Brewery owner Coors dies, 102
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.
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 longstanding family tradition, he kept Coors marketing expenses to a minimum, spending a fraction 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 lie-detector 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.