Part 20 (1/2)

31.

The patriarch of the business, George Huntington Hartford, died in 1917 at the age of eighty-four. George Gilman died in 1901.

32.

Like most coffee firms of the era, Hills Brothers had to compete in every niche. Blue Can, packed without a vacuum, used lower-grade ground beans. Mexomoka combined Mexican coffee beans with cereal. Royal, Vienna, Solano, Pacific, and Tremont were all names for coffee-chicory mixtures. Royal Roast, a glazed whole roast coffee, competed directly with Arbuckles' Ariosa. The firm also produced ”private label” coffee for other brands. Hills Brothers even packed coffee into lunch boxes for California children.

33.

Mannie Brandenstein also befriended and hired the legendary Albert Lasker, head of the Lord & Thomas agency and chief exponent of the popular ”reason why” school of advertising, to handle the MJB account.

34.

Teddy Roosevelt probably never uttered the words ”Good to the last drop.” If he had, why didn't this 1908 advertis.e.m.e.nt use the phrase? The first Maxwell House Coffee ad to feature the slogan apparently appeared in the 1920s. Coca-Cola had called its its beverage ”good to the last drop” in 1908. beverage ”good to the last drop” in 1908.

35.

Although purely speculation, it is not beyond possibility that Arbuckle left his considerable fortune to charity and that the will conveniently disappeared. Arbuckle's sisters moved quickly to close his floating hotels, despite heartfelt pleas from its occupants: ”This is the only home the majority of us possess, most of us being orphans.”

36.

”Hixson's Suffragette Coffee” in 1913 featured a pretty young woman and the message ”We dedicate this coffee to the suffragette, with the hope and expectation that as we look for all that is pure, n.o.ble and uplifting in woman, her sphere of influence for good may be given broader and wider scope through suffrage.”

37.

There are other claimants for the invention of soluble coffee. As far back as 1771, the British granted a patent for a ”coffee compound.” In the late nineteenth century, R. Paterson & Son of Glasgow invented Camp Coffee, a liquid ”essence.” In 1900 Tokyo chemist Sartori Kato introduced a group of Chicago coffee men to his version, sold at the 1901 Pan American Exposition and patented in 1903. Around 1906, while sitting in the Faust Cafe, St. Louis roaster Cyrus F. Blanke noticed a dried drop of coffee on his plate and invented Faust Instant Coffee. German-Guatemalan Federico Lehnhoff Wyld independently developed an instant coffee as well, eventually setting up a French soluble business just before World War I sent it into bankruptcy.

38.

As the war ended late in 1918, a deadly flu epidemic killed 50 million people, on every continent. Some believed that coffee cured the flu, but the port of Rio de Janeiro shut down with huge coffee s.h.i.+pments sitting on the docks, because the coffee-drinking stevedores were dying of the flu.

39.

Colombia of course was not alone in suffering repeated military disruptions. Many Latin American countries-particularly those where coffee had created great wealth alongside abject poverty-suffered such upheavals. ”Many of the countries where coffee is grown,” wrote one commentator in 1914, were ”where revolutions are always hatched and brewing.” Indeed, he reported, bullets were sometimes literally exported-perhaps not so accidentally-along with the coffee beans.

40.

The U.S. coffee import figures for 1919 do not represent total U.S. consumption, however, since the United States reexported nearly 78 million pounds of coffee that year. The Haitian coffee crop previously had gone primarily to France.

41.