When 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 that housed the Pabst executives. You can still see the date ‘1880’ at the top of the center wall of this building on Juneau Avenue. As I entered through the doorway one summer day not too long ago, I thought how many other people had walked through this portal to become part of the nation’s largest brewery in the 1880s. Cressy was one.
Cressy Morrison came to work to promote the medicinal beverage called Best Tonic. Pabst had created the product two years earlier, in 1887. Like Maltine as well as products from other breweries, Best Tonic provided medical help for women suffering from various ailments like fevers and digestive problems. One medical journal recommended the product in these words: “Every clinician has experienced the difficulty of combating that debility which is the result of acute infectious fevers. Often the most intractable symptom the doctor must overcome in such convalescence is the stubborn gastric and intestinal agony usually so marked in the aftermath of typhoid and its congeners, and in the cachexia of malaria. For these conditions there is no better remedy of its kind than a large circle of practitioners regularly find in Pabst Extract, The ‘Best’ Tonic.”
And so the medical community supported Pabst Best Tonic. Cressy had an important ally in that relationship.