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Mr. Sam guides Seagram
By Tom Range, Sr.

In 1889 Yechiel Bronfman, a successful gristmill operator and tobacco planter of Bessarabia in southwestern Russia, was forced to flee the country with his family to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms under the czars.  His third son Samuel was born on shipboard during their voyage to North America.  The family settled in midwestern Canada and in 1902, after a period of hardscrabble, the father purchased his first hotel in Emerson, Manitoba.  Successful in real estate, the Bronfmans invested in apartment houses and three more hotels, these in Winnipeg.

Young Sam noticed that the moneymakers of the family hotels were the bars.  As he matured, he assumed control of this part of the family business.  To "eliminate the middleman," Sam himself began importing liquor from Great Britain and the European continent.  He would "blend" the "straight" imported whiskey with water and various ingredients.  His materials and mixing process cost about $5.25 per gallon.  It was bottled and sold for $25 a gallon.  He opened his first retail liquor store in Montreal in 1916.

Prohibition was enacted in 1920 in the neighboring United States.  In the States, mobsters like Meyer Lansky were looking for sources of liquor to stock their speakeasies in the metropolitan areas of America.  Bronfman and Lansky formed a mutually lucrative business relationship.  Now insisting that he be addressed as "Mr. Sam," Bronfman sold to Lansky all the hooch that was ordered, which, under Canadian law, was strictly "legit."  What was unlawful in the U.S. was the transportation of the liquor into the United States, a risk assumed by Lansky and his colleagues.  By 1925 Mr. Sam was one of the richest men in Canada but he was not accepted by Canadian society in Montreal, where he had moved with his family.  He needed a pedigree, a family history.

In 1928 he acquired the firm of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Ltd.  The origin of the Seagram name dates back to 1857 in Waterloo, Ontario with the founding of a distillery by two men named William Hespeler and George Randall.  Joseph Seagram married into the Hespeler family in 1869 and ultimately acquired controlling interest in the company.  The timing of the Seagram acquisition by Mr. Sam could not have been better.  It presented him with the opportunity of expanding the distilling of his own product.

Upon repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Seagram entered the U.S. market big time.  It had acquired the largest stock of fully aged rye and bourbon whiskeys in the world.  The company began developing its own brand names.  By early 1934 its master blender, Calman Levine, came up with "Seagram's Seven" which indicated nothing more than its arbitrary number on a list of samples Levine was testing.  Mr. Sam added the word "crown" to make the brand name of the rye the famous "Seagram's Seven Crown," the best selling rye whiskey in the world.  Another favored brand name is "Seagram's V. O.," the initials dating back to the Joseph Seagram days of the nineteenth century, standing for "very own."

Mr. Sam moved much of the corporate headquarters to New York City after Repeal, at first occupying whole floors in the Chrysler Building and in 1957 in its renowned Seagram Tower on Park Avenue, designed by master architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.  By now, Mr. Sam's children were grown and ready for positions in the family business.  His daughter Phyllis had been given the task of implementing the building of the Tower.  She had contacted Mies van der Rohe and found, to her amazement, that he had not gotten a license to practice architecture in New York State and was not about to sit for a test to obtain a license.  The problem was solved by Phyllis by having Johnson named as Mies's collaborator.

As a boss, Mr. Sam ran Seagram like a tyrant.  He had the habit of pouncing into his employees' offices unexpectedly with questions for which he demanded immediate answers.  Woe betide the person who did not know the answer or, even worse, who pretended that he did and tried to fake it. 

Mr. Sam died in 1971.  Contrary to Jewish tradition, he lay in state in a silver shroud in an open coffin in the center of the great rotunda of the Montreal headquarters of the Canadian Jewish Congress.  His company continued in the hands of his son Edgar.


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