of getting your incessant babble out of this cell.” Brady frequently told me: “With you the second bullshitter never has a chance!”

No question but when Jimmy Carter won the Presidency in 1976 that I wanted out of the Committee “cell” and a place in the Administration. Another colleague spotted this cartoon by Barney Tobey (1906-1988) in the New Yorker that shows two college professors seeking a “nibble from the Carter transition team.” I was fortunate enough to get that nibble and ended up as head of the Asia and Pacific Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

During my four years as head of the Asia Bureau, I trust my service was not as authoritarian as the cartoon right. The drawing was altered to fit the occasion and sent to me by one of my staff, a noted jokester. In 1980, Reagan having won the presidency from Jimmy Carter, I was thrust after 20 years back into the private sector, working for an international consulting firm. One of my friends thought that the Bill Long cartoon was appropriate to my new situation.

During the period of adjustment, I was engaged in a variety of activities, including organizing kazoo bands, both among extended family members and my co-workers at the consulting firm. As a result, a Gary Larsen cartoon of cavemen playing a tune on what appear to be lizards appealed to at least one family member as appropriate for me.

In his inaugural address in 1989, George H. W. Bush mentioned “a thousands points of light…all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good.” The comment gave rise to a multitude of cartoons at the time, including one by Robert Maxwell Weber, known for over 1,400 cartoons that appeared in The New Yorker from 1962 to 2007. Given my obsession with televised sports, this one had a certain appropriateness.

The final cartoon by Dave Coverly (born 1964) below, also has some relevance. Although ordered to retire at age 75 by my consulting firm boss after twenty-some years on the job, a man who might be compared with one at the podium, I quit and got another job right away. But if there had been a retirement ceremony for “Jack,” I might well have written my own “goodbye.”

They say that art imitates life. It would seem that idea can be expanded to cartoons that, now and again, have imitated my life. Or was my life imitating those cartoons?

I continued to be astonished, amused, attracted — you find a word — for the use of children in beer ads in the pre-Prohibition era, that is, before 1920. This is my third post on the subject. I find that some brewers regularly used kids to sell their suds. Two of them are profiled here. Others seem to have featured them as a “one off,” among a variety of images.

Franz Falk’s Bavaria Brewery of Milwaukee (1856-1892) may have set a record for the use of children in its ads. In addition of two trade cards I have already shown, I have collected five more images, like the one shown right. Initially Falk seems to have been reluctant to show the youngsters in close association with his beer. This card shows two children ice skating, with the male on the right holding the hand of the girl. Although skating is a common winter occupation in Milwaukee, the presence of mountains in the background make it clear we are not in Wisconsin

We might be in Bavaria because that is where Falk got his start, learning how to make beer in a local brewery. He struck out for the U.S. in 1848 settling first in Cincinnati and three months later went to Milwaukee with its strong German population. By that time all of Milwaukee’s famous breweries — Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz - had been established. Falk found work at smaller breweries, saving his money until in 1855 with a partner, he built a malting and brewing enterprise in the city’s Menomonee Valley.

Shown above, a second kiddie card from Falk depicts a young girl contemplating a golf club. There is no indication what this illustration may have to do with beer. Later trade cards are more explicit in that connection, for example showing a youthful waiter attempting to bring bottles and glasses full of Franz Falk Brewing Co.’s Milwaukee Export Beer while a dog imperils the exercise by biting onto the lad’s belt.

Although a similar disaster is implied by a trade card of a small girl who seemingly has been carrying three bottles of beer and two glass goblets on her apron. She is finding out that the arrangement does not work well as the items begin to spill on the ground. The little curly hair does not seem to mind, however, as she provides a wan smile. The only youngster who seems to be having no trouble getting beer from here to there is a well-dressed black girl. She has put her beers in a sturdy basket.

In a city full of breweries, Falk’s advertising apparently was successful. By 1872, Franz’s was the fourth largest in Milwaukee. In 1880 the Bavaria brewery consisted of five brick and stone buildings, including the yards, outbuildings, and side track to the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. The site occupied about 5 acres, operating with eight icehouses and on-site malting production of approximately 100,000 bushels annually. Falk employed 100 men, twelve teams of horses and operated its own cooperage. In addition Falk owned their own rail cars for shipping beer. After a major fire in 1892, however, the Falk family sold out to Pabst.

The Krug Brewery is another that featured children on it's advertising trade cards. As shown above, Krug went a step further than Falk by showing its kids sitting at a table with bottle and glasses of beer of varying amount of liquid. They are announced as having a “theatre party,” dressed in costume. The text makes clear that Krug’s “Cabinet Beer” is “specially brewed for family use” — apparently no matter how young.

In 1859 Fred Krug established the Krug Brewery with an original output of one and a half barrels a day. Located in Downtown Omaha, by 1880 the company was brewing approximately 25,000 barrels a year. In 1894 the brewery moved to new facilities adjacent to South Omaha. The plant cost $750,000 and was reportedly one of the best equipped breweries in the country. Fred was doing well by making children his salespersons and emphasizing family use.

I am particularly struck by one trade cards that show a young lad perched on a stool with a large bottle of Krug’s Cabinet beer on the table in front of him. He is said to be writing a testimonial to the brew, which would indicate considerable personal interaction with the bottles. It likely read, as does the card, “Cabinet Beer bring Health and Joy to Every Family.”

My favorite kiddie ad for beer is the toddler depicted on a trade card by the Indianapolis Brewing Company, the city’s biggest and longest-lived brewery. Formed in 18897 from a consolidation of three already established brewing companies in the Indiana city. It survived through National Prohibition and continued operations until 1948.

The last example here is a trade card from the Imperial Brewing Company, the creation of a group of Kansas City investors who saw a growing market for lager beer in a burgeoning population. Financed at $50,000, the facility was to have a brewing capacity of 50,000 barrels. Plagued by problems of profitability, it went bankrupt in in 1905, had new ownership that changed the name and downgraded Imperial from its flagship brand. The trade card makes use of the art work of Ellen Clapsaddle, whose depictions of wee ones were highly popular at the turn of the 20th Century. The card here would have been sent by the brewery at Christmas.

None of these images of children selling beer survived after the fourteen years of National Prohibition. By then sensibilities about advertising of alcoholic beverages had changed markedly and it was no longer appropriate to identify kids with booze. Thus these images are now just short of one hundred years old and approaching “antique status.”

Note: For this blog my first post on the subject of “Kids Selling Beer” was June 18, 2011, followed by a second article on May 21, 2016. A post devoted to the life and work of Ellen Clapsaddle ran on March 2, 2012.

Although homo sapienshave been chewing a variety of substances for centuries, it was an American, John B. Curtis, who first commercialized chewing gum in 1848. He knew that American Indians chewed resin made from the sap of spruce trees and decided a market existed. As time went along other enterprising individuals enhanced the product by using other chewing substances and adding flavorings. Today annual sales of worldwide are in excess of $26 billion annually. Much of this growth can be laid to the imaginative, vigorous promotions by U.S. gum companies, including the use of glass advertising paperweights and change trays.

This post is devoted to a selection of these, beginning with a 1931 weight from the Beech-Nut Packing Co. of New York. Best known for baby food, the company launched its line of chewing gum in 1910. In May 1931, the famous aviatrix Amelia Earhart flew across America in an aircraft that had been specially made for her by the Beech-Nut folks to promote their chewing gum. Called an “autogiro,” they featured it on a paperweight. A forerunner of the helicopter, this was a relatively new aviation design that many at the time believed to be dangerous. Earhart made the trip safely only to disappear over the Pacific six years later.

Teaberry Gum, celebrated on a weight, dates from about 1900 when it was patented by Charles Burke, an inventor from Pittsburgh who was experimenting with various flavors of chewing gum in his basement. Commercialized by the D. L. Clark Co. of Pittsburgh the product managed a slow and steady sales record, peaking in the 1960s when Clark, hoping to create a dance craze called “The Teaberry Shuffle,” created commercials using the Mexican-themed music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. The dance failed to catch on and more recently manufacture of the gum went “south of the border.”

Few among us have never tasted Juicy Fruit, particularly popular with kids. The average age of the typical Juicy Fruit consumer reputedly is under 20, with three to eleven year olds making up 60% of the business. The Wrigley Company that issued the paperweight above, first marketed the gum in 1893. Although the brand name is familiar to 99% of American polled, there is strong disagreement about what fruit serves as the model for Juicy Fruit flavor. Some say a combination of banana and pineapple, others jackfruit, still others get a whiff of peach. Wrigley won’t say.

Thomas Adams, an American scientist and inventor, is credited with substituting a natural gum called “chicle” for resin and founded a company that soon dominated the market with Black Jack, rolled out in 1884, and Chiclets, 1889. Prosperity allowed Adams to experiment with new flavors and substances, including pepsin, the chief digestive enzyme in the stomach. By using pepsin (or claiming to) the gum could be marketed as a digestive aid. Since the enzyme apparently has little flavor, the company could add the taste of “tutti frutti” to the mix and issue a paperweight to celebrate it.

“I didn’t know that the Coca-Cola Company once upon a time issued a chewing gum?” You didn’t because Coca-Cola didn’t. This gum was produced by an entirely different outfit, The Coca-Cola Gum Company of Atlanta. Although Coke’s people fiercely protected their trade name, by contract they allowed the gum to carry their trademark but insisted that the product include Coca-Cola as an ingredient. A 1904 ad asserted that Coca-Cola Gum “contains the delightful tonic properties of Coca-Cola.” The public, however, seemed averse to chewing — rather than drinking — their Coke. Despite a dandy paperweight the gum company was in business only a short time.

Mo-Jo Gum may have been a latecomer to the chewing wars, made by The Chicle Products Company of Newark, New Jersey. Its ads, circa 1915, were aimed squarely at denigrating the competition, suggesting that the others contained impurities. “We have no monopoly, we simply will not make Dirty Chewing Gum.” Take that Adam’s Black Jack! Symbolizing its “purity” Mo-Jo was white but its labels, as shown on a weight, were highly colorful, likely to appeal to children. Just how a tiger, squirrel and macaw sent a message of “pure, clean chewing gum” has gone unexplained. Another Mo-Jo label featured an alligator and two egrets.

One of dozens of gum companies that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th Century America was the Chusit Gum Company that shows up in Cincinnati business directories around 1903. It was a company headed by a well-known local businessman and investor named O. M. Bake, with an equally prestigious group of officers. Their financial gamble, symbolized by the dice they included in their paperweight, may not have paid off because the company shortly disappeared from directories. The name they chose for their gum, however, was clever, suggesting both “chews it” and “choose it.”

As an afficianado of bubble gum myself, I am reminded that the product, invented in 1928 by Walter Diemer for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company of Philadelphia, disappeared during World War II, as I was growing up, possibly because of a shortage of basic materials. Fleers’ Double Bubble, the first commercially made bubble gum, made sales of $1.5 million the first year of its marketing even at one cent a pop. To help sell the new gum, Diemer himself taught salespeople how to blow bubbles so that they in turn could teach potential customers. In the post-war period, bubble gum returned and Double Bubble issued a number of paperweights, each with the same motif but various names attached of their dealers and representatives.

Bazooka bubble gum, always my favorite, was first marketed in the U.S. shortly after WWII by the Tops Company of Brooklyn, New York. As advertised on the weight shown here, the company included within its wrapper a color comic strip called “Bazooka Joe,” harking back to the war when “bazooka” was the name given to a man-portable recoilless anti-tank rocket launcher. The offer of a “free gift” on the paperweight was a bit misleading. For example, a telescope was offered “free” if someone sent in 200 Bazooka comics but just five and 40 cents also would suffice.

The ten paperweights shown here help to anchor in time chewing gum, a product developed more than a century and half ago as a result of American ingenuity and inventive spirit. As a result, the jaws of Americans, and indeed the world, ever since have been working up and down with regularity — “chewin,’ chawin’, chewing gum.”

Foreword: This is the third in a series of posts demonstrating how American whiskey distillers, rectlifiers (blenders), and wholesalers used the image of Uncle Sam prior to 1920 as the Prohibition “noose” tightened on the industry. It was a ploy to lend a patriotic aspect to their marketing. But as the cartoon shown here indicates, the force of “dry” also saw Uncle Sam abetting the liquor industry by profiting significantly from the taxes collected. Before 1920 the largest source of federal revenues were excise taxes on alcohol.

The trade card from “Wolf’s Famous Distilling Company” of Kansas City was a typical depiction of Uncle Sam in the whiskey trade. The old gentleman is pointing to a federal revenue stamp on “Wolf’s Monogram Whiskey” that indicates it has been “bottled in bond,” that is, under government mandated conditions that dictated length of aging, alcoholic strength or “proof” and other requirements in return for delayed taxation. Although the claim that the stamp guaranteed “strength” might have some validity, it had nothing to do with quality or purity.

“Freeland Sour Mash” was a whiskey brand from Henry W. Smith & Company of Cincinnati. Although this outfit has been described as operating a distillery in Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from 1890 to 1901, records indicate that Smith was a rectifier, re-distilling and blending whiskeys obtained from Kentucky distilleries, particularly several in the Covington area, Federal District #2. It somewhat strange then that Uncle Sam is shown sitting whittling on the 7th District in Kentucky, some distance from Cincinnati.

The Yellowstone Whiskey ad specifically identifies Uncle Sam with “Bottled in Bond. A whiskey wholesaler, the firm of Taylor & William was established in Louisville just after the Civil War in 1865. In 1871 the sales manager, Charles Townsend, made an annual trip to the West Coast. En route he visited the newly opened Yellowstone National Park and, noting the enthusiasm over this natural wonder, decided it might be a good idea to name a whiskey after it. Viola! a

national brand was born!

This tradecard from what purports to be “Mascot Rye,” is an unusual depiction of Uncle Sam. In the first place, he is without his trademark top hat and bears a collar on which is written “honest and good as I am.” The label on the bottle bears an image of a horseman riding through a horseshoe and identifies J. Polsnek” of Akron, Ohio, as the source of the whiskey. My extensive research on Polsnek and Mascot Rye has failed to reveal any information on either.

By contrast, George Benz & Sons are well documented St. Paul, Minnesota, whiskey wholesales and eventually distillers, after buying the Blue Ribbon Distillery in Eminence, Kentucky. One of the company’s premier brands was “Uncle Sam’s Monogram Whiskey.” The image of Uncle, however, gives him dark skin, looking like a strutting performer in black face.

A second representation of this whiskey in a Benz saloon sign, finds him safely white, albeit with a pot belly. George Benz and his wife bore five sons, many of whom entered the business. In 1887, the name was changed to George Benz & Sons to reflect their role in the business. The sons continued the enterprise following George Benz's death in 1908 at age 69, switching to real estate upon the advent of Prohibition in 1918.

This ad for McCulloch’s Green River Whiskey, a major Kentucky bourbon is more subtle in its identification of Uncle Sam with the product. In the background, is one or more “guagers,” federal officials tasked with testing each barrel from the distiller to ascertain the “proof,” i.e. percentage of alcohol contained on which the tax can be levied. It may be symbolic That Uncle Sam is looking away from the testing process and busy whittling. Too often, it seems, distillers bribed the gaugers to under-report the alcoholic content and lower their tax obligations.

Theodore Netter, one of several Philadelphia brothers who were in the liquor trade, united two symbols of America for his trade card. Uncle Sam stands on one side and (Miss) Freedom, here wrapped in the flag, stand toasting each other. Netter adds in a shield to claim that his blended — and not bottled in bond — “American Famous Fine Whiskey” is “guaranteed under the National Pure Food Act.” This was yet another false claim in an effort to appear government approved. The food and drug authorities soon reacted to such claims and levied sanctions against their use.

The notion of not just one but two symbols of the United States also appealed to the Scottish makers of Haig Whiskey. A trade card for American consumers featured Miss Liberty of statue fame holding aloft a bottle of the famous pinch bottle while Uncle Sam takes an obsequious bow before this United Kingdom import. Haig distillery, now known as the Cameronbridge Distillery was founded in 1824. In 1830, it became the first distillery to produce grain whiskey using the column still method.

Each of the images above was created before 1920 and the advent of National Prohibition. After Repeal in 1934, and the effective end of the “dry” threat, the use of Uncle Sam as a symbol for whiskey merchandising largely came to and end. From time to time, however, a whiskey-maker will decide to resurrect the image in whole or in part. One of the nation’s oldest and most iconic brands not so long ago decided to advertise its longevity at Christmas time by stowing a bottle with a gift package in Uncle Sam’s top hat. The simplicity of the design can be compared with those shown earlier.

Note: The two prior treatments on this blog that featured Uncle Sam in liquor ads were “Enlisting Uncle Sam as Booze Salesman,” October 1, 2011, and “Return of Uncle Sam - Whiskey Salesman,” February 15, 2012.

Foreword: This is the fourth and likely final post devoted to funeral home ambulances that have been preserved on glass paperweights and celluloid pocket mirrors. Funeral homes seemed to gravitate to these advertising items and almost always emphasized their ambulance services, despite the fact that in many instances the vehicle doubled as a hearse. While today such dual-use conveyances are banned by law, in many U.S. localities, particularly rural areas, the local undertaker also provides ambulance services. Below are nlne paperweights that help tell the story.

The first weight shown here features the oldest ambulance of the group. It is a horse-drawn conveyance from Hindle & Bayles, undertakers located at Fifth and H Streets in Washington, D.C. The proprietors were Thomas A. Hindle and William A. Bayliss. Hindle with wife Agnes apparently had his residence at the funeral home. Bayliss, an immigrant from Nova Scotia, lived close by with his family.

Although the Mitchell-Fleming Funeral Home no longer exists in Tulsa or its branches in two other Oklahoma cities, the mortician’s records have proven of great interest to historians looking into the Tulsa race riot of May-June 1921. Those tragic events left at least 39 dead, 35 blocks of a middle-class black neighborhood burned out, and an estimated 10,000 people homeless. During that period it appears that the Mitchell-Fleming ambulance operated mainly as a hearse, taking the dead for burial — at least twenty of the black victims to the city’s Oaklawn Cemetery.

The Geo. W. Scott undertakers at 2950 W. Madison Street in Chicago provided a “perfect ambulance service” using a Dodge motor vehicle that quite clearly could double as a hearse. Note the outside ornamentation and the fancy windows. Although I have been able to find out little about this establishment, someone saw it as significant and recently paid $137.50 at auction to own this pocket mirror.

Ford’s Funeral Home in Gastonia, North Carolina, was true to its name. Those appear to be three Ford motor cars lined up in front of the pillared mansion that apparently is the funeral home, some of the vehicles on call for ambulance duty. In its newspaper advertising, Ford’s, located at 137 South York Street, claimed the title “Leading Morticians” and took telephone calls both day and night.

In a departure from the usual, Greenhoe-Hatch ambulance service put photos of the proprietors on their paperweight. They had pooled their talents, Barney W. Greenhoe earlier having operated Greenhoe’s Chapel and Fred F. Hatch employed at the Colonial Funeral Home. They advertised vigorously in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, business directory as “funeral directors and licensed embalmers…service our motto.” They could provide a private ambulance with a “lady attendant” or rent customers a limousine.

Geo. H. Long gives few clues to the city and state in which he plied his “motor ambulance.” A bit of research reveals that Long was doing business in Kansas City, Missouri, located at 10th Street and Barnett Avenue. He was one of 35 undertaking establishments listed in a Independence business directory, indicating that competition was brisk. A large display ad in a 1924 business directory featured photos of both George and his wife, announcing “Kansas City’s Original Independent Undertaker…Assisted by MRS. LONG.”

Some funeral homes advertised their ambulance services without having to display the actual vehicle. So was it with the paperweight issued by the Beardsley Funeral Home. Edith and Sam Beardsley were an early “power couple” in Chariton, Iowa, said to be innovators at a time when undertaking was shifting from a furniture store sideline to full-time profession. Like the Longs of Kansas City both Beardsleys were involved in the business so that when Sam unexpectedly dropped dead, Edith continued to operate the funeral home on her own for nearly 20 more years.

The next paperweight uses an illustration of the Frank A. Buley Funeral Home while advertising its ambulance service. Unfortunately I cannot read the smaller type on the items and have not been able to locate the establishment, one that appears to have been sited in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The final paperweight depicts neither motor vehicle nor mortuary, but is strong for the ambulance service it provided in Wichita, Nebraska. This one combines a weight with a mirror on the bottom. Turning it over and looking into it reveals “a friend of ours.” Wichita Undertaking Parlors were the scene of a dispute in January, 1921, about whether a prominent Wichita businessman, Joseph Nichols, had shot himself in a suicide as he lay pinned under his own automobile. The coroner said yes. As he lay at the parlor for the viewing, Nichols’ family and friends contended vehemently that he was trying to fire in the air to call for help but accidentally had shot himself.

There they are — nine more artifacts of a time when a hearse could double as an ambulance, and vice versa. This makes a total of thirty such paperweights and five pocket mirrors presented on this blog — a collection in its own right.

Note: My first article on this subject,“Where to Buddy? Hospital or Graveyard?” was posted during July 2009. It presented six paperweights and two pocket mirrors. A second, called “Chasing the Ambulance: But Wait…Is It a Hearse?” followed in May 2013. That one displayed ten weights. A third entitled “Funeral Home Ambulances: A Conflict of Interest?” was illustrated with five paperweights, two pocket mirrors and three other advertising items. It appeared in November 2016.

Shown above is a tee-shirt that now resides in the Anthropology Division of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, an item of clothing that I donated several months ago. Why should such a mundane artifact deserve preservation one of America’s premier museums? Therein lies a tale.

In March 1989 as a consultant I was selected by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in coordination with AFL-CIO officials, to lead a team to evaluate USAID-funded, union-run programs aimed at assisting black labor organizations in South Africa. My being selected was related to similar prior evaluations and my history as a member of a labor union.

The assignment proved to be a memorable one. While the policies of the George H. W. Bush Administration were not antagonistic to South Africa, still in the grip of “Apartheid” policies that denied blacks virtually any rights, pressures to do something for that population had led to funding a modest AFL-CIO program.

Agents of the South African government followed me and my evaluation team everywhere. Under cover of night we were forced to meet union leaders like Cyril Ramaphosa, show here, then the head of the black mine workers union (NUM) and now president of South Africa.

Despite the surveillance, the team’s evaluation went well and about a year later, I led a team on a follow-up assignment. During the ensuing period things had changed. F. W. de Klerk, shown here, now was president. He was moving to remove discriminatory laws and had indicated that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison. My team was not followed. Somewhat dissatisfied with the AFL-CIO program, USAID employees had begun their own labor initiatives.

One of their efforts involved a garment factory in Durban. Although the project was beyond my mandate, the Mission Director asked me to go to Durban to assess the situation. Purchased from a private individual and now owned by USAID, the factory had been given to the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) to operate. That union only recently had been formed from two completing unions. SACTWU was multi-racial and predominantly made up of women.

The idea of USAID owning a South African clothing factory was intriguing and I soon hied off from Pretoria to Durban, shown here. At the airport I was picked up by SACTWU representatives and taken to the site — the Zenzeleni Clothing (Pty) Ltd. Inside, dozens of workers, mostly female, were busy in all stages of making items of clothing but chiefly tee-shirts, some with militant messages. As part of the formalities of the afternoon, I was presented with the shirt shown at the top of this post. The raised fists so prominent in the design were a note of militancy against the government and its restrictive laws against black unions.

While it was evident that the factory was clean, well-lighted and appeared to be operating efficiently, the thought was unsettling that a U.S. government agency owned it and had given its use to an organization strongly opposed to the existing government. While I agreed with the sentiments on the SACTWU tee-shirt, my recommendation to the Mission was to divest itself of the factory as rapidly as possible, potentially by arranging to give it outright to SACTWU. Eventually that occurred. A Zenezeleni clothing outfit still exists in Durban. I have no idea of its relation to the factory I visited.

Upon my return to the U.S., I stopped in London to discuss the South African situation with officials of the British Trade Union Congress (TUC ). In the midst of our discussion, a staff member burst into the room to announced that Nelson Mandela had been released from his Robin Island prison. A new era was about to begin in South Africa.

In subsequent years, I wore the SACTWU tee-shirt to Labor Day picnics. In recent times, however, it languished in my closet until it occurred to me that the tee-shirt deserved to be preserved as a historical artifact. After some calls and emails, I was put in touch with Dr. Mary Jo Arnoldi, a specialist of African anthropology at the Natural History Museum. After consideration of my gift by Smithsonian curators, it was — to my great glee — accepted for accession and available for posterity. That is the tale of the tee-shirt.

Afterword: In 1995 I returned on business to South Africa. By that time union leaders with whom I had met surreptitiously were cabinet members. They included Jay Naidoo, shown here, who had headed the black union federation, COSATU. Now he was Secretary of Labor in the Mandela government and about to issue a new labor law, one replacing the Apartheid period laws. I was humbled by his making me an “honored guest” at the ceremony attending the new law.

Coming across a set of comic postcards that Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee issued before National Prohibition, I decided to make the cards and several other examples the subject of a post. Although I am from Milwaukee and knew something about the family, some additional research revealed that although the Millers could see humor in their brewing efforts, tragic events seemed to stalk them.

First the Miller cards: It is a set of six, artist unknown, in which the comic theme was linked to various modes of transportation ostensibly available in Milwaukee. Street cars were common in the city but none like the one shown below. Entitled “A Trolley Ride in Milwaukee,” the card depicts a beer barrel teaming with passengers, all seemingly drinking beer, rolling down the tracks on bottle caps (!) in front of the Miller plant. A pedestrian has been knocked down and a dachshund runs along side.

“The Water Wagon in Milwaukee” enlists two of those “weiner dogs” to pull another High Life barrel that has been transformed into a street sprinkling device while locals aboard enjoy steins and goblets of beer. Note that the gent sitting right behind the driver holds an outsized bottle of Miller beer. Unlike its Milwaukee competitors, Miller always sold in clear (not amber) bottles.

Even a sightseeing van could become a vehicle using a High Life Beer barrel to hold customers. The engine is case of Miller bottles, the wheels are sausages, and one of those weiner dogs is running along side. Although the beer-swigging passengers are alleged to be “touring Milwaukee,” they appear to be in front of, what else, the Miller brewery.

One of Miller’s bottles became the “S. S. High Life” on the next postcard. Although the ship seems to be steaming through choppy waters, the crew seems mostly intent on drinking beer, ignoring the mustached captain who is peering anxiously at the horizon. Note that the ship’s antenna is a string of hot dogs.

An intact beer barrel became a substitute for a balloon in a postcard entitled “In Milwaukee Looking Over the Town.” It illustrates three hirsute men floating over the Miller Brewing Co. The pilot carries a stein of beer while one passenger carries a foaming goblet and a second is sucking at a hose directly connected with the barrel. The propeller is four bottles of Miller High Life beer.

The final card in this series is an airplane with weiners and pretzels for struts and sausages for propellors. At the single control is a little old man who seems as intent on his foaming stein of beer as he does on piloting responsibilities. As aways the brewery provides the terrestrial scenery.

Although these postcards deserve special attention for the their ingenious designs and humor, Miller also provided other light-hearted cards, some of them linked to Milwaukee. Seen here is one that presumably shows a stout German gentleman swigging from a bottle and intoning “How Ish Dot for High Life Beer. The brewery issued it at a time when it was not uncommon to hear German spoken in everyday discourse.

A final card likely dates from the post-Prohibition era when Miller was able to resume making beer. It shows a suited gentleman looking at a soaring thermometer in the heat of a summer while holding a towel to sop his brow.

In the next frame, he has found a bottle of Miller High Life and as the cartoon indicates, the temperature is going down.

The use of humor by the Miller Brewery to sell beer, while not unique in Milwaukee, was taken to a new level by that company. It made all the more interesting when one considers the tragic circumstances that have plagued the Miller family over the years. I was in Milwaukee in 1954 when Frederick C. Miller, the president of the firm, and his college age son both were killed when their plane crashed on take off.

The original brewery founder, Frederick Edward John Miller, and also suffered heartaches. He and his wife Josephine had six children, most of whom did not survive infancy. Josephine is said to have died of influenza in 1860 while on a trip traveling back to the couple’s German homeland, leaving Frederick with a two-year old daughter who herself would succumb to tuberculosis at age 16.

Although Frederick married a second time and sired five children who survived to run the brewery after his death, this marriage also produce several children who died in infancy. In an 1879 letter, Miller offered a glimpse of his personal torments: "Think of me and what I had to endure - I have lost several children and a wife in the flower of their youth…."Whenever I think of all of them, how they were taken away from me so quickly and unexpectedly, then I become sad and melancholy….”

Anyone looking in on this blog from time to time will recognized my fixation with glass paperweights, particularly those that advertise a product or place from an earlier era. Recently I have been intrigued with weights that feature animals in unusual — indeed, weird — situations and am happy here to share their images.

A good example is a glass weight that shows an alligator in harness pulling a wagon driven by a small boy. The caption says “Driving Bessie at the Florida Alligator Farm” in Jacksonville, Florida. The farm was the outgrowth of an “antiquarian Disneyland” called Dixieland Park, opened in 1907 as “The Coney Island of the South.” The venue featured a wide variety of rides, animals and other attractions. Largely shut down after World War One, the park acquired a large number of alligators and was renamed the Florida Alligator Farm. By the 1930s the entire collection was sold to what is now the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.

A key element of the earlier Dixieland Park was its ostrich farm, the large birds a strange and exotic sight in early 20th Century America. One could not just ogle the ungainly large birds, but also go for a ride on them. Show here on a weight unbridled, the novelty of riding an ostrich apparently faded rather quickly. After all, who wants to ride one twice? Bring in the alligators!

The Cawston Ostrich Farm was the 1885 brainchild of Edwin Cawston who chartered a ship to take fifty birds from South Africa to Galveston, Texas, where they boarded a train for Pasadena, California. Of the original fifty only eighteen survived the trip but, nature being as it is, the farm had over 100 ostriches from the survivors. Shown here is some of Cawston’s flock.

The Cawston Ostrich Farm became a premier Southern California tourist attraction for many years, aided by a trolley line that brought visitors from Los Angeles. Guests were able to ride on the backs of ostriches, as shown here, be taken for ostrich drawn carriage rides, and buy ostrich feathered hats, boas, capes and fans at the Ostrich Farm store that was connected to the factory. Although Cawston’s closed in the 1930s, original buildings still stand and are designated South Pasadena Cultural Landmark #18.

Ride an ostrich, why not ride a buffalo? Bob Yokum, a saloon owner in South Dakota set out to prove that it could be done. Not known for intelligence, buffalo —The American bison — do not like to be saddled or harnessed and have a mean “buck.” Determined to find out what a buffalo could be trained to do, over several years Yokum was able to train them to pull a wagon and even to be mounted like a horse. At his farm near Fort Pierre, S.D., he gave demonstrations, even to racing his buffalo against horses or putting them in a Mexican bull ring. In each case, his shaggy beasts came out the winners.

While on the trail of the buffalo, here is a more contemporary paperweight, issued by the U.S. West telephone company showing two male buffalo butting out their aggression. This company was one of a number of firms that emerged from the “break up” of the old AT&T. The tag line is “Bring on the competition,” a reference to a number of firms vying for the landline business. U.S. West is a couple of decades gone, the victim of mergers and changes in technology, e.g. cell phones.

The Metz Brothers Brewing Company was among the first brewers in Nebraska, founded in 1859 in Omaha and bought by the brothers in 1861. By 1880 it was producing 12,400 barrels of beer annually. Claiming they had “no equal in the country,” Metz issued a number of giveaway items to saloons and restaurants carrying their brew, among them this weight showing a pretty young damsel trying to ride a donkey, with little success. It has always puzzled me what a picture like this had to do with beer.

The fellow on the next weight had no fear of being bucked off because he appears to be riding a wooden horse. Established in Cleveland in 1852 and incorporated 30 years later, the Sturtevant Lumber Company. The company seems to have had some imagination in depicting what I imagine was its founder riding this “splinter steed.” Sturtevant’s yards and mill were located at Central Way, corner of Stone’s Levee.

Talk about weird. Check out this camel with a Shriner’s hat, swatting down in a shirt and collar. The city designation provides a clue. Troy, New York, bears the nickname the “Collar City,” a label that originated in the long-term presence of the detachable collar industry that began in Troy in the 1820s. In addition to collars and cuffs, an entire shirt industry grew up in Troy. Making shirts early in the nineteenth century became a factory business with numerous companies being located in Troy’s urban center. International Shirt & Collar Co., faced with considerable competition even in Troy, went the route of the camel.

Let’s end this litany with an elephant. This one advertises “Ivorine,” a product whose purpose is only hinted at on the object. It declares that “Ivorine is a big thing,” and that the animal’s tusks were cleaned with Ivorine. Nowhere can I find a hint of what this product was and what it did. The word is generically used for anything resembling ivory and the reason, I presume, that an elephant was chosen to grace the paperweight.

From alligator to elephant, the makers of vintage glass paperweights have employed the odd images of animals to advertise. They provide a glimpse into a not-so-distant past that, looking at these, can seem eons ago.

Doc! I Keep Seeing White Elephants at Saloons

Going South with the 9999th U. S. Air Force

Saloon Trade Cards, Risqué and Profane

Monkeys Doing Business

A Salute to Milwaukee's "Best" Brewery

Blue and White from Robinson of Akron

Early Philadelphia Inns and Taverns: Part 1

Early Philadelphia Inns and Taverns: Part 2

“The Man on the Barrel” Through Time

Poetic Justice?

The Forgotten Artistry of John H. Bufford

The Maxwell Touch on Glass Paperweights

Reviewing My Life Through Cartoons

Still More Kids Selling Beer

Chewing Gum As Viewed Through Glass

Uncle Sam — The Distillers’ Man

Wrapping Up Hearse Ambulances

The Tale of a Tee-Shirt

The Brewery Millers: Laughter Amid Tears

Weird Paperweights — The Animals