Baum, Dan. Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty. New York: William Morrow,
2000. 367 pages.
The Coors name became famous first for its beer, and then for its
parochialism. The family company in Golden, Colorado brewed a beer that
sold itself without marketing. Coors was the first to use the all-aluminum
can (and were also too proud to dump the press tab opener, which tended to
cut your finger). Then their competitors, Anheuser-Busch and Miller, began
spending upward of a billion dollars a year on ads. In the mid-1970s Coors
went public when they could no longer pay their bills out of their cash
reserve, and reluctantly hired some marketing people. Their job was not
easy: Coors' history of vicious antiunionism led to an AFL-CIO boycott in
the late 1970s that left a bad taste among blacks, feminists, unions, gays,
and environmentalists that lasted well into the 1990s.
Meanwhile, Joseph Coors became political beginning with the Goldwater
campaign in 1964. He bankrolled the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and finally
his hero, Ronald Reagan, become president in 1981. Joe's money was behind
some of the reactionary ethos of the 1980s -- when it wasn't fat checks for
knee-jerk pundits, or for a right-wing TV network, it was $65,000 for Ollie
North's contras. Eventually Joe and Holly split up (it turned out that for
thirteen years he had been cheating on her), and Adolph Coors Company limped
into the 1990s with the next generation in charge of whatever remained.
ISBN 0-688-15448-4
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page