Adolph Hirschman & a $35,000 Saloon Sign

As a youthful immigrant from Germany, Adolph Hirschman took years and many miles to find his footing on the American business scene.  From New York he ventured to Savannah, Georgia, working for a grocery firm as a traveling salesman.  In 1882, saying farewell to the Sunny South, he headed 1,370 miles north to St. Paul, Minnesota, to open a saloon and liquor store.  Prospering there, Hirschman commissioned a saloon sign with himself as the central figure a picture that not long ago sold at auction for $35,000.

Shown below, the sign was created by a lithographic technique developed in Germany in which images were put on stone plates and subsequently transferred to metal sheets.   The technology swiftly was brought to  America and the Tuscarora Advertising Company.   By 1895 advertisers from all over the United States were sending in orders for metal signs to the Coshocton, Ohio, factory. Among them was one from Hirschman in St. Paul, who knew what he wanted.

Hirschman’s order for a sign likely included a preliminary design.  Entitled “East Meets West,” the 36 by 27 inch picture contained an ad for Hirschman’s flagship brand,  “Henry Hunter Fine Old Rye,” illustrated with a whiskey barrel.  Perhaps more important, two-thirds of the image depicted a cowboy addressing an elegantly outfitted man. Look closely at the latter. Then look at the photo of Hirschman, right.  The proprietor had placed himself on his saloon sign.  As if to leave no doubt, the suitcase at the feet of the figure is marked “A. H. & Co.”

When the sign, virtually pristine in a well-made oak frame, went up for auction several years ago, speculation arose that is was one of a kind.  While possible, I lean to the idea that Hirschman, while not making many copies, funded a few to give his very best customers.  He also made use of the image as his trademark, and featured it on his letterhead.

The man behind this iconic sign was born in March 1852 in Brandenberg, Germany, the son of Phillip and Mary (Caspari) Hirschman.  He was educated in its elementary and secondary schools.  While still in his adolescence, his mother died. When Adolph was 17, his father emigrated with the family to the United States, residing in Troy, New York, and working as a cigar manufacturer.  The youth’s early employment has gone unrecorded, but most likely he was engaged in the mercantile trades.

In 1876 Adolph married Rose Cohen, a New York City resident four years younger than he.  Their only child, Benjamin M., was born the following year.  This growing family may have encouraged Hirschman to look outside New York for employment. In the early 1880s, he moved wife and child to Savannah, Georgia, joining the wholesale grocery firm of Solomon Brothers as a traveling salesman.  

The company dated from 1873, owned by Henry Solomon and his brother, N.E. Solomon, immigrants from England.  Not long after Hirschman’s arrival, the brothers split.  In July 1882 Henry Solomon created a new company with his son, Alexander, as a partner.  Left “high and dry,” N. E. Solomon reached out to Hirschman with a proposition to co-own a wholesale and retail liquor house and saloon.  One catch:  The property was in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1370 miles north of Sunny Savannah in the frigid “North Star State.”  

Nonetheless, Hirschman jumped at the chance to run his own business.  Bundling up Rose and Benjamin, he quickly relocated to St. Paul, where he would live the rest of his life.  Although the details of their financial arrangements remain undisclosed, N.E. Solomon quickly exited the partnership, likely bought out by Hirschman. He now was in sole charge of a liquor house and saloon.  According to one account:  “He proved successful from the first and from small beginnings he has continually enlarged the scope of his operations until he now owns a very extensive business.” 

 

Among Hirschman’s gifts was an artistic eye, manifest in the well designed labels he gave his whiskeys, illustrated here on his “Red Wing Whiskey” label featuring an accurately drawn red wing blackbird.  Hirschman’s flagship brand was “Minnesota Club Whiskey,” available in quart and flask-sized bottles, as shown below.  He does not appear to have trademarked any of his house brands.

Hirschman advertised Minnesota Club widely, citing it as “A particular brand for particular people, to be had at all clubs and first-class buffets.  A trial will convince.”  He also provided the saloons, hotels and restaurants carrying his liquor with several different varieties of back of the bar bottles advertising Minneapolis Club.

 

His largesse to his wholesale customers extended to providing shot glasses and serving trays advertising his brands   At right is a tray that advertises Minnesota Club.  The hunting motif was a common one for Midwest whiskeys.  The tray likely was a products of the Tuscarora Company, noted for manufacturing those items as well as saloon signs.  

Having chosen Minnesota as his home, as he prospered Hirschman became  a major investor in its Mesabi Range Iron mines.  One of four major iron deposits in northern Minnesota, the Mesabi stretches 100 miles.  There the soft ore lay close to the surface to be scooped up from open pit mines.  The whiskey man’s  investments were concentrated at the Mesabi's Canisteo mines in Itasca County.  They proved to be productive from their discovery in 1907 through the 1980s.

The Mesabi iron mines

Hirschman also was active in St. Paul’s civic and social life as a member of the local Masons, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Sons of Hermann (a mutual aid society for German immigrants), Elks, St. Paul Auto Club, Association of Commerce, and the St. Paul Commercial Club.  He also served as vice president of Mount Zion Temple, a prominent local synagogue.

As his son Benjamin came of age, his father took him into the liquor house, first as a traveling salesman and in 1904 as a full partner.  The duo operated their liquor establishment successfully until closed in 1920 by National Prohibition.  Hirschman lived just long enough to see the “dry” law rescinded, dying in 1935.  He was buried in the Mt. Zion Temple Cemetery under the monument shown right.  His widow, Rose, joined him there three years later.

Summing up Hirschman’s career as a “whiskey man,” a biographer wrote: “He has ever manifested…indomitable perseverence, high intelligence and business sagacity.”  Hirschman also has left future generations an image of himself as he apparently would like to be remembered:   in formal dress, debonair, standing in front of his bar — seemingly fulfilling the elegant dreams of an immigrant boy.

Notes:  This post principally was drawn from two biographies of Adolf Hirschman. The first is from “History of St. Paul and Vicinity:  A Chronicle of Progress,” by Henry Anson Castle, 1912.  The second was “Men of Minnesota,”  author unidentified, published by R. L. Polk & Co., St. Paul, 1915.

 

“James” Gioga: Whiskey, Gold, and Sweet Music

The ceramic jug that introduces this post carries a simple message:  “Jas. Gioga, Goldfield, Nev.”  Behind that liquor container is the story of an Italian immigrant who came to America’s shores seeking his fortune, found it in selling whiskey to gold miners, and fathered one of the jazz stars of the 20th Century.  Although details of his life are few, enough information can be cobbled together about Giacinto “James” Gioga to tell an American success story.

Gioga was born in San Guisto, Canavese,  Italy, in March 1877, the son of Pietro and Catherine Bertetti Gioga.  His parents had him christened under the given name of Giocinto. It translates to Hyacinth, the name of a male saint of the 16th century, known as the patron saint of weightlifters and anyone in danger of drowning.  The boy grew up in San Guisto, shown here,  a picturesque small town near Turin in Northern Italy.

When Gioga was 17, seeking his fortune outside of his native land, the youth emigrated to the United States.  In November 1899 he embarked on the immigrant ship, SS La Bretagne.  Shown here, the La Bretagne was launched in September 1885, a ship built to serve a France to New York ocean route. It provided accommodations for 390 first-class, 65 second-class, and 600 third-class passengers.  Gioga was among the 600 in third class.

 

Landing in New York, Gioga wasted little time before heading to the American West, in the process anglicizing his given name to “James.”  His first stop was in Canon City, Colorado.  Centrally located in the state and known as the “Crossroads of Colorado,” this small city of about 4,000 was not a typical Western boom town.  It sits on the Arkansas River and abuts the Royal Gorge, cut by the river.  Although both oil and gold had been found in the vicinity the discoveries had led to modest growth but not the explosive populations being experienced in other Colorado mining towns.

What drew Gioga to this location is unknown.  He may have had Italian friends or relatives living there.  As a newly arrived immigrant, speaking little if any English, he must have been given a “hand up” the economic ladder.   Given Gioga’s future in the liquor and grocery trade, it would appear that he went to work in a local Canon City store and found his calling.

 

Now in his early 20’s, Gioga liked what he found in America.  Determined to settle here the immigrant reached back to San Guisto to the sweetheart of his youth, Rosa Galetto, asking her to join him in America — and marry.  Rosa, five years younger than “James,” endured the ocean crossing and stage coach journey. The two were wed in a Colorado ceremony.  In rapid fashion two sons were born from their union, Peter in 1903 and Bob in 1905,  the latter destined to become a well-known American musician. 

After a few months in Canon City, Gioga packed up Rosa and their belongings and headed three states and 870 miles west to Goldfield, Nevada. Goldfield was a true Western boom town, named for deposits of gold discovered near the site in 1902.  By 1904, the Goldfield district was producing 800 tons of gold ore, valued at $2.3 million, 30% of Nevada’s production.  This remarkable strike caused Goldfield to grow rapidly, and it soon became Nevada’s largest city and the Esmerelda County seat with a population of some 20,000. 

Arriving circa 1903, Gioga found a city in the process of explosive change.  The rapid transformation can be seen in the two photographs below. On the left is Goldfield in 1904, two years after its founding.  The muddy street holds hotels, saloons, restaurants and merchantile establishments, all frame buildings thrown up rapidly with little thought for permanence.  By 1906, seen right, the  main drag has been paved. Ramshackle structures were being replaced by brick and mortar buildings.

Gioga initially may have worked in an already establish Goldfield business.  His name did not appear in local directories until 1907.  At that time he is identified as proprietor of a retail liquor establishment, a designation that apparently included both saloons and liquor stores.  Totaling some 57, there was one liquor establishment for every 350 man, woman and child in the county.   Each paid $30 for an annual license to do business.

Despite the competition, Gioga appears to have prospered.  By 1914 he had added a line of groceries to his liquor offerings.  His primary customers were the miners who were swelling the population of the area.  Shown left below are the gold fields with the town in the distance.  Each of the mines employed dozens of workers, right below.  Gioga’s saloon was at the east end of the town, said to be “perfectly suited for thirsty, hot miners and prospectors coming in from the south.”  The young Italian immigrant prospered.

Goldfield miners

Gioga went a step beyond his competition by selling whiskey wholesale to the proliferating saloons in Goldfield and vicinity.  He apparently was receiving supplies by the barrel from distant distilleries through the Tonopah and Goldfield (T&G) Railroad, a line created in 1905 that survived until 1947. He decanted the barrels into ceramic jugs of several gallon capacity that were sold to the saloons dotting the local landscape.  Shown below, Gioga jugs are considered rare by collectors, with only a handful known.  One recently sold at auction for $7,000.

Although Gioga was not an American citizen, his immigrant status was no bar to his voting in local elections or, indeed, running for office.  Only a few years after arriving in Goldfield, he was nominated for the post of trustee, a two year term, under the banner of the Socialist Municipal Party.  Non-Marxist, this political organization was concerned about creating and enhancing local public infrastructure.  (A similar local Socialist Party, for example, controlled Milwaukee’s city hall for three decades.)  I can find no indication how Gioga fared in his electoral bid.

Gioga’s civic interests apparently did not extend to funding of city celebrations. In 1915 Gioga was recorded among local businesses contributing to the annual Goldfields July Fourth festivities, including a fireworks display.  While many local saloons were cited in the press for contributing $25 or more, Gioga chipped in a paltry $5.  He clearly had other priorities.  Registration records from 1917 indicate he spent a considerable sum on a new automobile.

As the decade progressed, growth faltered in Goldfield.   In the 1910 federal census, the town population had declined to 4,838. Among problems at the mines was the increasing cost of pumping salt water out of the pits, making them increasingly uneconomic. By 1912, ore production had dropped sharply. The largest mining company left town in 1919. In 1923, a fire caused by a moonshine still explosion destroyed many of Goldfield’s frame buildings. 

Gioga watched this decline from his saloon and store, also aware of the growing prohibitionary fervor in America.  Having prospered significantly for roughly a  decade in Goldfield, about 1918 he decided to pull out and relocate his family further west in Los Angeles.  Subsequent directories found him living  there with wife Rosa and their two sons in a modern home in what appears to be a gated community, shown below.  Although still a relatively young man, Gioga does not appear to have opened a saloon in the City of Angels. 

 

Now the spotlight shifts to the Gioga’s younger son, Bob, whose musical talent would bring him to the pinnacle of the American music scene of the early 20th Century and subsequent recognition in a Wikipedia entry.  Growing up in Los Angeles, Bob began to make a name for himself on the West Coast during the 1930s working with a series of dance bands.  Best known as a tenor and baritone saxophone player, shown below right, Bob also mastered the clarinet and bassoon.

Bob first gained national attention for his musicianship when he teamed with Stan Kenton, a good friend.  When Kenton formed his first band in the late 1930s, Bob joined him, making his first recording with Kenton in 1940 playing the tenor sax. He stayed on to anchor Kenton’s saxophone section until 1953 and appeared on virtually every recording session of the 40s and early 50s playing popular and jazz music.  Shown below is Bob, left, with Kenton.  About 1953 this Gioga, now married, retired from music.  During ensuing years the couple bought and operated a citrus farm. 

Meanwhile James Gioga and wife Rose must have basked in the attention their son was achieving on the national music scene. Throughout  his 37 years in this country, Gioga had never bothered to become an American citizen.  That changed in 1944 when he applied in the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles for naturalization.  He was granted citizenship.

Forest Lawn

 

Gioga would live another 19 years, dying in August 1963 at the age of 66.  He was buried in the famous Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California. Rosa would join him there in 1972.  Living to be 94, Bob Gioga was buried near his parents in Forest Lawn after his death in 1999.

Note:  This post was composed from a wide range of sources.   Bob Gioga’s biography was drawn in part from an article in the publication “All Music.”

Pre-Prohibition Bartenders and Their Libations

Foreword:  One way of approaching pre-Prohibition alcohol is to concentrate  on the cocktails of those times.  My one foray into that territory, to co-write a celebrity drinks recipe book, proved to be too complicated and the idea was dropped.  Now the Louisiana State University press has forged ahead with a series devoted to cocktails associated with New Orleans.  A just-published slim volume entitled “The French 75”  by John Maxwell Hamilton reveals how much history a cocktail can reveal.  It has spurred me to provide here brief vignettes of three notable American bartenders of the 19th and early 20th Centuries and the drinks associated with their names.

Orsamus Ward:  America’s First Celebrity Bartender.   Born in a bucolic corner of Massachusetts, a young man with the unusual name of Orsamus Willard (1792-1876) became America’s first celebrity bartender, earning a reputation that spread far beyond New York's City Hotel. Caricatured here, Willard went from farm boy to a reputation as the “The Napoleon of Bar-Keepers.”

City Hotel

Starting as an office boy about 1811, Willard quickly impressed hotel management with his energetic and intelligent approach to his duties.  Able to write with either hand, his dexterity was noted as a skill that, accompanied by his outgoing personality and “urbane and courtly” manners, eventually fitted him to become the posh hotel’s principal bartender, a position he held for almost 27 years.  

An 1894 history of the Willard family was lavish in its description of Orsamus’ abilities:  “He acquired a wide reputation for…His never failing memory of names, persons, and events.  He…possessed in a remarkable degree the power of giving politely prompt and satisfying answers to the multifarious questions of guests, without interrupting the bookkeeping or other business details upon which he might be engaged.”

Just as important, Willard could whip up one helluva good cocktail. This from one patron: ‘Willard was one of the first in the city to concoct fancy drinks, and he introduced the mint-julep as a bar drink,’ frequently mixing them up three or four at a time.”  Among his other specialties were Whiskey Punch, Apple Toddy, and an Extra-Extra Peach Brandy.  An English traveler observed (with some exaggeration) that Willard’s name was “familiar to every American, and to every foreigner who has visited the States during the last thirty years [as] the first master of his art in the world.”   The result was his anointment as the “Napoleon of Bar-Keepers.”

Jerry Thomas was “King” of American Bartenders.  Described as “a gentleman all ablaze with diamonds,” Jeremiah P. “Jerry” Thomas (1830-1885) during his lifetime was a gold miner, (minor) Broadway impresario, art collector, inventor, gambler, reigning monarch of American bartenders, and the author of the nation’s first drinks recipe book.  Thomas’ “Bar-Tender’s Guide” published in 1862 during the Civil War, is still in print, available from multiple sources.  His signature cocktail was the “Blue Blazer.”

In his early 20s and restless, Thomas moved  to New York City in 1851 and opened a saloon below P.T. Barnum’s American Museum.  It was the first of four he would run in New York City during his peripatetic lifetime  He wore flashy jewelry and his solid silver bar tools and cups were embellished with gem stones.  Thomas became famous for the showmanship he brought to his bartending.

Thomas developed elaborate flashy techniques of mixing cocktails, sometimes while juggling bottles, cups and mixers..  His signature drink, depicted here, was the “Blue Blazer,” a fiery concoction thrown from glass to glass, as shown below.  Later he would claim the invention of the “Tom & Jerry.” Thomas also has been credited, probably erroneously, with the original martini.  His "Bartender's Guide" was a first in the field.

In 1885 while running a Manhattan saloon, Thomas, 55,  died of a stroke.  His death occasioned obituaries around the country, particularly in the cities in which he had worked.  The New York Times opined that he was the Big Apple’s best known barkeep and “was very popular among all classes.”  Thomas was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

“The Ideal Bartender” Was Black Tom Bullock.  Born in Louisville, Kentucky, not long after the Civil War, Tom Bullock (1872-1964) was the son of former slaves who learned his bartending skills at the local Pendennis Club.  The use of African American bartenders was a Southern tradition, not replicated in northern states and Bullock made the most of it.  Honing his skills in a variety of venues, he finally became chief bartender at the exclusive St. Louis Country Club.  There he attracted influential patrons and a reputation that spread far beyond Missouri.  

A playful 1913 editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch contended:   “Who was ever known to drink just a part of Tom’s? Tom, than whom there is no greater mixologist of any race.”   With the help of men like George Herbert Walker Sr.,

pater familias of American presidents and August Busch of Budweiser fame, in 1917 Bullock was able to publish his drinks recipe book, entitled “The Ideal Bartender.”  Now well more than a century old, it has never been out of print.

Bullock became particularly famous for his Mint Juleps. “The Ideal Bartender”contains two recipes – Kentucky Style and St. Louis Style. The former is the familiar Mint Julep he probably mastered at the Pendennis Club. The other recipe includes gin, lemon, lime juice, and grenadine, a non-alcoholic bar syrup. In a nod to Busch, “The Ideal Bartender” also includes a drink called Golfer’s Delight that used Bevo, a non-alcoholic beer that Anheuser-Busch developed in anticipation of Prohibition.

During the “dry” years, Bullock was forced to giving up openly dispensing alcohol.He remained employed for several years at the St. Louis Country Club performing unspecified duties.  He disappears from the public record after 1927. It is generally believed that Bullock lived until 1964, but almost nothing is known about his later years.  His drinks manual remains  his legacy and a continuing reminder of this extraordinary, indeed, ideal,  bartender.  

Notes:  Longer articles on each of these bartenders may be found elsewhere on this website:  Willard, June 13, 2022;  Thomas, Oct 12, 2022, and Bullock, July 7, 2022 (The last a reprint of an article researched and written by Michael Jones for the Louisville Tourist Bureau.)  Finally a word about the new book that generated this post, “The French 75” by John Maxwell Hamilton.  I recommend it for a delightful romp through the history, lore and many manifestations of this iconic cocktail.  Just published, the book is available from the LSU Press and Amazon Books. The author is interviewed at https://www.marketplace.org/2024/04/10/the-enduring-legacy-of-the-french-75-cocktail/.