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Updated 8/25/09.
In this section we will include the personal stories of former Falstaff
employees. If you have a story to tell, please
email me.
Robert with his daughter and the last
can of Falstaff off the line from Galveston in front of the hospitality room with a 12 of
Staff and a yellow returnable case
"My Falstaff story actually begins with my
father, John R Ebert Jr. Dad went to work for Falstaff in 1956 at the time they purchased
the Galveston brewery from Southern Select. Dad started out as the Bottleshop Supervisor
and oversaw the expansion and installation of the new bottleshop from 1956-60. The brewery
was doubled in size and became one of the most modern and efficient in the country.
Dad was working there when Hurricane Carla hit Galveston. The plant
received only moderate damage and was back in production in one week. Unfortunately,
several employees' homes were severely damaged so the Griesediecks came to Galveston on
the company plane which was loaded with clothes and supplies from the other Falstaff
plants to help our people. They even flew in a Kansas City steak dinner for all employees
and families.
During the 25 plus years Dad was with Falstaff he was Bottleshop
Supervisor, Warehouse Supervisor, Truck Fleet Manager and finally Production
Superintendent. Dad worked for Falstaff from 1956-78 when he retired. He came out of
retirement in '79 to take on the job as Production Superintendent and stayed there until
the plant closed in 1981. My brother Bill also worked there as a mechanic.
My own career with Falstaff began in the summer of 1980 when I was
hired on to work on the pallet repair crew. This crew was made up of the sons of employees
to work during the summer months. We worked in the 37th Street warehouse repairing pallets
and filling in where needed. I was the foreman of this crew and believe me, it was hot and
dirty work. The 37th street facility was a modified Quonset design and only half of the
doors would open. I don't know if you have ever been to Galveston, TX in the summer
(I have!-John) but the days averaged 95-100 degrees with very high humidity. We worked
five ten hour days and made $8.50 / hour. That was very good money in 1980 and I went to
straight to the beach every day after work. That job lasted the summers of my junior and
senior years in High School.
The following summer after I graduated I still had not decided what
I wanted to do so went to work at Falstaff full time as a production line operator. I ran
the can and bottle fillers, labelers, de-casers, palletizers, and the hycone machine (the
plastic ring that holds six packs together is called hycone). I also drove a fork lift and
loaded / unloaded trucks and rail cars. My dad wanted to prove he did not play favorites
by making sure that if there was a dirty job, I got it! I crawled through pasteurizers
with high pressure hoses washing out broken glass and ran the labelers, which were known
as the meat grinders because the bottles were labeled right out of the pasteurizer. The
bottles were heated to 154 degrees which built up pressure, and if the labeler arm hit
them in the wrong way they would explode sending glass shards everywhere. I still have the
scars.
I hand stacked beer when the palletizers went down. We ran at full
capacity and could not have any downtime so had to hand stack a lot of beer. One Friday
Dad walked up to me with a drivers handbook. In an hour I took my commercial driver's
license test and just two hours later I was hauling a load of beer down to San Antonio.
I really enjoyed the time I worked there. There was a good team
spirit in Galveston. We survived Paul Kalmanovitz's attempts to close the plant down and
made money right and left. Before New Orleans closed they had a strike there. The Plant
Manager in New Orleans saw the handwriting on the wall and started to ship us everything
that wasn't nailed down. One of management's favorite tactics seemed to be to cut all
maintenance budgets to the bone and see which plant could still operate. Galveston
continued to run well because of the New Orleans equipment and this did not seem to make
the corporate boys very happy. The plan looked like to run up losses at Galveston for an
eventual closure & to then transfer the volume to other plants and take a tax write off.
In the summer of 1981 Galveston was grouped into an operating
division with the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio. Pearl was apparently Kalmanovitz's
favorite plant and his "baby". When our division started losing money, the blame
was immediately put on Galveston although the company managers & accountants proved
otherwise. This was, unfortunately, was the last straw for us and Galveston was axed
due to mounting corporate losses and company politics.
We were told in August of 1981 that the plant would close
temporarily. When all the other Falstaff plants closed, they were instructed to dump any
beer left in production. New Orleans had beer left on the bottling line when the security
guards came in at noon and escorted the employees out. We decided not to dump the beer as
we had a full stockhouse which was usually two months production. We bottled it all up in
one month and set a plant record for production in our last month. Once again management
was hot because they lost a write-off for the dumped beer. To us anyways, this Kalmanovitz
had a very weird sense of business.
We closed on September 1 as instructed. In 1984 preparations were
made to reopen. The plant was cleaned, equipment overhauled and raw materials shipped in.
But all the last moment the economy took a serious down turn and Galveston did not reopen
and sat idle for many years. When Paul Kalmanovitz died in 1985, the employees threw a
party. In 1990 the corporate holding company for Pabst, Pearl, Falstaff and General
Brewing moved the production equipment to Pearl and shipped the
stock house tanks and brew kettle to China to brew Pabst there. The actual brewery
buildings were bought in 1997 by Bersinger Corp after warehouse 4, the keg house, and
grainery were torn down. Bersinger now uses it for warehousing and has an ongoing
renovation program.
I was one of the youngest employees at Galveston when it closed.
Most had been there 20 years + and it was like a family, many only had worked for
Falstaff. After the closure, some went to Budweiser in Houston or to Coca-Cola. The
employees were highly sought after because of their experience. Many now are gone,
including my Dad, who had nothing but fond memories of working for Falstaff. Mine are also
very positive. I have the last can of Falstaff which came off the line. It was given to my
Dad by the employees because he always treated them right. I got it when he passed on.
An interested story happened while I was there. Falstaff started to
produce Falstaff Lite and were sued by Miller Brewing for trademark infringement. One of
the old hands who had worked for Southern Select said they had used the word
"Lite" in the 1940s, but no one could prove it. He said had a bottle of Southern
Select Lite in his garage and brought in it. The lawyers looked at it and insured it for
several million dollars and shipped it to Court. Falstaff won and to this day Miller pays
Falstaff a royalty on each case of Lite produced. Our guy did want any money, he just
wanted his bottle back." 4/14/00
"I worked for General Brewing in San Francisco when in the early 1970's Paul
Kalmanowitz took over General. I was one of the few people he retained, working with Mr.
Paul was not easy. Before he moved north we were still trying to keep sales afloat, Lucky
Lager was rapidly going down the drain, so in order to generate new sales we introduced
Walters beer into the Northern California market. Coors was the big seller in those days,
but was alienating retailers because of shortages of product, so we devised a sales
program to introduce Walters with the theme " The Other Great Beer From
Colorado". We were given full reign by Jack Miller, the then CEO for Mr Paul.
We were about to get started with advertising point of sale
material, a nice looking package design made to look close to Coor's colorings when Mr Paul moved his headquarters to San
Francisco, this put him in our offices every day to observe and comment. He did not like
the idea of Aluminum cans, so it was changed to steel cans, he cut way back on any elaborate advertising materials, so we
had cheaply made paper point of sale pieces. We had a hard time convincing what was left
of our wholesaler network to take Walters on, many did not trust Mr Paul, they
feared once they got sales started, Mr. Paul would then sell it direct to the chains.
Finally I was able to get a maverick wholesaler in Chico California
to take it on. We hit the market and were able to get space in the beer boxes, some
retailers even gave us Coor's space, they were so mad at them. Sales were starting to come
around but then retailers told us they wanted bottles, that was Coor's most popular
package. I then went to Mr. Miller and asked that he consider having Walter's in short
neck export bottles. Mr Paul didn't want to spend for new bottles, so Walter's was put in
the same stubby bottle which had "Lucky" embossed on it, and then into a very light
cardboard six pack carrier.
After a few weeks, we started to get various complaints, first because of the steel cans
the beer took on a taste of metal, they said it probably was from the water at Pueblo.
Secondly, the six pack carriers were falling apart from the dampness in the cooler boxes, this lead to some breakage which
Mr. Paul would not give credit for to the wholesaler. Needless to say Walter's Beer died
before it could get off the ground like so many other things that Mr. Paul had a hand in.
I left Mr. Paul shortly there after and enjoyed many more years in the industry working
for Olympia and Stroh's, but I'll always cherish the time I spent putting the Walter's
program together."
Mickey G.
Retired Beer Hack 12/09/00
"Just found your website and found it very
interesting! Being a former Falstaff employee of the Ft Wayne plant a lot of the
things I saw and read about were reminiscent of old times at the brewery. I
worked there nine years and had many eventful days and heard about many strange
things and stories form the old timers still working there. You can only imagine
some of those events that happened as the company allowed beer drinking in the
plant up and until the plant closed in 1990. I sometimes still wonder how
everyone managed to do their jobs as it seemed as if all the employees drank
their fair share every day! We, as former Falstaff
i.e. Berghoff Brewery employees still get together three times a year and meet
for lunch to talk about how life was at the brewery years and years ago. We
still have one guy living who hired in at 1936 and worked until 1989! On
the subject of ale, I always thought it was kind of funny that Falstaff
advertised their ale as "aged in wood". Anybody that knew anything
about brewing would know this to be impossible! For one thing if the beer was
aged in wood vats, they would soon become so moldy that there would be so much
bacteria in them it would be transferred into the beer itself! We would get into
each tank and hand clean them after the ale was done fermenting and ready to be
transferred to a finishing tank. We hand coated each wooden vat every winter
with hand applied coating of a hard type of beeswax called manmouth. This
process of coating each tank kept a lot of guys from getting laid off in the
winter when things slowed down some. I'll tell you that this job of coating
these ale tanks was not an easy one to learn!
 I had quite a
hard time myself learning how to do it right. The process called for having
first to climb into the open ale tanks and take a torch and scraper to the floor
and walls of the tanks. This was a slow process of heating the old wax and
scraping off the old junk off. You had to be very careful as to not heat the
wood too much as it would start to blacken and burn if you did. The easy part
was the scraping. The coating of the tanks took the longest. In order to apply
the wax to the tanks, it had to be heated in old cooking fryers that the company
bought at Goodwill and such! Real high tech, huh? Well, after the wax had melted
in the fryers it had to be applied by using paint brushes. This was was not
unlike painting only the tank wood had to be hot when you applied the wax or it
would just gum up. It took weeks of training to get really good at this process!
The worst part seemed to be the wax always wanted to run and sag on the tank
walls. It was hard trying to keep those streaks off the walls as well as the
brush strokes. The floors weren't too bad as the way didn't have anywhere to
run. Each tank took about a week to do.
 There were three
guys to a tank too. One guy was always the outside safety buy who was in charge
to watch for any fire that could start. I always thought this was a waste of
time until I was the outside man one day and watched a guy set his coat sleeve
on fire!! Lucky for him I had been paying attention and noticed the torch was
burning his sleeve!! He was not hurt or burned, not sure if "Staff"
had anything to do with the event. Burning those torches always seemed to work
up quite a thirst if you know what I mean! Some
of the tanks in the brewery dated back to the Berghoff days of 1887. We kept
them in pretty good condition as the cold damp cellars had a destructive effect
on them. We also coated the outside of the tanks with a real good varnish every
two year or so. The yeast for the ales was really special. Guys used to skim the
yeast of the top of the ale with skimming paddles. The yeast was skimmed to save
for use in new brews and pumped via rubber hoses connected to a small brink that
we tossed the yeast into. The yeast was pumped into a special yeast storage room
which was kept just above freezing!! This room was about 50 to 75 yards from the
ale cellar. They kept a close watch on the amount each brink would hold as the
ale yeast was a very active culture and would start growing in size when we
stirred it up in the pumping process! It wasn't uncommon to see the ale yeast
actually growing and coming out of the ale brinks if someone had pumped too much
into them.
 An
interesting fact to pass along to everyone is that the tanks were made out of
cypress trees. I heard that when the brewery closed all of the wooden tanks were
sold to a winery. Spent many a night after work
drinking 'Staff with the boys at the brewery!! Heck, we always figured that it
was cheaper than going to a bar! I always told the wife that I had to work
overtime when I came home late. Never did check my pay stub to see if was true
or not. I can remember the first day we, a bunch of us, got hired in. At the end
of the shift we stayed and shot the bull and tried to kill a keg. Well, about
six hours later, we finally decided we had enough. We didn't know our way around
yet and couldn't find our way out as the plant was locked up pretty tight. We
were ready to crawl out a window when we finally found a way out!! That was a
day we didn't forget for a while as we all went home with a pretty mean
hangover. Didn't do much drinking on the job
through the years as it made it rough to do your job well not to mention going
home with a hangover. The best time I remember a beer tasting really good was
when we had to dump sugar bags when when we made a Lo-Cal brew. Six guys took
turns dumping 75 lb sugar bags into the hopper. Man, it got pretty hot up there
and you could really develop a serious thirst! I think all the sugar dust had
something to do with it. This is one of the few times I had some beer before
lunch time. Heck, I watched many a guy come in during the morning and head
straight for the tapper instead of the coffee pot. Now they were your serious
beer drinkers! (webguy note: Tarnation! If there is an afterlife I want to be
sent to a Falstaff Brewery to work!) We had our own little fiasco with
Mr. Paul and his henchmen, the meeting over the pension vote got pretty nasty.
His lawyers tried their darndest to try and convince us that all of our pension
money would be safe in their hands. Well, after both sides had given their
stories we took a vote and finally stood up to Mr. Paul and told him where to
go! Well, everyone was afraid what would come next as Mr. Paul always
punishes those who cross him. We did pay the price the very next day as he
decided to cut production in half and lay off about 50 guys! I think he was
surprised by the outcome of the vote as he always thought he had us in his back
pocket. After that he sent our Malt Liquor business to Pearl and they really
messed it up. I guess it didn't taste the same and some sources said it was
their water problems that caused it. But he just told the distributors back east
that they now had to go to Texas for their Malt. I guess that was the last straw
for many of them and they just said the heck with it and switched labels. Well,
after a few months they moved the Malt business back to Ft Wayne but the damage
had already been done by then! We never did win all that business back and all
because of Mr. K's little temper tantrum. We all just felt if they were going to
close us down to just go ahead and do it and stop making threats all the
time. We had heard that he always had a grudge
against the company as he hadn't been completely told of all the millions of
dollars of debt that Falstaff had owed from bad business dealings when he bought
the company. Derek Oltman Ft Wayne, IN
01/08/02 For
Daddy
"My dad worked his way up from
an accountant to Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer at a company that no
longer exists - Falstaff Brewing Corp.
He was such a loyal employee that he had both my sister
and I bow our heads whenever we passed the old Falstaff headquarters at 5050
Oakland in St. Louis, Missouri. I had my first sip of beer when I was but a
toddler, and by age 6, I knew the proper way to pour a beer and serve it to a
guest.
Daddy has been dead for gee, 7 years. He gave his life to
a corporation, and the corporation pretty much dumped
on him and all the other people who had worked for many, many years at Falstaff.
My dad
lost his livelihood, his pride, his home, his honor when the brewery was bought
by a very petty, evil man, way back in 1975, when I was a senior in college.
I remember it well, because Daddy was in the hospital with
a gangrenous (yes, gangrenous) appendix, and right after surgery, the man who
bought the company, Paul Kalmanovitz called him in his
hospital room and fired him. Yes, after 42 years of service, he fired my dad.
What made it worse was that Daddy, age 62, not eligible
(at that time) for Social Security, had to go look for a job and accept
unemployment benefits.
Mom and dad had to sell the house we grew up in and move
into an apartment.
The company refused to give him his pension - which he had
paid into for all those years. Daddy, along with other executives at Falstaff,
had to fight for his pension in court - it went all the way to the Supreme
Court, and finally, 5 years later, after losing everything, Daddy won.
Now, this was back in the days when a Fortune 500
executive made way under $100,000 a year - my dad made $42,000 a year when he
was fired back in 1975. Corporate executives were not the millionaires they are
today.
Why am I talking about this? I don't know. Perhaps it
explains my very deep distrust for corporations - they do not have their
employee's best interests at heart.
Tears still come to my eyes when I think of the pain my
mom and dad went through. He had worked his way up from nothing and then lost it
all to the capriciousness of a nasty rich man.
Neither of my parents ever recovered from this - they
found that many of their friends were really friends only because of Daddy's
position. Mom developed a drinking problem, got over it, and then died suddenly
of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 69, when Andy was only 1 year old.
Perhaps this is a warning to all - don't put all your eggs
in one basket, don't ever depend on a cold corporation to stand behind you -
always keep a resume handy, and know who your true friends are".
Authored by Beth on
Friday, November 14, 2003.
Update 08/25/09
My
father’s name is James C. Akin, he
started at Falstaff in 1948 at plant No.
1, one time he had told me that he was
loading a rail car in February at an
outside rail dock. At this time (around
1949 to 1952) loading was done manually.
As I understand the process, a set of
rollers was added to the case conveyor
system to extend it to the outside dock,
three or four employees would form a
line leading into the rail car and hand
cases of beer from one to another to
load the car. According to the story the
outside temperature was about -3 degrees
F. I had remarked that it would be
rather hard to work under those
conditions. My father said that to try
and stay warm it was common practice to
take an empty beer case and stand in it,
then take a drop light and set it in the
case to warm your feet, according to him
“if your feet are warm you didn’t feel
the cold as much”.
The
pictures that I’m sending are of a group
of employees that, in 1964, had achieved
15 years of service. They received a
commemorative tie clasp and a picture
with a note from Joe Griesedieck. In the
picture my father is in the first row
forth from the left (the guy without a
tie), I guess he had to get a tie now
that they gave him a tie clasp.
The
last picture is of my mother (on left)
and my father when they were visiting
another Falstaff worker. It seems that
before taking the picture he made sure
that you could tell what beer they were
having, probably because at this time my
father was working at
Anheuser-Busch. (taken about
1969)
Thanks to Robert J
Akin 8/25/09
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Falstaff
