TweetNow that Labor Day is over, I can get back to the task of writing my book on the Pabst medicinal product called Pabst Extract or Best Tonic, first introduced in 1887. Soon I will outline a new schedule for the next few months to pace my rewriting of the nine chapters of the book. […]
Read MoreTweetLast week I visited Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. There I discovered that the nineteenth century Shakers sold a medical beverage that had ten percent alcohol. I toured the museum on the property where I found a wooden box used for bottles of Corbett’s Sarsaparilla. The Shakers bottled and sold this beverage. Tall ‘Queen of […]
Read MoreTweetMiss A. Rhoda walked into Milwaukee ‘s Kopf Pharmacy on October 21, 1897. She ordered one bottle of Best Tonic , which cost her twenty-five cents. The Hugo S. Kopf Pharmacy, located at 78 Juneau Avenue, was one of many pharmacies that sold the Pabst Tonic. The customers were middle class women who would not […]
Read MoreTweetCressy spent his early years on the farm of his grandfather, General Lucas Pond. The house was built between 1823 and 1825, was enlarged over many years later. It contained twenty rooms and five fireplaces. Virgil Pond, Cressy’s Uncle, in 1900 donated the house to the King’s Daughters and Sons of Norfolk County. The house […]
Read MoreTweetAs I drove south from Boston on Interstate 95 that fall morning, I thought how remote this section of southern Massachusetts appears. It is not far from the Rhode Island line. My goal was the small southeast town of Wrentham, Massachusetts. On the main road of Wrentham all I could see was how rural this […]
Read MoreTweetA few weeks ago another writer recommended I read Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. The book centers on a Chicago family whose father is sent to Germany as the US Ambassador in the early 1930s, just as the menace of Nazism is emerging. I just started reading the book yesterday. Larson uses historical […]
Read MoreTweetWhen A. Cressy Morrison arrived in Milwaukee in the year 1889 for his job at Pabst, the brewery’s name had changed from the Best Brewery to the Pabst Brewery. Fred Pabst, who had married Best’s daughter, was now running the Company. The office of Fred Pabst was on the second floor of the brick building […]
Read MoreTweetI remember a couple of summers ago visiting Pabst Brewery on Juneau Avenue in Milwaukee. Thought empty, the old buildings were still there. The tour of the old main office building was the highlight. We walked up the steps into the office of Captain Pabst and then into the section where the advertising office, with […]
Read MoreTweetFor the past several months I have been following my outline to write the nine chapters of the book. A week ago I wrapped up Chapter 9. Now it is time for me here to reflect on what I think is the condition of the manuscript in its current form. Though I have been careful […]
Read MoreTweetWhat amazed me as I read the advertising material from Pabst about its Tonic is that the beverage was referred to as ‘food’. In an 1890 page in the Secret booklet called “Still More Secrets” we read: “Malt Extracts are prescribed by physicians to promote sleep, to strengthen nerves, to build up the system as […]
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