The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle from Milwaukee, Wisconsin • Page 70

6 THE WISCONSIN JEWISH CHRONICLE September 29, 1967 The ISronf mans from page 2) SINCEREST NEW YEAR GREETINGS Seagrams and other distillers were legally shipped to French soil, loaded onto ships in the ice-free St. Pierre harbor, and carried down east to "Rum Row," a line of mother vessels anchored outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. Coast Guard. Small, fast boats that plied from beach to ship completed the last leg of the voyage. In 1931 enough Canadian whiskey landed in St.

Pierre to provide every man, woman, and child in the islands with ten gallons a week. Sam Bronfman says he really doesn't know how much of his whiskey actually got into the U.S. during the prohibition years. The records of Atlas Shipping were destroyed at about the same time that the U.S. speak-easies unbolted their doors.

"We loaded a carload of goods, got our cash and shipped it," he recalls. "We shipped a lot of goods. Of course, we knew where it went, but we had no legal proof. And I never went on the other side of the border to count the empty Seagrams bottles." In 1935, however, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgen-thau Jr.

concluded that the Canadian distillers owed $60 million in excise taxes and customs duties on illegally imported alcohol. To the delight of U.S. distillers, he drew up a bill that would have effectively prohibited Canadian whiskey imports until the claim was settled. In the State Department, Cordell Hull thought the claim was "probably worth nothing legally," but he negotiated a 5 per cent settlement through the Canadian legation. In May, 1936, Distillers agreed to pay $1,500,000, one-half of the dubious Canadian debt.

Sam started putting together his TT A 4noo i i founded in March, 1928. The Seagram stockholders received 25 per cent of the company. The Bronfmans and their Scottish partners shared the remainder. William Ross, managing director of Distillers was president of the new firm, but he ruled from across the Atlantic. In Montreal, Sam, as the company's sole vice-president, was in charge.

During the year of U.S. prohibition, 1920 through 1933, the U.S.Canadian border leaked alcohol. For the first decade, the Canadian Government treated exports of whiskey to the U.S. as legal transactions. It willingly refunded to Canadian distillers a $7 internal tax on every gallon exported to the U.S.

For the Canadian distillers, unburdened by the conventional expenses of advertising and marketing, trade with the U.S. bootleggers was very profitable. The Bronfmans cautiously used a separate family-owned company, Atlas Shipping, as a go-between in Seagrams' transactions with the Americans. Atlas bought whiskey from Seagrams or imported it from abroad and then resold it to the bootleggers' agents. At first the company shipped much of its whiskey to Windsor, Ontario, where it was turned over to the bootleggers, who loaded it onto speedboats for a quick trip across the mile-wide Detroit River.

In 1930, however, the Canadian Government blocked the export of liquor to any destination where its import was prohibited. When direct exports were banned, Atlas opened a branch office, the Northern Export in St. Pierre, the largest village in the tiny French-owned St. Pierre and Miquelon island group some fifteen miles south of the Newfoundland coast. Purchases made lore renceburg, Indiana, for 172,000 shares of Seagrams.

Aged whiskey from Canada was shipped south to Lawrenceburg, where it was blended with newly made neutral spirits. While his competitors were proudly advertising whiskey aged for all of six months, Sam hit the market with smooth, mellow whiskey. By the end of 1934, Seagrams' Five Crown was the leading American brand. THAT FIRST YEAR SET A PATTERN for the next fifteen: expansion accelerated by acquisition; a strong emphasis on blended whiskey; and a corporate preference for better-grade, slightly more expensive liquor. By the early Forties the company's brands included Calvert, Carstairs, Kess-ler, Hunter, and Wilson in addition to a line of Canadian and American blends marketed under the Seagrams label.

Seagrams entered the U.S. battle with a sharp advantage over its American competitors a large stock of aged whiskey. In its warehouses was "the biggest supply," Sam says, "of bourbon and rye in the world." For the Americans, who had little more than raw spirits to sell, this looked like fearsome competition. U.S. distillers worried even more about Sam's intimate association with Distillers Co.

which had a still larger amount of alcohol laid away. The Americans wooed the Scotch trust ardently, hopeful of obtaining rights to import one of its prestigious brands of whiskey or gin and fearful that the company would barrel into the U.S. through its Canadian affiliate or on its own. Sam, on the other hand, was ready to bid farewell to the colossus. In 1934 the Bronfmans bought (Continued on page 7) COMMERCIAL FINANCE CORPORATION Specialists in Financing Small Business Officers and Directors: (Continued at about the same time that the experiment ended in Canada.

The Dominion had never been completely dry; bootlegging, speak-easies, and home stills had convinced Canadians as they eventually would persuade Americans! that the law was unworkable. Alcohol was gradually legalized through the provinces. But each provincial government instituted a monopoly on retail sales, eliminating Bronfman's mail-order business. For the what would prove a boon appeared at first to be a serious threat. The job of finding something else for the family to do fell on Sam.

His mother had died in 1918; a year later, Ekiel on his deathbed had called Sam to his side and charged him with taking care of the family and keeping it together. Thus anointed and equipped with his own willful personality Sam, the third son, took over as head of the family. BY 1920, SAM, WITH his obvious affluence and chauffeured car, was marked down as a fine catch by mothers in the Winnipeg Jewish community. He began calling on Saidye, one of four daughters of Samuel Rosner, another immigrant from Bessarabia who had served for a time as mayor of Plum Coulee, Manitoba. Exuberant and outgoing Saidye was unsure what to make of this quiet, shy suitor some six years her senior.

But one day, while away on business, he surprised her with a telegram from Van-counver asking her to a dance in Winnipeg. Any beau who asked for a date by telegram was obviously serious. In June, 1922, they married and left on a honeymoon trip through the U.S. At one point they detoured to Louisville and, while Saidye waited, Sam talked about the whiskey business with a former distiller. The Louisville trip was part of Sam's latest plan to keep the family in business.

If the Bronf-mans couldn't sell whiskey to consumers, they would make it and sell it to the government stores. In 1924, Sa mand Allan came east to Montreal. Here, just outside the city at Ville La Salle, hard by the spot where the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers flow into the Lachine Rapids, they bought a parcel of land. On May 20 the two brothers turned the first spades of dirt on the site of a Bronfman distillery.

Sam's move into distilling or, for that matter, the original venture into liquor sales could well have been a genealogical echo, since in Yiddish, bron-fan means brandy or gin. But MURRAY BEIN SAMUEL A. LAKRITZ MEYER I. TARNOW EUGENE M. LERNER BADZINSKI Tel.

273-6533 Wisconsin 53203 by the bootleggers' agents from 1 Rossville Distillers, in Law- Sam embarked on distilling with no conscious knowledge of the business. He hired a Louisville man as a consultant, set his brother Harry to watching over the builder, and diligently taught himself how to make whiskey. The distillery was operating by late 1925. But the Bronfmans' newly formed Distillers had no established brands. The Dominion market was dominated by imported Scotch, rather than the local Canadian whiskey.

And Canadian law required that whiskey be aged two years before it was bottled. To solve all those problems in one stroke, Allan and Sam set sail for London and the offices of the giant Distillers Co. whose name the brothers had ambitiously imitated. D.C.L. was and is an amalgamation of distilleries controlling well over half of the world Scotch market.

The Bronfmans suggested that this huge Scotch trust purchase a half interest in their new Montreal venture. The brothers needed the capital, but they also wanted something more important: the right to import malt whiskies from Scotland, mix them with their own grain alcohol, and then bottle and sell the blend under well-known Distillers Co. brand names as "Highland" whiskey Scotch that isn't made in Scotland. The proposal was a legitimate one; all popular Scotches are blends made by mixing malt whiskies with lighter-bodied grain alcohols. In 1926, Sam and Allan returned to England, carefully carrying a bottle of alcohol made in Montreal with a still the brothers had imported from Scotland.

The Scots sniffed the bottle's clear contents, nodded approvingly, called in several directors who had been shooting in the highlands, and finally agreed to the deal. Allan, who had graduated from the University of Manitoba law school he was the only brother to get past high school drew up a contract to divide ownership of the Montreal company. IN LATE 1927 SAM learned that one of his principal competitors, Joseph E. Seagram Sons, was in trouble. After the death of Joseph Seagram in 1919 many of his heirs, though willing to hold corporate titles and offices, seemed more interested in spending money than earning it.

The company was foundering under the weight of nepotism and lack of interest. With the consent of his partners in London, Sam acquired Seagram and its well-known brands of gin and whiskey. Distillers was 352-2700 Cordial New Year Greetings! JACK KOHLENBERG LAWRENCE R. APPEL ROBERT M. WEISS GEORGE G.

LORINCZI GAIL 610 N. Water Street Milwaukee, Metal Co. MORRY MITZ May the New Year 5728 be replete with health and happiness to Jewry. May the New Year bring the fullest measure of peace and good will to all mankind. BADGER TOBACCO CO.

MRS. ROSE WIENER ARTHUR COHEN HARVEY COHEN ELIAS GARFINKEL Milwaukee Scrap 158 N. Broadway 276-4253 MILWAUKEE and the Families of SAM BASS Milwaukee, Wisconsin Sincerest New Yea7 Greetings! SHELLENBERGER-GREGG COMPANY 6333 N. Teutonia.