Controversial executive led beer company during boycott
America was a land of opportunity for immigrants, whether legal or illegal, including what he called “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande. And in February 1984, Coors, speaking to minority business owners in Denver, was quoted by the Rocky Mountain News as saying that black people lacked “intellectual capacity”
In the ensuing uproar, the NAACP in Los Angeles called for a boycott of Coors beer, and 500 liquor stores in Southern California joined it. Coors apologized for his comments the day after the article appeared, but he also sued the newspaper for libel, saying his words had been distorted. (The suit was later dropped.)
William Kistler Coors was born in Golden, Colo.rado, on Aug. 11, 1916, the second of three sons of Adolph H.J. Coors Jr. and Alice May Kistler Coors. His father became head of the company after the founder, William’s grandfather, whose original name was Kuhrs, died bycommitted suicide in 1929. Adolph III, the elder brother of William and Joseph, was murdered in 1960 after being kidnapped for ransom.Coors is survived by two daughters, Margaret Coors Beresford and May Louise Coors; his son, Scott; seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. of what the leading competitors budgeted for advertising. “We don’t need marketing,” Coors proclaimed in 1975. “We know we make the best beer in the world.”
Along with his younger brother, Joseph, a Coors executive who supported Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, William Coors, although not as overtly political, championed bootstrap success and free enterprise, and was widely admired by conservatives.
But he alienated unionists, blacks, Hispanics, women and gays with views and policies that critics called racist, sexist and homophobic, and members of those groups joined informal boycotts of Coors beer in increasing numbers in the 1970s.
Coors brewery workers struck in 1977 over many issues, including the use of liedetector tests to ferret out employees who were gay or whose politics were considered radical. Workers who crossed picket lines voted the union out. The AFL-CIO declared war, calling for a boycott that lasted 10 years and caused Coors sales and market shares to fall sharply.
At labor’s behest, many black, Hispanic, gay and feminist groups joined the boycott as time went on, adding to its power.
For years, a favorite theme of Coors was that
William K. Coors, who led one of America’s biggest beer-makers for decades, but whose ultraconservative speeches and anti-union policies incurred boycotts and the wrath of organized labor, civil rights groups and minorities, died Saturday at his home in Golden, Colo. He was 102.
The death was confirmed by Colin Wheeler, a spokesman for the Molson Coors Brewing Co.
A grandson of the stowaway from Germany who founded the Adolph Coors Co. in the foothills of the Rockies in 1873, Coors was chairman from 1959 to 2000 and vice chairman until 2002, building a regional brewery into the nation’s third-largest, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller.
William Coors, a Princeton-educated chemical engineer whose first job was sweeping company floors, was widely credited with developing the recyclable aluminum can that has become standard for beer and soft drinks. In 1959, long before recycling was common, Coors offered a penny for each can’s return.
Following long-standing family tradition, he kept Coors marketing expenses to a minimum, spending a fraction