Drinking and Driving III

                    

Twice before I have featured posts that documented how frequently beer and liquor companies prior to National Prohibition featured their products in juxtaposition to motor cars.  At the end of the 19th Century in the entirety of the United States there were only 8,000 automobiles.  Over the next 14 years that number exploded to 1.7 million.  Purveyors of alcoholic beverages were quick to jump on the motorized bandwagon.

Among them was James Hanley, a liquor dealer who with a partner in 1876 bought an existing brewery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  Several years later Hanley moved it to his native Providence.  In 1901 he issued a calendar featuring an elegant couple out for a ride on their “horseless carriage.”  Note that this vehicle is still being steered with a lever and the driver is sitting on the right side, British style.  The association of the automobile with alcohol is cemented by a picture on the front panel of a gent and a beer bottle.

By 1907 when the J. & M. Haffen Brewing Company of the Bronx, New York, issued its calendar, the steering wheel had replaced the lever and back seats had arrived but the driver still sat on the “wrong” side.  The excited woman with her arms raised clearly in the rear has been imbibing some of Haffen’s brew and is in clear danger of being flipped out at the next corner.  Founded in 1856 by Mathias Haffen, a Bavarian immigrant, the brewery flourished. It incorporated in 1900 and moved into a new seven-story building but faltered with the onset of prohibition and closed in 1917.

By 1911 when the Adam Scheidt Brewing Company issued its calendar, the motor vehicle in the background had a honest-to-goodness steering wheel and the driver sat front left.  The scene is more explicit about the picnic beverage.  A young woman, looking slightly tipsy, is holding out her glass for more beer as her boy friend contemplates opening another bottle from the apparently once-full case and filling both glasses. The brewery began in 1870, run by German immigrant brothers Charles and Adam Scheidt.  With time out for National Prohibition their brews existed for more than 100 years.

The Piels Brothers Brewery was founded by Gottfried, Michael and Wilhelm Piel, immigrants from Dussedorf am Rhein, Germany.  Arriving in the U.S. in the 1880s, the brothers bought a small old-style brewing plant on Long Island, N.Y., then in disuse, and began introducing more modern scientific principles.  Michael was the brewmaster and plant superintendent.  The brewery met with considerable success and expanded as its reputation spread across the U.S. and abroad.  The company provided saloons carry its beer with a painterly looking lithograph of five men driving across the desert and obviously lost, seeking directions from Indian braves on their ponies.  Note the “cow-catcher” on the front   of the automobile.

The quality of the sign may be explained by Michael Piels reputation an art aficionado.  The identification with the brewery is subtle.  Shown here in detail is the cargo riding on the running board.  It appears to be a case of beer with “Piel Bro’s E.N.Y. (aka Brooklyn) Brewery.” In September 1973, Piel Bros. plant was closed down after 90 years of operation. 

In contrast to the subtlety of the Piels’ offering is the saloon sign from the Conrad Seipp Brewing Company of Chicago.  It depicts two couples in an antique roadster traveling on hazardous single lane mountain road — notice the absence of guard rails — only to be stopped by a giant bottle of Seipp’s Extra Pale Beer.  The party also is greeted with graffiti on the clift advising: “You can’t get around it, it’s the pure food beer.”  The company also issued a serving tray that carried the same image with some slight alteration in the colors.

Nickolas “Nick” Herges provided his customers with a pocket mirror that showed him smoking a cigar above a building that held his saloon, the Budweiser Tavern in St. Paul Minnesota.  The name of his establishment indicates a “tied saloon,” one in which only Bud and other Anheuser Busch products were sold. The automobile in the scene appears to be chauffeured.  Herges was an immigrant from Germany, according the 1910 census.  He lived above the tavern with his wife, Susan, born in Minnesota of German ancestry, and their three sons.

For years I harbored doubts whether the ad from the Bock Auto Bar Company of Milwaukee was authentic.  It discusses “dusty roads” making motorists thirsty and prescribes the “Auto Beer Bar” as a remedy:  “Your favorite beverage on tap all the time.  Invaluable in traffic jams or on Sundays.”  The illustration shows a gent gleefully filling a goblet with beer from one of two barrels installed under the dashboard.  From the perspective of the present day this would seem to be a spoof.  Those who have investigated, including me, a former Milwaukeean, have concluded that the evidence is on the side of the ad’s legitimacy.  

Drinking and driving — today anathema — in an earlier time was eagerly embraced by breweries and saloons.  The evidence is here and in dozens of other beer and whiskey ads and merchandise. 

Note:  Some of those other marketing uses of “drinking and driving” are found in my earlier posted articles on the subject:  November 7, 2015, and April 22, 2017.

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Drugs, Sex, and the Military in Panama

I recently watched the 2012 movie, “21 Jump Street,” about two rookie  policemen who go undercover back to high school in an effort to break up a drug ring.  The movie got good reviews but has the usual Hollywood trappings of a motorcycle and car chase, vehicle explosions, and considerable gunplay.  Nonetheless, the firm reminded me of my own adventure involving an analogous situation in the Panama Canal Zone.

It all began in November 1986 with a seemingly innocuous item in the Commerce Business Daily (CBD), the Federal government’s daily list of contracts being put out for bid.  The notice was from the U.S. military’s Southern Command, known as SOUTHCOM, located in the (former) Panama Canal Zone.  The Command was seeking a contractor to open and staff a secondary school for American military dependent students at a mothballed military base near Colon, a city on the Pacific side of the canal.

It was an unusual assignment but not so odd that the consulting firm for which I was working lacked interest.  The chairman, a New Mexico-born Hispanic, had lived in Panama, went to high school there and later had played on the national basketball team.  In addition, education in Central and South America was a “core” area of our business.  He was keen to find out more — and possibly to bid for the contract.

Since we would be dealing with Americans, my inability to speak Spanish was not a problem and thus, as vice president in charge of international business develpment, I was tapped for the assignment to investigate the opportunity and, if a go, lead the proposal team.  Moreover, I was familiar with the Canal Zone, having made two trips there as a staff member with Congressional delegations in 1962 and 1970.

Both trips had left me with lingering bad memories of the Zone and Zonians, as the Americans who lived there were known.  On the first trip a congressman in the group, a Catholic, at a party thrown for the delegation was subjected to an anti-Catholic slur by a somewhat inebriated colonel’s wife.  During the second trip, a specific mission to review SOUTHCOM,  the U.S. military's Southern Command, a black Panamanian friend and dinner guest of one of the congressmen was insulted by a drunken major in the SOUTHCOM Officer’s Club.  Moreover, during a Sunday boat outing for the delegation, several officers accompanying us were drunk and incoherent by 10 a.m.  Details were reported to the Secretary of Defense upon our return with a recommendation to get SOUTHCOM out of Panama.

In 1977, responding to nearly 20 years of Panamanian protests, President Jimmy Carter and Panama’s General Omar Torrijos signed treaties that replaced the original 1903 agreement and called for a full transfer of canal control in 1999.  SOUTHCOM and other military were allowed to stay until that date but a naval base on the Colon side was “mothballed” as the Zone itself became Panamanian territory.  My pre-trip research revealed that Christobal High School, shown here near the Colon base, had been shut down but appeared to be intact and possibly could be reopened to accommodate the projected school.

In a piece of good fortune I first stopped in Honduras to do some marketing with American officials.  At lunch in the U.S. Embassy cafeteria , I happened to sit at a table with an American Army captain.  We struck up a very friendly conversation.  I was surprised and intrigued to find out that he was head of the military anti-narcotic unit in the former Zone.  When I told him where I was bound and why,  he said cryptically:  “When you get to Panama, look me up. I may have something you will be interested in.”

The Captain’s office was my first stop.  He told this story:   Through an undercover enlisted man posing as a high school student, his unit had broken up a drug ring, one dealing in pot and cocaine, at the American High School in the former Zone.  About a dozen boys, all sons of officers, had been caught exchanging banned substances, readily available in Panama, for “sexual favors” from the wives of enlisted men.  The encounters occurred at the women’s homes during the day while their husbands were on duty.  

That day I met the undercover MP, a handsome young man

of Latino heritage who looked a trifle old to be in high school but had pulled off the impersonation.  He emerged with the names of the boys involved in the drugs-for-sex ring.  Night raids on their bedrooms were conducted at their military-provided homes, sometimes over strenuous parental objections. More incriminating evidence was turned up.

Under the terms of the 1977 treaty that turned the Zone over to the Panamanians,  the juvenile perpetrators should have been subjected to Panamanian law.   Reluctant to submit them to Latino justice, however, the U.S. military alternative was to banish the kids back to the U.S.  In most cases that meant that their mothers had to go with them.  Over time their officer fathers had complained loudly and repeatedly to the Commanding General about not having their wives around.  

Thus was hatched the idea of opening a special boarding school for the drug-dealing over-sexed boys, a place where they would be under supervision but inside Panama, with families semi-reunited and Mama back home. Tucked away on the Pacific side of the country, the miscreants would be out of sight and, it was hoped, out of trouble while getting an education.  This clearly was a military solution:  The costs involved apparently were not a consideration.

The scheme may have seemed like a good idea at the time to the Army brass, good enough, in fact, to warrant a formal announcement in the Commerce Business Daily, but my presence in Panama seeking more information appeared to panic the population.  At the American High School, shown here, the civilian principal emphatically denied to me that there were any drug problems at the school and feigned complete ignorance of the projected high school in Colon.

A series of phone calls revealed that no military officer of any authority was willing to talk to me. There were firm denials about the Colon school plan -- until I read from the CBD notice.  After a few semi-frantic calls it was decided that a female Army second lieutenant from public relations would meet with me at SOUTHCOM headquarters.  The interview lasted less than five minutes.  She suggested that military secrets were involved and, over my objections, we adjourned.

Adding to the excitement was my decision not to rent a car.  During earlier visits taxicabs had been ubiquitous in the Zone so I had decided not to hire a car and driver.  In the new era, however, taxis were virtually nonexistent. I was forced to beg rides, even hitchhike, from office to office.   The personal sense of adventure involved in that strategy evaporated by afternoon when I got caught in a driving rain squall while walking a half mile to my final appointment, a meeting with an Army psychiatrist whose relevance to my inquiry I cannot recall. As my suit dripped on his carpet, he was pleasant but as unhelpful as the others.

That night, as I stood in my hotel room watching the sun go down over the skyline of Panama City I was struck how changed it had become since my earlier visits.  High rise buildings were to be seen everywhere with cranes busy constructing others.  Most of those high rises were empty I had been told, built as a way of “laundering”  the millions of dollars in narcotics money that flowed through Panama.  Then I sat down to write my report of findings. In summary:  “This procurement is crazy.  Forget about bidding.”

My visit apparently set off alarm bells not just in SOUTHCOM but likely all the way back to the Pentagon. Before I had even returned to my office, the Colon school procurement notice had been rescinded without explanation in the Commerce Business Daily.  How much heartburn, I wondered, might that have caused some of the officer corp at SOUTHCOM.  But on the other hand, score one for rationality.

DISTILLERIES IN 3-D

Foreword:  This post results from my recently finding an article done years ago for a limited circulation publication that since has ceased publication and deciding that the images were interesting enough to warrant a reprise as a post for this blog.

This article is devoted to the depiction in three dimensions of whiskey distilleries, real and imagined.   That so much attention has been paid to distillery buildings is in itself puzzling since they normally are utilitarian structures and not very attractive.  Despite that, a number of whiskey makers have chosen to memorialized their buildings with replicas in ceramic.  Other distillery replicas come from the imaginations of those who provide kits for model railroad buffs. They often do resemble the rustic wooden buildings where much of America’s early whiskey was made.

The Old Taylor Distillery,  marked by the castle that served as its administrative headquarters, created a ceramic bottle that held a fifth of its bourbon.  The turret at right ends in a cork and can be removed to pour the whiskey.   Located in Frankfurt, Kentucky, Old Taylor also reproduced its architecture in a metal bank. The money inside could be retrieved by using a key to open a metal panel on the base.

The Ezra Brooks whiskey people also put their product in ceramic distillery bottles.  One shown here was issued in 1970 Featuring a smoke stack, it was colored in green, black and brown, with gold highlights.   Like the Old Taylor jug, the top of the factory screwed off to allow the whiskey to be poured.   Ezra Brooks also issued a mini version of the distillery, this one all in gold.  Made by Heritage China, this bottle featured a cork in the base that could be removed to access the small amount of liquor.

Abe Bomberger of Pennsylvania Dutch stock rebuilt andexpanded the still house, shown here, as well as the warehouse and the jug house. With these facilities the Michter distillery increased production substantially.  As a National Historical Landmark designation states: His complex “represents the transformation of whiskey distilling from an agricultural enterprise into a large scale industry.”

Bushmills Irish whiskey, a replica of its distillery shown here, claims a long heritage of distilling.  When the original building was destroyed by fire in 1885, the company built a new one. It is still in use and the model for the replica the company issued several years ago.

While the previous structures were constructed from metal or ceramic a third group of distilleries were made of wood, meant to be part of model railroad layouts.  Many come in kits ready for assembly.  They carry signs on them for Jack Daniels, Jim Beam,  and other popular contemporary brands.   These models have a rustic look, appropriate to an Old West layout for a Lionel steam train.  Here are examples:

For a long time, it seems, among manufacturing facilities, the distillery, has sparked considerable interest and imagination in three dimensions.  My hunch is that the product that flows from these mundane structures is what catches the interest of those who make the models and those who buy them.   In other words, it is the hooch and not the hutch that ultimately holds the appeal.