Right now I am editing the book chapters that I spent the last year writing.
What seems daunting to me is that at the moment the length of the manuscript is a bit short of my goal.
Do I need to worry about word length, or simply a book worth reading? I would opt for the second choice.
Every day I sit down, review, and rewrite a section of a chapter.
It is a slow process but necessary for the book to have any readers.
I take the job day by day.
The ability to sell a product to someone who did not need it became the goal of advertising by the earty twentieth century. Mass production of goods outpaced the distribution and consumption of such goods.
The talent to create an ad for a magazine or newspaper to sell a product to someone was therefore an important talent.
This was happening at the same time that advertisers began to look at sdvertising as a science.
A. Cressy Morrison [courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. 1937]
Emily Fogg-Meade wrote in her article “The Place of Advertising in Modern Business” in 1901 in the Journal of Political Economy, “Advertising is a mode of education by which the knowledge of consumable goods is increased. It sets forth the peculiar excellence of novelties, keeps in mind the merits of staple articles, and thus increases the general demand for commodities.”
To be ‘scientific’ meant that there was a method, which could be carried out and measured for its success.
Fogg-Meade wrote in the same article that “Advertising experts differ as to the possibility of reducing advertising to a science, but they all acknowledge the importance of skill.”
Cressy showed his skill at advertising by making the Pabst Best Tonic the number one product for the brewery.
I just bought this ad on Ebay.
Over the period of his final three years at the brewery 1895-97 the Pabst advertising manager A. Cressy Morrison carried out a publicity campaign that focused on the three periods of brewing beer: the beginnings with the Egyptians, then the Germans who developed the art of brewing, and finally Americans who perfected brewing.
Brewing began in Egypt. This is what Cressy wrote in the booklet called “Ominous Secrets”: “So far back in the beginning of history that the archeologists can only approximate the date by thousands of years, humanity had discovered—humanity, whose wisdom was already so developed as to create the pyramids and those stupendous architectures now buried amid the sands of ancient Egypt,–humanity has discovered that in the preservation of the health and the development of the strength of the people lay the secret of progress, the power to build, the possibility of national defense.
“In almost every sepulcher, buried with kinds and with the people, embedded as in amber in their language and the rubric letters of their literature; on tablets of stone, in hieroglyphs with untold histories, and carved by the cunning sculptor in the very temple of Isis, we find the secret of the nation’s strength and wisdom ‘The two-rowed barley of the Egyptians,’ the first food grain, the most perfect strength-giver which nature has ever yielded to the pursuit and inquiry of man.”
Thus Cressy’s creative skills as an adman inspired him to link the beginnings of brewing to the Egyptians.
Notice the ad [above] promoted the Best Tonic which certainly had the qualities of the beer that the Egyptians gave the world. Tonic had not only its qualities but also its content. The Tonic was really beer.
The Pabst Brewery had achieved its status as the world’s largest brewery by the 1890s.
By that same time advertising provided for the financial success of national magazines like Ladies Home Journal. No longer did articles reflect the value of a magazine. Money generated from advertisers made LHJ the most popular national magazine of its time.
The new advertising demanded that the adman include illustrations and images to promote the product. People wanted to see pictures, not just words, in an ad.
Jackson Lears writes in his book Fables of Abundance that according to a Printers Ink contributor in 1898, not words but pictures constituted “the quickest-acting medium for the transmission of one man’s thought to another man’s mind.”
It was in that kind of advertising environment that A. Cressy Morrison, advertising manager at Pabst, guided the promotion of the Pabst product called The Best Tonic.
Advertising was changing mass publishing, and Cressy was in the midst of it.
I began to write the nine chapters of the book one year ago. As is my style, I put a lot into the chapter, some of it because I wanted to include it, other material I inserted to fill out some missing area.
Right now I am editing those chapters. This is not difficult work, but it demands attention to detail.
I hope to finish this editing by mid October.
Now 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.
I continue to collect materials about A. Cressy Morrison (1864-1951), the Pabst advertising manager for Best Tonic for ten years. Much of it needs to be integrated into the story.
What demands most of my energy, however, from this point on is that I need to rewrite and edit what I spent the last year writing.
Last 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.
Educated at Darmouth, Thomas Corbett was a both a Shaker and a medical doctor who served the nineteenth century Shaker community in Canterbury.
According to the museum guide, the box dates to the 1820s.
People were in search of medical help from such concoctions like the Corbett product. The label on the product claimed this beverage from the Shakers could help with many ailments including stomach problems.
In an ad for the product NH Speaker of the House at that time Stephen H. Ayer said this product helped him with his bronchitis.
So when Milwaukee’s Pabst Brewery came out with its medicinal beverage, Best Tonic, in 1887, there had already been a stream of such products, including this one from the Shakers on the East coast.
Miss 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 enter a saloon for alcohol, but would have no fear in buying alcohol-based medicinal beverages from the pharmacist. There were no laws regulating patent medicines until 1906 so the manufacturers used whatever methods necessary to provide the product to its customers.
Cards and pamphlets about the product were also distributed in the pharmacy. Advertising of patent medicines was possible because the manufacturers supplied the promotional material as well the campaign strategies they thought would attract customers. For example, it was not uncommon to conduct a contest to see what pharmacist would construct the best window display with the patent medicine as the focus of the display.
So it was that the local pharmacy became a major outlet for Pabst Tonic.
Cressy 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 with its eight acres of land became the Pond Home for the Aged, which opened in 1902 and operated until 1931.
The house is gone today and all you see is wooded area with the road, and directly across the road sits the Cressy Memorial Chapel [left], now a private home. Harriet Cressy, daughter of Lucas, built the Chapel in 1909 for the Home for the Aged to honor their son Oliver Sawyer Cressy, Jr.
In a nearby little red schoolhouse where his great-uncle Enoch Pond (1791-1882) once studied Cressy too began his education. The area where the school stood is not far from his grandfather’s house. Though the schoolhouse is long gone, the property sits back in the woods where the school once stood. The road that runs along the property is now Valley Street.
As 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 area was, even for today. How isolated this must have been in the nineteenth century. There must have been many farms here at one time.
As I approached the center of town on Route 1, the main road, I could see a few businesses, stores and gas stations. The sign for the public library caught my attention. The Wrentham town library would certainly be a place to start for my search for information on A. Cressy Morrison who was born in this town in 1864.
A. Cressy Morrison (1864-1951) the Pabst Adman for Best Tonic
The library had a few patrons checking books in and a couple checking theirs out as I waited for someone to help me. It was fortunate for me that the Wrentham Historical Society had a room at the Library to which the librarian escorted me. Many volumes of Wrentham’s history filled the shelves. The librarian pointed out some material that might prove helpful in my search for Cressy.
A mention of the name ‘Morrison’ appeared in one of the mid-nineteenth century indices for the local newspaper. It turned out to be a death notice of Alice Morrison in 1880. I wondered if she was related to Cressy.
The librarian also mentioned a local cemetery where there might be a reference to a Morrison among the records held there. I drove a mile or so to the cemetery. The caretaker, Joe, opened his metal index file of people who are buried in the cemetery. We found the same Morrison mentioned in the notice at the library. No sight of A. Cressy Morrison, however.
So that first day I found I had to continue my search for Wrentham’s famous son, Cressy.