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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