Beer on Wheels Though the Decades

 The process of hauling beer in barrels, bottles and cans has evolved during the past 150 years as transportation itself has changed in America.  Along the way some intriguing vehicles have been used to cart the suds.  Here a sampling of these vehicles is examined, beginning with the oldest down to the new.

John G. Unsoeld was a manufacturer in Detroit, Michigan, of “Trucks, Wagons, and Buggies of all descriptions.”  About 1879 Unsoeld set his hand to design a new and improved beer wagon, shown here.  In his patent application he claimed that his invention was an improvement to the wagons then being used in delivering beer in casks.  There followed a very technical discussion of the mechanics.  Simplified, Unsoeld’s invention was to raise the seat to allow barrels to be placed under the driver, allowing a shorter vehicle.  Whether Unsoeld ever got orders for any of these contraptions is unknown.  Could they have been un-sold?

August Schell's wagon also seems to have raised the driver and it fit more beer barrels by hanging them from chains on each side.  To pull this heavy load the wagon required three horses harnessed in line.  Schell, a immigrant from the Grand Duchy of Baden, emigrated to the United States in the 1850s.  Working initially as a machinist, he gravitated to New Ulm, Minnesota, where in 1860 he founded his brewery.  Today it is the second oldest family-owned brewery in America after Yuengling.  It celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2010.

The Mathes Brewery wagon clearly was meant for show, not for hauling.  The big bottle was advertising the company’s Red Ribbon Beer, a Wurzburger lager.  Rather than horses, this rig is being pulled by a pair of mules who seem on this 

serving tray to be dozing.  The tray was issued by Herman A. Mathes, a Burlington, Iowa, producer of beer, soda water and mineral waters.  He was in business, according to directories, from 1892 to 1919, closing with the advent of National Prohibition. 

The next image helpfully has been labeled 1910, a time when motorized vehicles were replacing animal-drawn wagons.  Note that this Coors van has the steering wheel on the right side of the carriage.  It took a while to get automotive details straightened out.  The Coors Brewery got its start in 1873 when German immigrant Adolph Coors with a partner started a brewery in Golden, Colorado, using a recipe for a Pilsner-style beer.  Coors safely survived Prohibition by diversifying its products.

The next photo seems to be trying to prove how much beer could be carted at one time.  Any severe jolt might well have those unsecured barrels at the top cascading down on the three workers.  The information with the photo indicates that the truck was hauling ‘Gansett’ down cobblestone streets in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  The beer itself was the product of the Naragansett Brewing Co., founded in 1890 at Cranston, Rhode Island.  Subsequently it became the largest beer producer in New England.

Still a pre-Prohibition model, the next van marked a definite improvement.  It shielded the driver from wind and rain, allowing him to assume a dapper pose with bowler hat, mustache and sleeve guard.  He was driving for National Brewing Company, and likely imitating “Natty Bo,” the longtime symbol of the beer.  Founded in Baltimore in 1872 and operating until the late 1970s, this brew was very popular with the college crowd during the 1950s and 1960s, largely because it was could be had for about fifty cents a bottle.

Although it is hard to tell, I would put the vintage of this Pacific Beer truck at pre-Prohibition given its hard rubber wheels.  It obviously has been decorated with flowers for a parade, clearly NOT the Pasadena Rose Parade.  The Pacific Beer & Malting Co. was established in Tacoma, Washington, in 1888.  Founders were Scholl and Huth who turned out 260 barrels of beer a day.  The brewery filled a need in Tacoma because beer transported from the East, likely by rail, often lost freshness.

The Buckeye Brewery of Toledo, Ohio, for years featured a waiter with a large head and small body.  Then one day in a bar a brewery executive found Carl Walinski, who not only was a dwarf but also one that could roller-skate.  He became the living symbol of Buckeye beer for years.  Walinski was even given a 3 foot, 6 inch “wife,” called Bonnie.  Although they were not really married, the pair often appeared together before the public, driving up in their miniature beer wagon. 

Moving from the ridiculous to the streamlined, here is a Miller High Life Beer delivery van from 1941.  It was a specially configured Dodge constructed by the H. Barkow Co. of Milwaukee and likely designed by Brooks Stevens, a Milwaukee industrial designer.  The sleek lines were entirely in keeping with the “art deco” styles that were sweeping the nation.  By sculpting the vehicle’s curves, moldings, fenders and paint scheme, the illusion was created of length and decreased height over a relatively short wheel base. 

Given the competition among Milwaukee brewers, Miller almost certainly was reacting to a streamlined fleet of insulated delivery vans maintained by the Schlitz Brewery.  They had been crafted from 1838-1939 Dodge Airflow trucks. Schlitz obviously was not about to let Miller get a jump in the streamlining game and hired the General Body Company of Chicago to design an even jazzier looking vehicle. The same outfit that gave Oscar Meyer its motorized weiner, General Body in 1941 came up with the eye-stopping design shown here.  By that time World War Two had begun, however, and the model never got off the drawing board.

Our final brew hauler is a semi carrying a giant can of Heineken Beer.  This rig appears to take beer-hauling to its pinnacle — one giant metal tank holding thousands of gallons of golden liquid on its way to a bottling plant.  Boasting a pedigree in Holland back to 1592, Heineken was the first European beer to be imported into the U.S. after Prohibition was lifted in 1935.

There they are, eleven ways of transporting beer, some antiquated, some quaint, some purposely absurd, and some strikingly well-designed.  These vehicles all served a purpose, most for getting the products of a brewery to a thirsty public, a few for advertising the product.  They all, however, rolled on wheels.

More Kids Selling Beer

In June 2011 on this blog I featured an article on “Kids Selling Beer” in the pre-Prohibition era.  In the almost five years hence it has been possible to collect more than enough other examples of American breweries and other beer distributors marketing their brews by using children in their advertising.  While today such practices would severely frowned on — and condemned on social media — at the time apparently only the prohibitionists would have been outraged by kids selling beer.

We begin by an image from the early 1900s that shows a baby apparently happily sucking on a bottle of Duesseldorf Beer.  This was a product of the Indianapolis Brewing Company, originally founded by Peter Lieber and two partners, one of them his brother, about 1868.  An ad slogan used by the company in  the early 1900s claimed “for family use a speciality.”  Whether this included tots as young as the one in the picture is open to conjecture, but images of infants and toddlers were commonly used by the brewery in its marketing.  Indianapolis Brewing survived until approximately 1948.

The Buckeye Brewing Company of Toledo was another beer-maker that regularly made use of the “cute and cuddly” pictures of children in its advertising pre-Prohibition, including the captivating illustrations by Ellen Clapsaddle [See my post on her, March 2012].  Many Buckeye kiddies appeared on advertising greeting cards for Christmas, Easter and other holidays.  The one shown here of a child with a rabbit followed a familiar theme involving animals.  The Buckeye brewery survived 127 years before closing in the early 1970s.

Some child-plus-animal images came with an edge to them.  This ad from the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company of Cincinnati is a take-off of the verse, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  In this case the lamb has followed Mary to school where though the window the schoolgirl sees her teacher swigging a glass of Moerlein’s beer before class.  This brewery began production in 1853 in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded by German immigrant Christian Moerlein.  When forced by Prohibition to close its doors in 1920, it was among the ten largest in America by volume.  The brand was revived in 1981.

Sometimes the animals could be downright distressing to the children in brewery ads.  Here a young lady seems to be menaced by a gaggle of geese that seem intent on pulling on her garments, an activity that clearly is disturbing her.  This image was the handiwork of the Bartholomay Brewery of Rochester, New York.   Founded in 1852 by Philip Bartholomay, the facility grew to be a large beer manufacturer, with production of some 189,000 barrels by 1888.  Although it operated successfully for almost seven decades, Bartholomay did not survive National Prohibition.

Another youngster with animal troubles was a lad dressed in a chef’s hat who is running with a delicious-looking confection on a plate trying to scramble away from some rapacious birds who also have their appetites whetted.  This illustration appeared on a trade card issued by John W. Hirt who was dealer in beer and liquor in Utica, New York.  The card particularly noted “Toledo Lager Beer. Hirt may have been referring to Buckeye beer among the Toledo producers of lagers.

Another familiar theme for kids selling beer was to juxtapose them with flowers.  One example came to the drinking public from Aurora Brewing of Aurora, Illinois.   Here we have a comely young lass who appears to be smelling an orchid or perhaps a snapdragon.  She graced the front of a greeting card issued by the brewery.  Dates seem to differ on this outfit, but it appears that it was founded in 1890 and closed in 1920, a run of some 30 years.  After Repeal in 1934 a brewery of the same name opened in Aurora but closed in 1939.

Maier & Zobelein Brewery of Los Angeles gave their little starlet Shirley Temple-like curls and seated her within a basket of roses as part of a holiday greeting to their customers.  Let us hope the thorns had been removed.  In 1882 two German immigrants named Joseph Maier and George Zobelein purchased an existing brew house and renamed it for themselves.  They made a light, pilsener-style lager that was becoming increasingly popular with the public during the latter half of the nineteenth century.  

The next image is of a child, dressed in a sailor suit, of an undetermined gender, looking wistfully at a bunch of daisies.  The card also carries a bit of verse:  “Cool as an ice-berg and chemically clear, You never drank better than Lang’s Bottled Beer.”  Gerhard Lang got control of this Buffalo brewery, founded in 1842, by marrying the daughter of the founder Philip Born.  Lang expanded production, building a huge and palatial brewery with a grand hall lined with marble.  His would go down in history as the largest single brewing plant in Buffalo, with an annual production of nine million gallons annually.

In the Tannhauser Beer trade card, the flower, a dandelion, has gone to seed and the tots are blowing the seeds around — hopefully to someone else’s yard.  Again we are in the realm of terminal cuteness.  This beer was a major brand of Bergner & Engle, a large brewery located in Philadelphia.  The firm touted its Grand Prize at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 and at the Paris Exposition of 1878, and gained a national customer base.  Although Gustavus Bergner had some political clout, he was unable to hold back the tide of the “dry” forces that eventually closed Bergner & Engle.

A few brewers found it useful to show their merchandising children in scenes of distress or delinquency.  Frederick A. Poth, another Philadelphia brewery owner, decorated a trade card with four boys and one girl, apparently siblings, who have eaten hot mustard and now regret it.  Poth had learn beer-making from the bottom up, shoveling mash out of the copper brewing vats and hefting massive bags of barley from delivery wagons.  Seeing an opportunity in the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, Poth opened a beer garden and served his own beer, eventually erecting a facility, according to observers, “…that grew to mammoth proportions and employed hundreds of workers.”

Like Buckeye Brewing in Toledo, the Franz Falk Bavaria Brewery in Milwaukee issued many advertising items with children depicted.  Shown here are just two trade cards of Falk’s production.  Neither image is particularly edifying.  The one at left shows a juvenile who is smoking a cigarette while apparently wooing a young lady.  At right, lad appears to be splashing water on a girl who clearly is not enjoying the experience.  Franz Falk, after learning brewing in his native Germany, emigrated to Milwaukee in 1848.  He eventually owned a major plant, occupying five acres, operating eight ice houses and on-site malting production of 100,000 barrels annually.  He employed a hundred men, kept twelve teams of horses, made his own barrels and owned his own rail cars.

This journey through kids selling beer began with a baby sucking on a bottle.  It ends with a trade card of a group of boys working their way through a case of beer— Yuengling as it turns out — while an irate woman fruitlessly threatens them.  This trade card was issued by A. Liebler Bottling Company of New York City, an enterprise founded in 1887 that was a bottler of beer and other beverages, including Yuengling brewery of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, one that claims to be the oldest operating brewing company in America.  One wonders what Frederick Yuengling, son of the founder, thought of his bottling company seemingly encouraging youth drinking while the Prohibitionists were hot to exploit all such inferences.

Using the images of children to sell beer appears to have been another casualty of National Prohibition.  After Repeal fourteen years later, brewers decided that  such images were no longer appropriate.  Thereafter all the babes in beer ads have been fully grown, with curves.

"Bucky," the Beer Dwarf: Life Imitating Art

The Buckeye Brewing Company of Toledo, Ohio, could trace its origins to 1838, two years after the city was founded and 12 years before the Civil War.  Forced to making “near beer” and soft drinks during Prohibition, Buckeye Brewing quickly resumed making real beer and merchandised it using a dwarf-like cartoon figure the company called “Bucky.”  Then it found a real human being that was Bucky “in the flesh.”  The rest of the story is an excellent example of life imitating art.

Fifty years after its origins,  two Toledo businessmen had bought the struggling brewery in 1878, expanded its capacity and sold a brand they called “Buckeye Beer.”  Their early symbols were the nut of the buckeye tree,  whereby Ohio is known as “The Buckeye State.”  Other early Buckeye advertising featured the head of a large antlered deer, presumably referring to a “buck’s eye.”  As noted above, Prohibition ended all such merchandising.

Not  long after Repeal in 1934,  Buckeye resumed its beer business. The company quickly regained its market share and more as other local breweries gradually ceased operating.    As brewery executives surveyed earlier advertising,  the stag and buckeye nut probably seemed old-fashioned.  The company commissioned a cartoonist to come up with a new and more contemporary image.  The artist gave them the figure of a waiter, a man with a large head and small body.  He was, in other words, a dwarf.  They called him “Bucky.”

While today it is highly doubtful any merchandiser would imitate such a choice, the mores then were different.  During the same period Walt Disney gave us “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” an immensely popular cartoon movie.  Real dwarfs greeted Dorothy and her companions as they headed down the Yellow Brick Road in Hollywood’s “Wizard of Oz.”  Moreover, I recently saw an early Tarzan movie in which the hero’s love, Jane, absurdly is captured by a “savage” African tribe of skin-blackened dwarfs.  In other words, the image was not socially incorrect for the times.   In fact, no small part of the success of Buckeye Beer was Bucky, the little man with a smile, a wink, and an energetic step.

In Toledo,  where I grew up,  Bucky was everywhere.  He was the principal figure on all the brewery ads, with a towel on one arm and carrying a tray with a pilsner glass and a bottle of Buckeye Beer, with -- who else? -- Bucky on the label.  The cartoon dwarf was on the brewery giveaways to saloons and other favored customers.  Items included beer glasses, bottle openers and match folders.  As you ventured went down a Toledo street there was Bucky on the side of  brewery trucks,  flagged over license plates and displayed on billboards.  Signs were evident not just in the city but spread across the cornfields of Northern Ohio and beyond.   For the real Bucky fan,  as shown here, the company provided an enameled pin for the buttonhole.

Several years after adopting the cartoon figure, a  brewery executive walked into a Toledo saloon called the “Green Lite Inn,”  a popular watering hole and restaurant on Toledo’s Near West Side. Tending the bar was Bucky in the flesh.  His name was Carl Walinski, a man just 4 feet, 2 inches tall.  The Buckeye executive rushed back to the brewery to tell his bosses.  After some discussion, in 1936 they signed the 25-year-old Walinski to a contract.  Their cartoon had come to life.

Carl was born in 1910 in Toledo, the son of Adam and Victoria Walinski, the second of six children.  According to census records, his father was a carpenter and later a repairman for the City of Toledo.  Both parents had been born in Ohio;  their own parents had been immigrants from Poland.  The family lived not far from the Green Lite Inn and close to Swayne Field, home of the Triple A Mud Hens baseball team.

Beside looking like the figure in the beer ad, Walinski brought an additional talent.  He was a roller skating whiz.  Hired by the Buckeye Brewery, he was employed for promotional events and would often roller skate through town and into bars holding aloft a tray of Buckeye Beer.  Kids would line up along his route and expect his tray to flip.  It never did. Walinski’s secret was that his glove was glued to the tray.  The tray in turn was glued to the bottle and glass so that nothing ever tumbled.  Walinski once told an acquaintance about his strategy.  He would roller skate in the front door of a bar, greet customers and roll out the back door. He recounted that the operation got difficult by the end of his shift because everywhere he went the patrons would buy him a beer. After a succession of bars, it became difficult for Bucky to stay on his feet and finish his route.

The brewery declared that Walinski had skated some 30,000 miles during his stint as mascot from 1936 to 1942.  The dwarf was even given a wife, a 3 foot, 6 inch woman, called “Bonny.”  Although they were not  really married, the pair often appeared together for public appearances in the region driving a beer truck reduced to scale.  A promotional brewery card showed them standing together before their miniaturized vehicle.  In order to promote Buckeye’s bock beer which, as many breweries did, advertised with the picture of a goat,  Bucky also acquired a mini-chariot pulled by a ram.  Without  much imagination the company named the goat “Billy.”  Brewery promotions claimed that Billy had pulled Bucky at least 10,000 miles during their partnership.

The math is interesting.  By adding the alleged 30,000 miles of roller skating to the 10,000 miles of being pulled by the goat,  Walinski presumably covered 40,000 miles during the eight years he worked for Buckeye Beer.  Even if  Bucky were in action every day of the year and every year of the eight,  a highly unlikely scenario, he would have had to cover almost 14 miles a day. Advertising men exaggerate. Interestingly, that was the occupation  Walinski claimed for himself to the census taker in 1940.

As a child of about seven, I once saw Walinski/Bucky in a famous Toledo eatery called Bud and Luke’s, a restaurant that still exists. He was on roller skates and looked just like the man in the cartoon.  My father, who knew him slightly, urged me to shake his hand but I was too shy to approach him. In 1942 Walinski, basking in local stardom and apparently unhappy when he was refused a  salary increase from the brewery, quit the job.  Having tasted the recognition that goes with show biz, shortly after he joined the Toledo Mud Hens baseball team as a bat boy and mascot.  Often an attraction in local parades, he remained highly popular and a local celebrity for years.   Walinski died in Toledo in  2002 at the age of 91.

Despite the resignation of their living Bucky, the brewery continued to use the cartoon figure for a number of years.  The 1950s brought a return of the antlered buck’s head to the Buckeye label and for a time sales continued strong.  The movement toward national brands, however, eventually caused Buckeye’s management to sell the brewery to Peter Hand Brewing Co. of Chicago.  In 1972 all production terminated at the 127-year old brewing facility.  Two years later six of the buildings were demolished.

Although the brewery is no more,  the story of the the cartoon dwarf that became reality is firmly implanted in Toledo and breweriana lore.  Life imitated art in a fashion that is unlikely ever to be repeated in merchandising beer -- or any other product for that matter.