Lou: I was sales manager for Old Dutch Brewery and this included a local delivery service and sales. Wholesale became an important part of it because the community was too small to be able to handle the output of a brewery the size that we were developing, so it was important to develop a lot of outside wholesale business; that we started to do.

We increased our distribution from outside Ohio into Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and it was doing very well. We had a good advertising agency out of Cleveland and started what was called The Old Dutch Polka Review, a live show on television station in Cleveland that was new at the time. It was a large show. We had a polka band and had national entertainment personalities on it every Monday night.

Guests were distributors and tavern keepers, and it was a tavern scene. It developed into a very find program which we put on a network in many cities around. It was difficult for me traveling all around to see these. Also, we did get a Beech Bonanza airplane and had a pilot who would fly me around to these areas. We’d get a distributor and I could call the distributor at 10 in the morning in Indianapolis or something and say, “Will you meet me for lunch?” and would do that, make a few calls. Come back and make a few calls and the pilot would take – in those days all those people would be younger too and they had young children.

My pilot would take their kids and fly them around the city and just make a big hero out of me for that. Then in 1956 people came along who had purchased the Frankenmuth Brewery in Michigan and their logo was a daschund. They were in Michigan and they were a popular beer. And, Iroquois in Buffalo, New York.

Put those two breweries together and call them International Breweries Inc. IDI, and they came along and, to make a long story short, bought us out in 1956 and a local partner and I agreed to work for them. He took an office downtown and was doing outside work for them and I was running the brewery. I contracted to work for the for four years and in addition to running this brewery they bought the Bavarian Brewery Company in Covington, Kentucky and I was also in charge of running that. Because of our network of distributors I was also the wholesaler’s relation manager for all the breweries, which kept me away from home almost all the time, it seemed like. So, when the contract was up they wanted me to move to Buffalo where the headquarters was and I chose not to do that and decided to move out west.

So, we went to Tucson, Arizona and we went out there and got the real estate business and ended up – that was 1961.

In 1967 I was offered a job in Baltimore, Maryland by the brewery called American Brewery. I went there and ran that brewery for several years and got it into such a position that Schaeffer Brewery which was in town in Baltimore asked me to come over and run that plant, and at that time Schaeffer had the brewery in Baltimore, Albany, Brooklyn, and a great big new plant in Pennsylvania.

We were the third largest brewery in the United States at that time. So I went to work for them until 1975 and then we decided to come back to Findlay.