My signed copy of Living the American Dream

Before we delve into the contents of the book, here are scans of the front cover of the Henry Kimelman memoir and of the author's autographed inscription. The bookseller’s listing had noted that the book had been autographed for a former ambassador, yet the script mentions only Hannah and Phil, so I wondered how they knew it was to a former ambassador.

A quick search on Hannah Phil ambassador immediately answered the question. From Wikipedia:

Philip Mayer Kaiser (July 12, 1913 – May 24, 2007) was a United States diplomat. On June 16, 1939, Philip Kaiser married Hannah Greeley. Kaiser served in the United States Department of Labor as Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Affairs, during the administration of President Harry S. Truman. He was a special assistant to Governor Averill Harriman of New York from 1955 to 1959. Later during the administration of President John Kennedy, Kaiser was ambassador to Senegal and Mauritania. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he persuaded the President of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, to deny the Soviet Union landing rights to refuel its planes. Finally, during the administration of Jimmy Carter, Philip Kaiser served as ambassador to Hungary. While ambassador to Hungary, Philip Kaiser was instrumental in the return of the Crown of St. Stephen to the Hungarian government from the United States in 1978. [4] After serving as ambassador to Austria, Philip Kaiser retired from government service in 1981.

It is not hard to imagine that when Philip Kaiser passes away in 2007, eight years after receiving a copy of his friend Henry Kimelman’s memoir, that his book collection would return to circulation and this volume would end up at a Maryland bookseller who is listed at Amazon.com.

Finally, here's the dedication page of Henry's book, honoring his wife, three children and six grandchildren. The John and Susan mentioned here were two of the family members who contacted me.

Contact with members of the Kessler family

Last month, I was contacted by several members of the Kimelman and Fishman families, grandchildren of the Sidney Kessler I have written about in this blog. They had discovered my posts about Kessler and wondered about the reasons for my interest in their grandfather. After explaining Walter Ruby’s connection to Kessler at the American Spirits company in the 1930s, I think that their concerns were mostly alleviated.

Grandson Bob Fishman helped me correct several errors in my narrative, taking time during his busiest month of the year as the executive director of NCAA March Madness coverage for CBS Sports. As a result, I have corrected Kessler’s birth and death dates in place in the previous posts.

Another correction deserves specific mention. Fishman questioned my information that baseball star Jackie Robinson was present at the opening of the Virgin Isle Hotel in December 1950. He noted that as a lifelong Dodgers fan, it was not possible that his grandfather would not have told him that if it were true.

When I went back to my source document, this December 10, 1950 article in the New York Times business pages (click to enlarge), I see where I made the mistake. Note that the last two paragraphs of the long article about the hotel opening are unrelated and concern other Virgin Islands tourism news, including an separate item about Jackie Robinson playing the first round at a new golf course.

So Bob is absolutely right and the family’s Dodger bonafides are intact. He noted in his email that though Robinson was not part of the opening, several years later, another baseball great, Hank Aaron, visited St. Thomas as guests of the Kesslers.

The other family members I was in touch with are John Kimelman and Susan Edwards, both children of Henry and Charlotte Kimelman. Charlotte, still living, is Sidney Kessler’s daughter. (Her sister Louise, also still living, is Bob Fishman’s mother. A third sister, Audrey, born after 1930, was previously unknown to me but now fills out the family tree.

One thing I learned from John Kimelman was that his father Henry had in 1999 published a memoir of his life in business and public service. In fact, Henry’s was the second autobiography in the family, as his grandfather Berl Kimelman had in the 1920s set down the details of his life in the old country (eastern Galicia). Henry later had that manuscript translated and published in a limited run.

Checking Amazon, I found that used copies of Living the American Dream: The Life and Times of Henry L. Kimelman were available. I ordered a copy, autographed by the author, from a bookshop in Maryland. It arrived in pristine condition with a plastic cover over the dust jacket. I have now had the time to carefully read Henry’s amazing book. While it provides little new information about Sidney’s activities before Henry marries into the family in 1943, it has much to tell us about Sidney’s later life that helps to illuminate our quest.

I will present what I learned from the book in the next several posts.

Illustrated Wohlgemuth history

You may remember Eli Wohlgemuth, one of the fellow travelers we have met during our genealogical journey into our parents' roots. Eli checked in by email the other day to update us on his progress with his labor of love, an exhaustive history of the family of Yeshayah Wohlgemuth, the famous rabbi of Memel.

"I will soon be ready to publish my book, 'And that you shall relate into your son's ears and your son's son's......' This unique timeline, history on the Wohlgemuth family and much more will be a three volume book, 2400 pages, with color illustrations," he writes.

Eli wonders if some of the readers of this blog might be interested in purchasing a copy. I warned him that our overall readership is low, but there are a few Wohlgemuth researchers among them. Rather than publish Eli's email address, you can contact me and I will pass along your information to Eli.

I have not seen Eli's manuscript as yet, but I am not expecting it to yield a breakthrough, because I believe it is focused on the children of Rabbi Wohlgemuth and their descendants, while my mother's family's Wohlgemuth branch may come through a sibling or cousin relationship. I will be especially interested in any biographical details about Yeshaya's boyhood and family relationships from the time before he settled in Memel.

Other Wohlgemuth researchers who are directly descended from the rabbi can expect a treasure trove of information.

Revised interpretation of American Spirits

I was wrong about several things in the preceding posts. I said that Kessler owned American Distillery but that's wrong. American was a long standing distillery in Pekin IL that had been doing business as American Commercial Alcohol Corporation during Prohibition.

As it prepared to enter the new spirits industry when Repeal went into effect, it would need a New York sales and marketing agent to bring its whiskey brands to the market. This was similar to how other fledgling liquor companies like Seagram's and Schenley were organized, matching up refurbished distilleries in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois with smart, mainly Jewish, businessmen inventing a new industry.

American Distillery had brought in a seasoned executive Russell Brown as president. I believe it was his strategy to create a subsidiary called American Spirits. The first president of American Spirits was Joseph H. Kraus. Peter Siskind was vice president of sales. Walter Ruby is referred to as advertising manager in one article but that may have been descriptive of his role but not his actual title.

Now a new liquor company needed a full range of liquor products. They produced their own bourbon and rye whiskey, but they needed import deals for Scotch and Irish whiskey, wines and liquors from around Europe, and rum from the West Indies.

In two 1937 articles from the NY Times business pages we see the company rolling out new strategies for their line of Scotch whiskeys and Puerto Rican rum. For the Scotch deal, they are distributing existing brands of whiskey, but for their rum play they worked with a new supplier and decided to establish a new brand.

That was Sidney Kessler and Carioca. He had taken over a rum making plant in Catano, outside of San Juan, just down the road from the main Bacardi distillery, and there he established his new Compania Ron Carioca. Doing so must have required some substantial resources, so I wonder if American Distilling didn't back the project and own a piece of it from the start.

Walter appears in that July 31, 1937 article. The Carioca Cooler is one of three drink concoctions that the company will be promoting. As far as I know, we don't have a date for when Walter left the company, whether it was shortly after the campaign launch or later that year or next. The date of his death is July 23, 1939.

The next several years show rapid growth in sales for American Spirits, especially the rum business, where it has had a hit with its new rum drink, the Carioca Zombie. The partnership between Kessler and American had gone so well that now it made sense to actually tie the knot, or at least that was what Peter Siskind thinks. The ambitious salesman engineers a deal for American to acquire Carioca for a 50 percent interest in the combined company, with the 50 percent to be split between Kessler and himself.

Peter Siskind becomes president of American Spirits on February 20, 1941 (see the NY Times clipping above). The business continues to grow, though shortages loom as the government puts all distilleries on producing industrial alcohol for the war effort. Kessler begins dreaming about his hotel and thinks it's time to cash in.

The buyer is Schenley, one of the big four liquor companies, for a rumored $4 million. Schenley continues to sell Carioca alongside other rum brands. American goes back to its knitting as a distiller for a time, though it makes a belated unsuccessful attempt to take over Schenley in the 1970s. Eventually, Schenley will be acquired by Guinness, the U.K. beverage giant.

We know that Kessler's million went into the Virgin Isle, and it paid off handsomely when after a decade of running the hotel he sold Hilton the long term license to operate it.

I haven't tried to track down Peter Siskind yet. He may have made out the best of all, having earned his cut by putting the deal together and by running the company successfully.

That's my current reconstruction of events. I'm sure I still have some things wrong, but this is getting closer.

Lots more on Sidney Kessler

Note: I have been in touch with members of the Kimelman and Fishman families about my writings about Sidney Kessler in this post and others on the blog. I hope to post new information that they care to share. This post has been edited since its original to reflect corrected information on Sidney Kessler's birth and death dates.

Well, I turned up all kinds of interesting information about Sidney Kessler. I'll do my best to summarize it here without posting full details on every point.

He was born June 20, 1897 to Polish immigrant parents in New York. I don't find him in early census years, but I do have his have his 1917 WWI draft registration. His mother's name is Yetta. His employer is L.K. Liggett, the drug store, at an address on Broadway in Manhattan.

In 1930, he is in the census at 645 Ocean Ave. in Brooklyn with his wife Frances and daughters Charlotte, age 8, and Louise, 5. His occupation is pharmacist. (Hmm. This is our supposed bootlegger?)

The next records are all from Ancestry's passenger lists database—ship and air manifests documenting more than 30 arrivals in New York from San Juan, Puerto Rico between the years 1936 and 1954. Usually he is traveling alone and carries one or two bags. On several trips he is accompanied by his wife, and on two by Peter Siskind.

The dates of the trips cluster like this: 10 trips between 1936 and 1940; 7 trips between 1944 and 1948; a flurry of 14 trips between February 1950 and April 1952 and then a final trip in September 1954. The trips are by steamship until 1944, after which they are air flights on Pan Am or Eastern Airlines.

Each record includes the passenger's local address. For the early trips, Sidney's home address is the same Ocean Avenue apartment from 1930. In the mid-'40s, he began using 101 Central Park West as his local address. This turns out also to have been the home address of his daughter Charlotte and her husband Henry Kimelman, of whom more later. For the last handful of trips, Sidney is using different hotels for his New York address.

While rich in new detail, this information generally fits what we already knew. Kessler was traveling regularly to Puerto Rico in the second half of the 1930s, presumably establishing distillery operations, arranging product shipment, dealing with officialdom and more. The frequency of his visits falls off during the war years and until the time of the sale of the company in 1946.

I don't know when Kessler first begins spending time during his trips not in Puerto Rico but in nearby St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. San Juan was the gateway city to the eastern Caribbean, so even later when he was shuttling to St. Thomas, he continued to travel through San Juan on the way to New York. I imagine he had come to know the Virgin Islands during his earlier trips and was intrigued with its potential for tourism and development.

After the sale of the liquor business, he decided to go all out for his dream and put together plans to build a grand resort hotel, one of the island's first, near the capital city Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas. The investors in the project are Kessler, his two sons-in-law Henry Kimelman and Eliot Fishman, and a fourth man Benjamin Bayles. Plans are laid during the trips in 1947 and '48.

Construction begins in 1949 and Kessler is on scene to oversee things throughout 1950, when the hotel opens in mid December. Baseball star Jackie Robinson is on hand for the opening. Then Sidney continues to travel to New York throughout the next year as he moves his family and wraps up business on the mainland. After 1951, he lives in St. Thomas full time.

Before I leave the subject of passenger lists, I want to note there are no visits to the islands prior to the time of his association with American Spirits. He had not done any business involving Puerto Rican rum before 1935, at least none that required travel to Puerto Rico. My point is that so far we see no evidence of his involvement in the liquor business, either legally or not, before then. It doesn't mean he wasn't a bootlegger, not a mild mannered pharmacist, but we don't see it yet.

There is lots of other interesting stuff, however. Most of it has nothing to do with Walter Ruby, but now that we're getting to know Kessler, we might as well flesh him out.

• On January 5, 1930, Joseph Weber, a 31-year-old broker living at at 75 Lenox Road, Brooklyn, poisoned himself after brooding over losses said to have amounted to approximately $100,000 in the stock market. Before he became unconscious, he telephoned to his friend, Sidney Kessler, 645 Ocean Avenue, informing him that he was "very ill" and attempted to administer an antidote to himself. When Kessler arrived, he found his friend in a coma and Weber died at Kings County Hospital.

• In 1943, there was controversy in Congress over Roosevelt Administration policy in Puerto Rico, where there had been some unrest. The Bell subcommittee of the Committee on Insular Affairs conducted hearings on political, economic and social conditions in the U.S. owned commonwealth.

The following exchange from the hearing is between Cong. Fred Crawford (R-Mich) and a witness named Lee D. Miller:

Mr. MILLER: So then I went to see Mr. Bash and Mr. Bash said he was going to see if there was some way he could stop Carioca Rum.

Mr. CRAWFORD. Who is Carioca Rum?

Mr. MILLER. Carioca Rum is a domestic corporation which is wholly owned by the...

Mr. CRAWFORD. Can you give us the names of any individuals connected with them?

Mr. MILLER. The name of Sidney Kessler, the individual who originated the whole deal. You ought to get Moe Goldman up here. He will tell you.

Mr. CRAWFORD. ...I have spoken to Mr. Moe Goldman, who admits that he was the agent, also admitting that he has not the financial background to swing this deal himself. This was said in front of a witness. The shipment of 10000 empty barrels were filled with this residue grain mixture by the "J. Younge Grain Co.," at Peoria, Ill., and the whole scheme was undoubtedly concocted by one Sidney Kessler of Rum...

Intriguing to be sure. To learn more we'd need to get a full copy of the multi-volume committee hearings.

• The Virgin Isle Hotel was a considerable success as Kessler's vision of a Virgin Islands tourism boom came true. On April 18, 1957, just one month after his winning streak on the game show Twenty One had come to an end, Charles Van Doren married Geraldine Ann Bernstein at the Virgin Isle Hotel, and the couple honeymooned there for a week. The bride, a former secretary Van Doren had hired to respond to his fan mail, was a niece of hotel owner Sidney Kessler.

• A Sidney Kessler was involved in a scandal involving an ambassadorial appointment in the Kennedy administration. However, I just now realized that this was a different Sidney Kessler.

* However, we do get into politics next through Kessler son-in-law Henry Kimelman. Kimelman gained wealth via multiple business interests in the Virgin Islands, where he served as the first commissioner of commerce. He became involved in politics in the '60s, served as chief of staff in Stewart Udall's Interior Department, and became a close confidante to Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota.

McGovern was visiting with Kimelman on St. Thomas in December 1969 when news broke of Sen. Edward Kennedy's accident in Chappaquiddick, and it was Kimelman who convinced McGovern that this gave the senator an opening to run for president. Kimelman became the campaign finance chairman and chief fundraiser.

Kimelman's name was on President Richard Nixon's enemies list.

On February 29, 1972, Sidney Kessler was listed among significant contributors to the McGovern campaign. Kessler contributed $1000. Kimelman kicked in $24,000 and a colleague in his West Indies Corporation added $10,000. McGovern lost.

Henry Kimelman served in the Carter admistration as ambassador to Haiti during the regime of dictator Baby Doc Duvalier.

• Sidney Kessler died in St. Thomas at the age of 94 on July 7, 1991. Henry Kimelman passed away in 2009, leaving wife Charlotte Kimelman, three children and seven grandchildren.

American Spirits boss Sidney Kessler

In Walter's "The Early Lives of Stan and Helga Ruby" document, we learn from Sandy Klein's memories that Walter Ruby's "partner" in Carioca was a man named Peter Siskind and that at some point the two men joined American Spirits, presumably bringing their product with them. The document goes on to report that after Walter's death, Siskind and a new partner Sidney Kessler owned the company until selling it to Schenley in 1946.

There are some things right and other things wrong about that account. The following excerpt from "Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas" has lots of detail about Kessler's activities in the U.S. Virgin Islands, including not-so-veiled hints that he made his fortune as a bootlegger. This article says it was Kessler who founded the Carioca distillery in Puerto Rico, which sounds right, but in 1938, which we know is wrong.

[For some reason, I can't get my image of the chapter to display larger than it is at right. Click it twice to read it in full size.]

I think it is likely that Kessler was the main mover behind American Distilling Co., and that American Spirits was the distribution and marketing agent for American Distilling in the United States. In a 1946 legal report on a stockholder lawsuit against American Distilling, the ownership of American Spirits is described as 50% owned by American Distilling and 50% by two of the defendants, Peter Siskind and Sidney Kessler.

Anyway, the excerpt reveals a good deal of fascinating information about Kessler, including his later activities as a major real estate developer in St. Thomas. Enjoy.

You be the judge

Just for fun, here is a comparison of the official Coca-Cola logo, in force as a protected trademark since 1893, and the logo treatment for American Spirit's Carioca Cooler concoction. You be the judge.

Coca-Cola brand protection history

I'm starting to look into the history of The Coca-Cola Company's trademark protection efforts. This six-minute video by Babson College professor Ross D. Petty doesn't mention Carioca, but describes the company's aggressive efforts to legally block competitive products and unauthorized trademark usage.

Angels In the Outfield

I added this as a comment to Walter's previous post, but there's enough here to merit making it a full item.

I thanked Walt for providing the link to the article about Bing Crosby's recording of the 1960 World Series. It's a very important development for Pirates fans like us, especially with the 50th anniversary of the Mazeroski homer coming up in a few weeks.

But I imagined readers could have been puzzled about the connection between Walter Ruby and his Carioca Cooler and a baseball game that would be played more than two decades later. Other than the free associations bouncing around in Walter the younger's mind.

So in the interest of helping an innocent reader understand those associations, here's some background.

Walter Ruby (the elder) was acquainted with (but not related to) his namesake Harry Ruby, the songwriter. At one time, we thought that Harry might have written The Carioca song, which was a hit in the 30s, especially after Fred Astaire danced to it in his first starring movie role. (By the way, the carioca in the song though not in Walter's rum is a reference to natives of Brazil.)

Anyway, long story. Harry didn't write that song though he did write numerous other hit songs in the 1920s and '30s. In 1951, he appeared as himself in a cameo role in the Hollywood production of Angels In the Outfield, a movie about a fictional version of, guess who, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Bing Crosby, covered in the article Walter linked to, also appears as himself in the movie, along with a number of real-life ballplayers including Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, and Ralph Kiner. The latter was a star player on the woeful Pirates teams of the early '50s.

Walter Ruby was a sports fan, and he relished popular entertainment, so he would no doubt have enjoyed the movie. Had he lived, he also would have followed the 1960 World Series, but on the wrong side. Having been raised in uptown Manhattan and with his family in the Bronx, Walter was a Yankees man through and through.

Segue here, but this might be an appropriate point to mention that Walter and I were both in Pittsburgh recently for a reunion of the kids who grew up on Green Valley Drive, where we lived at the time of that momentous baseball game. I haven't covered that here on the excuse that our childhood is outside the scope of this blog. However, on reflection, how Stan and Helga lived their lives after the birth of we three children seems entirely relevant.

So one more item for the blog to-do list. I'll have a future report on our reunion weekend.

We Had Em All the Way!

Dan,

Brilliant work! I'm pretty sure thats what got him fired. That's two times Coca Cola comes into Ruby family lore and things turn out badly; let's not forget that our great-grandfather Abraham Bloch (Walter's eventual father in law, who was in the seltzer business in Albany around 1910) was offered the franchise for upstate new York by a small upstart company from Atlanta that offered a syrupy new carbonated drink and he said, "Naw, I've got more than enough business already." For the rest of his life, whenever he had an idea or made a suggestion, people would say, "Yeah, yeah, and you're the guy who said no to Coca Cola." I drank a Diet Coke today (eveybody in Georgia still seems to drink Coke in support of the home team) and it tasted kind of weird to think of all the pain and grief those corporate SOBs caused our family!

On a happier note, see this New York Times article on Bing Crosby's vintage taping of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, which ends, of course, with Bill Mazeroski's epic game winning blast! 50 years ago in just a couple of weeks! Time flies when you're having fun. Certainly that was one of the very happiest moments of my life; the purest ecstasy and exaltation. The unheralded, scrappy Pirates upending the mighty imperial awful Yankees. Sublime justice for at least one moment. Miracles do come true, after all.

To paraphrase the Passover song: 'If the only great moment in my life had been Maz's homer slaying the Yankees, that would have been enough!' Not really of course, but its a good line.

Did Coca-Cola endorse the Carioca Cooler?

Walter just called from Savannah GA, where he is on a mixed work-pleasure trip with Tanya, to discuss the latest Walter Ruby developments. I read to him the following expanded version of the snippet published in the previous post, which I had since managed to piece together from multiple searches in Google Books.

You will note an interesting article in connection with the first Fall meeting of the IBA, which meeting was addressed by a well-known wine and liquor authority, Mr. G. Selmer Fougner.

This article leaves no doubt that the Carioca Rum Company is very closely associated with the Coca Cola Company in the promotion of a drink known as the Carioca Cooler. The presence of Mr. Homer Thompson of the New York Coca- Cola Bottling Company, at this meeting, is further indicative of the association.

Naturally, the writer is at quite a loss to understand your statement to him at the time of our meeting several months ago, at which you stated definitely that the Coca-Cola Company had no association whatsoever with the Carioca Rum Company and, as a matter of fact, had secured an injunction against these people for the use of the Coca-Cola name and facsimile of the bottle in their advertising."

Appellee's attorneys, in replying to said letter, denied the association with the Carioca Rum Co. referred to in the letter, but attention is called to it here for the reason that, if appellant's selling agent believed that appellee was interested in a beverage containing rum, it is altogether likely that purchasers of appellant's goods bearing the mark ...

Walter's immediate response: "That's what got him fired."

I hadn't gotten there yet, but it sure sounds right. Consider the timeline.

Walter is managing the Carioca advertising campaign for American Spirits in 1935-6, using an apparent tie-in with the Coca-Cola company. In addition to the cocktail labels published previously, above is the front and back of a miniature Carioca bottle that is available for sale on an Internet auction site.

Not only is Coca-Cola's name and logo prominently used, the Carioca Cooler's own branding mimics the Coca-Cola typography.

Then Walter abruptly leaves the company for unknown reasons. This very interesting snippet from the publication Printers Ink in 1937 shows the company reassigning its advertising account, presumably after Walter's departure.

Then we have the expanded snippet cited above, which appears to come in a legal filing in an 1940 appellate court case involving Coca-Cola's relationship with American Spirits and the Carioca Cooler. It is unclear who is the appellant and appellee.

As Walter the younger speculates, our early-day Don Draper of a grandfather didn't have authorization from Coca-Cola for his hot new marketing idea but went ahead with it anyway. Then the beverage giant sues or brings the hammer down in some other way on American Spirits, Inc. and Walter Ruby is forced out of the company as a result.

For those who didn't get the reference, Don Draper is the lead character in the television series Mad Men about a self-made man in the advertising business in New York the 1960s. Walter Ruby is a self-made man in the advertising business in New York in the 1930s.

By the way, the G. Selmer Fougner mentioned above was a prominent food and wine writer who had a daily column in the New York Sun, the first of the breed of foodie journalists so prevalent today. When you think of the characters like Fougner and songwriter Harry Ruby with whom our Walter crossed paths, it does seem like an episode of Mad Men.