Anheuser-Busch Archives Preserve the Past to Build the Future

If you were to make a wrong turn as you depart the visitors center for a tour of the Anheuser-Busch Inc. brewery in St. Louis, you would find yourself in the office of William J. Vollmar, Ph.D. And, if you were lucky enough to spend some time in his office and in the climate-controlled space a floor below, you would find yourself on a much different tour.Bill Vollmar is the corporate archivist and historian for the Anheuser-Busch Companies and, as such, oversees a unique collection -- documents, photographs, packages, bottles, cans, premiums, point-of-sale materials -- that tells the story of not just a brewery, but of American marketing itself.Vollmar is the only professional archivist or historian employed by a brewery anywhere in the world.The Anheuser-Busch archives contain many printed documents, including the Letter Press Books of Adolphus Busch -- 44 volumes and 27,000 pages of correspondence, both personal and business -- concerning the operation of the brewery and its general business matters. Vollmar also oversees a complete collection of Western Brewer (1877-1919), a trade journal of the brewing industry, plus press releases, reports and a wealth of printed documents. It also includes a wide variety of point-of-sale materials, representing more than a century of promotional efforts. Metal signs, lithographs, glass mirrors, neon signs, premiums, tap markers, glasses, trays and a multitude of other promotional and point-of-purchase advertising for Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch's other brands of today and yesteryear are represented in the archives."The company has produced millions of reams of documents, but only 2 to 4 percent have any real significant value," Vollmar explains. "We try to preserve as many of those as we can. Those include things like board minutes, papers of senior management and committee minutes."Advances in communications technology may actually pose a problem for Vollmar in the future. Brewery employees are more inclined to pick up the telephone to conduct business, or even hop on a plane and fly to a different location to meet face to face. As a result, there is less paper being generated regarding general business operations. And that means less information is available for the archives.A Legal BeginningThe collection serves a variety of purposes. In 1949, Anheuser-Busch sued the DuBois Brewing Co. of Pennsylvania, charging that the regional brewer had marketed a beer using the Budweiser name. The company's legal department amassed a number of exhibits for the trademark lawsuit -- including many point-of-sale pieces -- which became the start of the archives. The legal department was the keeper of the "historical collection" from 1949 to 1970, when Anheuser-Busch hired its first professional archivist. Vollmar joined the company in 1978, and is only the second person to hold the position.Some of the historic pieces in the collection, including portraits, lithographs and signage, are used as decoration among the executive offices. (See related story on "Custer's Last Fight.") But while these pieces help show visitors the rich history of the company, the archives is not a lending library.Representative SamplesNor is the collection complete. While Vollmar tries to obtain as many representative pieces as possible, he knows that he will never have one of everything."The truth of the matter is that if I got everything I want, I would need a building five times the size of this one," admits Vollmar. "If we had every can and every bottle we ever made, we couldn't possibly store them. But we do have a lot of cans."Until recently, a number of those cans still contained beer. Many of the older cans were seamed and the seams finally gave out. "We had some cans burst and leak beer," says Vollmar. "And that can lead to mold, which can be a disaster in an archive." All of the cans in the archives are now empty.Although a complete collection of all of the brewer's forms of packaging would be impossible to obtain -- or store -- the archives do contain a representative sample from all eras. More importantly, the collection also includes manufacturing and engineering specifications that can answer many questions.Many of the pieces in the archives might seem quaint on the surface, but upon further study reveal the savvy of modern-day marketing techniques. Much of the early signage reinforced the packaging, which in itself was an advertising medium. Early Budweiser labels contained a number of German words to reinforce the beer's heritage with German immigrants, many of whom did not speak English. A turn-of-the century promotional sign was a lithographed piece depicting Adolphus Busch shaking hands with Prince Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire.And lest one think that employing images of good-looking women to sell beer is a recent occurrence, Vollmar can produce many examples of the "Budweiser Girls." The series of promotional pieces used illustrations of attractive women holding a bottle of Budweiser. That particular ad theme was used from 1883 to 1917, making it the second-longest-running promotion for the brewery. (The longest is the "Pick-A-Pair" slogan, which A-B unveiled in 1957 and is still in use.)A Working ResourceThe collections have been used on many occasions to avoid reinventing good ideas. "We don't save all of this stuff just because it is neat to save it," says Vollmar. "We have used our history very extensively in our marketing." (See related article on the company's American Originals beers.)"If you don't maintain an archive, you don't know what you have done and you don't know where you have been," the archivist explains. "You can't have a nature unless you have a past. And that is the purpose of having an archive and a corporate historian."Vollmar admits that he "doesn't add one penny to the bottom line" for Anheuser-Busch. "But I help the company avoid reinventing things they have done before. I give the company a sense of identity, of what has been done before and how it was done."The company could operate without an archive, but Anheuser-Busch has a rich history and it sees its history as important."Vollmar sees the archives as a memory bank for an ever-evolving marketing staff. "We provide them with a continuity of information," he explains.For 1996, Vollmar has been busy providing information for the 100th anniversary of Michelob. "I have six different people asking for the same source material," he explains. "Sometimes people think of us as a lending library."To meet their demands, Vollmar must make multiple copies of many of the pieces from the archives. One set never leaves the archives and one set is provided to the person requesting the information. A third set exists just in case a loaned document is lost.Vollmar expects the Anheuser-Busch archives to continue to grow in importance to the company. "There is a tremendous interest in nostalgia," he explains. "Americans are a very nostalgic people, but we tend to destroy our history faster than we create it. We are here to provide a continuity of thought and information that is just not otherwise available."

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