The Organization Men (and Women)

Friend o'the Archive Keith Olbermann sent along a really neat Topps item recently and I think you'll all agree it's one of the more amazing pieces to be discussed here. I've previously shown an example of Topps Jamboree, a newsletter designed for the wholesalers and jobbers Topps relied upon to distribute their products but this particular item seems geared to the far-flung Topps salesmen around the US.  I'll get into dating in a minute but let's gawk at this wonderful piece first.

Here's a nice shot of Topps HQ in Brooklyn and a letter from Sales Manager Hugh Spencer to kick things off:

I can't find a good reference to John Dromey, at least the one who would have written the below piece but he wrote for an industry trade magazine called International Confectioner and that's where this story originated, in a longer form:

Take Mr. Dromey's exhortations with a grain of salt in places.  I'm not sure about the American Leaf Tobacco Company (ALTC) being the largest wholesale tobacco company in the US but they did have an impressive presence nationwide, or at least east of the Mississippi River.  Their scale is hard to measure though as so little is available on the company. The "Profitable Sales Aid of Silence" tagline though is 100% accurate-it's how the Shorin's operated for decades, i.e. letting their products do the talking.

The referenced real estate venture had at least one very major hiccup in 1933, when the building housing the ALTC (and apartments on the upper floors), a joint venture of their father's with another family (the Rabkin's), went bust and 7 Debevoise St. was foreclosed upon. This act makes the comments about ALTC reasonably suspect to my mind as well, although prior to the Depression things may have been quite rosy in both empires.

The filling stations though, which went by the American Gas Stations (AGS) moniker, are much more quantifiable. They certainly were doing well enough to get bought out by the Standard Oil Co. of New York (Socony) or what we would now call Mobil, in 1938, although latter day family accounts and those of others differ on just how well things were going. 

A 1939-40 New York City tax photo documents one such station; all seem to have been located in Brooklyn  although I have a recent report of one possibly being in Queens.  This may be one of the few photos showing the operation as any other tax photos I could find showed the switch to Socony Sobol Brothers) had already occurred. AGS sold Socony products so the oil major must have had a pretty good idea of what they were buying.  Around fifteen AGS station existed at their peak.

Similar chains around New York City (such as Sobol Brothers), were also being gobbled up at this time by much larger companies. AGS should not be confused with the American Oil Company (AMOCO), which was originally a brand of Standard Oil's but got trust-busted into an independent in 1911.  They later re-associated though and both Standard and AMOCO stations co-existed for many years before various mergers somewhat reunited them. The AGS stations were rebranded as Socony's Sobol's after the deal closed (Mobil had bought them too!) and I'd imagine would have been filtered down to Mobil stations eventually. One location was still active (as a BP IIRC) until five or six years ago and one or two others may still be service stations.

The "American" theme, which featured red, white and blue prominently, would be reflected in Bazooka's livery once the product was launched in 1947.

Now we get to some Shorin's.  I think I've only seen one other picture of Ira and maybe two of Abram over the years. Joe looks like Joe and Phil looks like a super-villain!

We see some offspring next.  Joel Shorin would end up as President of Topps and Phil Shorin's role must have been expanded at some point (I'm not as up to speed on the third generation as I am on the original nuclear families). Check out young Sy Berger!

The references in Berger's bio lead me to think this newsletter is from the second half of 1948 as I believe his first son was born earlier that year and the other jobs described match up with that dating. Eddie Shookoff's son gave me a valuable interview for my book and I believe Mel Bohrer was a car pool buddy of Woody Gelman and Sy Berger's for many years. I suspect Phil Jr. and Sy also interacted quite a bit as Berger had some involvement in procuring premiums from Japan after the war. Charles Zubrin also featured prominently for decades at Topps. 

I want to match up some of the initials of the secretaries below to some Topps correspondence I have but it's a back burner item:

As the "Changemaker" is still front and center and with no reference at the end to the penny tab version of Bazooka (that being a mid-1949 effort), I think my latter part of 1948 date estimate stands up pretty well. 

These "house organs" are hard to find and I have no idea how long this publication ran. I'd love to find more copies of this one and Topps Jamboree.

Depression's Got A Hold On Me

Well, you learn something new every other day or so I guess.  I was poking around newspapers.com a while back and spotted a very interesting article from the Brooklyn Times-Union October 30, 1933 edition concerning the long-time HQ of the American Leaf Tobacco Company (ALTC) at 7 Debevoise St., which my intrepid readers know as the primordial Shorin family company's second location:

I do believe the ALTC survived as an ongoing entity until 1938 so this foreclosure notice is a very intriguing find. It appears the Shorins partnered with a couple of members of the Rabkin Family and together they owned the four story building that had housed the ALTC since around the time of World War 1. I have not seen any associations between the Shorin and Rabkin families before, so this bears some further investigation. The connection with a paper company is intriguing as well.

The building, as you can see, was auctioned on October 14, 1933 so it seems possible the ALTC continued to maintain a presence within as renters but again more research is needed on my end.  The Shorin's were starting to heavily invest in gas station properties around Brooklyn at this time, so there may have a been a plan in place for dumping losses into 7 Debevoise St., or they just got over-extended. Either way, this further supports some reports I have seen from this era concerning the family's real estate investments. The family and ALTC primarily did business with Manufacturer's Trust, so the Williamsburgh Saving Bank may have been brought to the table by the Rabkin's.

Photo Finish

The New York City Municipal Archives recently made available their trove of their 1939-41 tax photos (over 900,000 in all) and let me tell you, it is like traveling back in a time machine.  Upon seeing the announcement I immediately set to investigating several address associated with the American Leaf Tobacco Company (1908-38) and American Gas Stations (1928-39), which as all of  my intrepid readers undoubtedly recall, were the two Shorin family businesses that were closed and sold, respectively, as they were launching Topps Chewing Gum in December 1938.

The two addresses associated with the American Leaf Tobacco Company (ALTC)  that I have found, both in Brooklyn like all other Shorin family ventures of the time, were located at 140 Throop Avenue and 7 Debevoise St.  I started with the aboriginal address at 140 Throop Ave and found....nothing.  It was clear the original building had been either knocked down or so modified as to be useless to me.

So I crossed my fingers and went hunting for 7 Debevoise St., hoping I could at last find an image of the name or company logo but alas, it looks like the tax photo was taken just after ALTC would have vacated.  7 Debevoise St is the building in the middle:

Zooming in shows what looks like the succeeding business moving in-you can see the boxes piled up in the window:

The detail is pretty remarkable on these pictures-although the official image of #7 was at the end of a film roll and not usable but the one I found was for the address next door, which gives a perfectly fine view of the building I previously showed on a circa 1905 Brooklyn Eagle postcard. You can easily identify #7 to the left, although it had what I gather were lightning rods atop it then:

Undaunted I next turned my attention to American Gas Stations (AGS), which is a better documented company than ALTC both on the web and in my own collection of Topps ephemera (I have zero on ALTC, not even a matchbook cover, and have never seen anything at all associated with the company).  The AGS HQ and main location was at 1619 Bedford Avenue, which was a block north of Ebbets Field.  Here's a view of the fabled ballpark you rarely see:

A caveat: the sliver of gas station shown to the right (this view is from Sullivan Place) is probably not the AGS HQ. The block and lot numbers don't quite match up in some locations on the tax photo database and search pages to current day coordinates but I'm pretty sure this was actually a Sobol Brothers operation with AGS up Bedford Avenue (running in the direction of the Camel sign from right field to center) about a block from here. The address of Ebbets Field was 55 Sullivan Place, which may explain this picture (can't tell, it's garbled on the locator site) and it's such a neat shot I wanted to show it to add some flavor.

I can definitely ID this next shot at 1381 Atlantic Avenue (Brooklyn Avenue at the corner of  Atlantic Avenue) as an AGS location, although it had been sold by then to Socony (who bought out AGS in 1939).

I was a little disappointed not to find an actual American Gas station but I persevered and found this spectacular shot finally, from 547 Vanderbilt Avenue (at the corner of Pacific Avenue):


AGS sold Socony (Standard Oil of NY) products, which were usually branded as Mobil, so that's why you see the name on this shot, which must slightly predate the other one, but this is the quarry I was after.  Check out the three attendants, all in their spiffy uniforms, standing near the pumps!

I plan to keep digging through the tax photos to see what pops up.  The search functions are a little off kilter sometimes and more than a few addresses seem to be missing but it's 95% accurate from what I'm seeing and you can suss out some more of it yourself after you poke around and get the lay of the land. Find out how to navigate the photos yourself by going here.

All the buildings above are gone, although several AGS locations remain as gas station sites.  The zoning laws in New York City probably have something to do with that but I think the last extant AGS structure at 1815 Ocean Avenue was torn down around 2012 and replaced or updated with a more modern building (a Sunoco) which now in turn looks to have been quickly eradicated for an apartment building expansion. Progress...

Turning Over An Old Leaf

Well it was bound to happen, a piece of American Leaf Tobacco Company history has finally landed in my lap. Now it's not one of my holy grail items, which would be a matchbook (an obvious choice for a tobacco importer and cigar packer) or stationery from the Brooklyn based HQ of ALTC but it's pretty sweet just the same. The item in question is a 1909 ALTC stock certificate issued for their Quincy, Florida operation.

I found my first reference for the owner of these particular shares, one Mr. Julian Mitchell, in the December 21, 1912 issue of Forest & Stream magazine which details the sale of his yacht to the U.S. Life Saving Service in Galveston. He is described as being from New York and little more sleuthing revealed he was a Broadway Producer and Director. His firm was eventually named Hamlin, Mitchell & Fields. Fields was Lew Fields, a very famous actor and comedian at the time who went into producing.  So Mr, Mitchell definitely had the means to purchase 50 shares of ALTC stock at $100 a throw!

The stock subscription was intended to raise $420,000 in capital, a huge sum of money at the time. That works out, of course, to 4,200 shares outstanding.  I'm still working on identifying the secretary and president of the Quincy concern as the signatures are a bit difficult to make out although the Secretary's surname looks like Shaw. I am still connecting the dots to Morris Chigorinsky (later Shorin) but prior research I have done links the Florida operation to Morris's Brooklyn HQ. I imagine since the stock was issued in accordance with the State of Florida's laws, the officers had to be Florida residents.

A look at the embossed seal gives us an ALTC incorporation date of 1908, which matches that of the New York Branch of the firm.

1908 being,  of course, the founding date of the company, as per this February 29, 1968 piece from the United States Tobacco Journal:

The back is a model of brevity. I think the transaction date is February 12, 1909 but it's a little hard to make out the month:

ALTC items are essentially non-existent so I am happy to have found this.  Hopefully more pieces from the firm will pop up but for now this will have to do.

Whipple, Whipple Good

I have always been interested in old photographs of New York City and Brooklyn in particular. Any explanation as to why would be futile at this point but point me to the shelves at a bookstore and the NYC section will be thoroughly examined for old shots that predate the 60's. One of the biggest publishers of old photo and postcard books is Arcadia Publishing and  they have a line second to none.

Arcadia Publishing has, for two decades now, published a line of books that feature old photographs of city scenes. This past January I found a chance shot of Debevoise Street (home to the Topps antecedent American Leaf Tobacco Company at #7) in one of their books.  The shot was from about 1906 and predated the ALTC's occupancy but captured the building that housed this Morris Shorin concern to a degree.

Now I have stumbled across Images of America: Williamsburg, by Victor Lederer and the Brooklyn Historical Society, another gem from Arcadia. Sure enough, another chance shot has delivered a glancing look at 140 Throop Avenue, where Morris Shorin was in business with a man called Louis Metz (or Melz) selling tobacco around 1905-06.  This address may have been home to an earlier American Leaf Tobacco Company in the late 1890's, which was owned by another family but may have planted the name in Morris' head for future use when he incorporated his ALTC in 1908.

Here is the full shot, dated around 1925, which is after the ALTC would have moved to 7 Debevoise St., looking east along Flushing Avenue to the right and Whipple St. off to the left.  Completing the triangle's third side, 400 feet or so in the distance, would be Throop Avenue. #140 is at the end of the block on Flushing:

140 Throop Avenue is, I believe, showing a portion of its very low white roof just above the first automobile parked along the curb on Flushing; a rectangular lback sign hangs to the left off a trolley pole just above it as well. The property essentially completes the point of the triangle at Throop and Flushing, much like the Tigers Shadow signed building (which is the White House theater) does as the intersection in the foreground, with frontage on both streets.  Here is a slightly closer (and grainier) look:

On the left you have the three story building with four windows across, another building that is slightly taller with three windows across and then the sliver of little white roof showing a couple of feet above the auto that I believe is #140.  I can't enhance it any more unfortunately. All the poles at the intersection are for trolleys; three lines converged here, making it an ideal retail location to sell cigars and, in a back room I imagine, run the ALTC proper.  Most of the buildings in the middle of the block along Flushing Avenue, including the two mentioned above (and which have between them but invisible here, a low, narrow building among the smallest I have ever seen) are still there.  I've marked it in blue here to make it ever so slightly easier to ID but have to admit it's pretty muddy:

Here's a detail from a 1929 Belcher Hyde Fire Insurance Atlas that shows the block, with Flushing Avenue at the bottom and Throop Avenue angling up from the bottom right of the map:

Some or all of the location in white marked "Gas Sta." is #140; but I do not believe it was ever a location of American Gas Stations, owned by the Shorin's in the 1920's and 30's.  You can see there are three lots on the intersection and city real estate maps show #140 Throop as occupying some or all of them at various points in time. I suspect common ownership of the lots, which could have had four or more buildings shared across them in a semicircular arrangement with the pointiest section perhaps being a yard.  If the building is still original then it had a number of bays within; indicative of a possible former use as a stable and also future use as a garage.  Perhaps ALTC was processing and packing cigars and tobacco here as the bays would allow shipping and receiving but I have always assumed they just operated the administrative end of the business out of here.

This location is still an auto repair shop today, although the pumps look long gone.  I am trying to determine if is the same building, at least along the Flushing Avenue side, that housed ALTC but have not yet tracked down when it was built. It's a strange property that has been greatly altered over the years but a prime retail location, or at least it was 100 years ago.


I still hope to find an image of an ALTC storefront but for now this will have to do.  

Great '08

Further to my previous post on the murky origins of the American Leaf Tobacco Company, one of the predecessor companies to Topps owned by the Shorin Family, I obtained from Carol Jablow last year a clipping from a February 1968 tobacco trade journal that speaks for itself, although I will offer some detail after you all take a gander:

This seals the deal for me date-wise as far as the Shorin family (actually, the Chigorinsky family at the time) and the founding of the ALTC. Whatever involvement Morris Shorin had with the earlier ALTC (circa 1890-91) , as owned by the Salomon family and, perhaps, in an even different configuration from circa 1897-1904, by a separate group, it seems the version started by him dates from 1908.  The 1890 "official date" always given out by Topps predates Morris's arrival in the US and as described in the caption, does not seem to correlate with the facts as understood by Manny-Hanny's loan department.

So why did Topps insist that the ALTC was founded by Morris Shorin in 1890?  It does not seem to make a lot of sense as that part of the narrative started in the late 50's or early 60's, well after the ALTC had been dissolved and a good dozen or more years after the death of its founder.  Like so many questions involving the history of the company and the family, the answers are slow in revealing themselves.

Good News Bad News

As luck would have it, I was perusing some old NYC/Brooklyn books yesterday and spotted, in plain view, a picture of the building that housed Morris Shorin's American Leaf Tobacco Company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  That's the good news. The bad?  It's a low-res shot and it was taken a little before ALTC would have moved in.

Morris Shorin (Chigorinsky at the time), I am 99% convinced at this point, was making and selling cigars and other tobacco products in partnership with a man named Metz (or Melz) from at least 1905-07 before obtaining a loan and starting the American Leaf Tobacco Company in 1908, possibly reviving the name of a firm that had probably shut down a couple of years earlier.  I would really like to get the story of the whole ALTC history firmed up but need access to some information that itself needs to be tracked down.

Chigorinsky and Metz operated out of a building at 140 Throop Avenue on the bustling Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant border (and which was possibly the prior location of ALTC in the 1890's). This would have been an ideal spot for a tobacconist's shop and was located quite close to where the family lived at the time. What is known is that sometime between 1908 and the summer of 1917 (probably much closer to the former rather than latter date) the ALTC moved to 7 Debevoise St in Williamsburg, just a couple of blocks away from 140 Throop Avenue.  This too would have been prime retail territory but the building would also have facilitated a second story business; possible retail and wholesale operations were undertaken at the same time.  Two stories of apartments comprised the 3rd and 4th floors.

Located down the street from a huge vaudeville theater and next to a cafe, 7 Debevoise St was captured in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle Post Card around 1906.  I found the shot in a great book by Richard L. Dutton called Brooklyn:  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Postcards 1905-07 and have cropped out the building to show here (twice, as I have tried to enhance the picture). I am not sure if that second story sign (which I cannot yet decipher but might say Can Can) was for #7 or #9 (building to the right of this one).  While not quite an ALTC shot, I'm getting closer!

Here is the wide angle shot reproduced in the book-it has more detail when not blown up:

It Runs In The Family

A little over three months ago I started an in depth research project into the origins of Topps Chewing Gum, which turned into an article for Les Davis' The Wrapper after it became apparent to me that the official story of the company's beginnings was, in large part, made up. The further back in time I went, the more I found. Now that Les is on to selling his next issue (with another story by yours truly, this time concerning Warren Bowman) I can delve into the back story even more. Some of this repeats parts of the Wrapper article, some of it updates same and some of it is newly discovered since then.

The oft told story of family patriarch Morris Shorin founding the American Leaf Tobacco Company in 1890 and then, in a fit of desperation brought on by the Depression, betting the family fortune on chewing gum and installing his four sons to run Topps may have first been promulgated to the masses around 1972, when the company went public with a stock offering. The origins of this tale seem to go back a few more years though, when Topps was doing some PR work in the wake of a lawsuit brought by Fleer in the mid 60's but I am still digging into that particular aspect of the story and will report my findings here at a later date.

As detailed in a prior post, the American Leaf Tobacco Company was founded in Boston in 1890 by members of the Salomon family, two years before Morris emigrated to the U.S. from Russia. Furthermore, I am finding increasing evidence that Morris did not fully control ALTC until 1908, when he secured a bank loan for its purchase. Now, it is not unusual for corporations or individuals to embellish their history, indeed it occurs to this day. What surprised me though was that the true origins of the company paled in comparison to the true origins of Morris Shorin.

Morris arrived in the U.S. in July of 1892  1891 with the last name of Chigorinsky and he was legally known by this name until 1919, as were his wife and children, of which there were five sons, not four, at least until 1918 when his eldest, Moe, died in October of an unspecifed chronic ailment. There will be more written on Moe at some point but it is worth noting he was born in Russia and did not arrive in the U.S. until 1904. It is also worth noting the name change to Shorin happened after Moe's death and probably not until the surviving Chigorinsky boys had completed their active military service during the Great War.

I have recently spoken and corresponded with some family members on the Jablow side and there is a notion that Morris took the Chigorinsky name as a joke almost, albeit an inside one, as it reflected both the cigar industry and his ethnicity. It is possible though, that he was indeed a Shorin before immigrating as there was a well-known merchant family of that name in Russia for many years prior.

When I wrote the Wrapper article I was laboring under the impression that Morris had come to America with his wife, Rebecca (nee Jablow) and young Moe; I have to confess I am not 100% convinced of this anymore although there is some lingering uncertainty among the Jablow descendants on this point. Census records for the family give differing accounts of events over thirty years' time which does not help matters but it is clear to me now that Moe was not a child of Rebecca's and that Morris and she were married (in the U.S.) in 1896.

Morris Chigorinsky was most probably well off (in a relative sense for immigrants) when he arrived in the U.S. in 1891. He initially had a cigar business that employed some members of the Jablow family but I cannot determine if this was how he met Rebecca. Over the years though, various Jablow's and their offspring would figure in the operation of Topps. Thanks to Carol Jablow, I was also able to obtain a picture of Morris and Rebecca as I had not been able to find one anywhere until she came to my rescue. Here is Morris first:



That was taken from a larger still showing them both, probably in Miami in the late 30's or early 40's:



From 1897-1903 the four "Shorin" boys (Abraham, Philip, Isador and Joseph) were born and around this time, or maybe a little later, Morris was in business with a man named Louis Metz (also referred to as Melz), in a location at the bustling intersection of Throop and Flushing Avenues in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that would have been ideal for a retail shop. City directories that I have been able to access on a limited basis do not give a business name unfortunately, so I cannot determine if they operated under the American Leaf Tobacco Company monicker or not. The ALTC did have operations as far away as St. Louis by this time, I just can't tell if Morris was involved with any of them. Confusing matters further is the dissolution of ALTC as a New York Corporation in 1903, which doesn't necessarily mean much as Topps would later go into and out of a corporate ownership structure in the early days of World War 2 without affecting operations.

Morris may have struck off on his own around 1906 (not sure yet) but in 1908 ALTC capitalized in New York and Florida with operations in the Sunshine State centering around a prime tobacco growing area. The firm would grow rapidly, establishing Brooklyn headquartes on Debevoise St. in Williamsburg although there is some debate among the Jablow descendants as to the extent of trouble it experienced during the Great War. My own observation is that the firm did well despite the war as Morris Shorin purchased a fine home in a well off section of Crown Heights around 1918, after renting in various locations up and down Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant for many years. Ira and Joseph went on to college and I suspect the other two boys did as well; even the ill-fated Moe had attended New York University for a while.

The late 20's saw the family purchase American Gas Stations, as recounted here recently, an entity that was run by Joseph Shorin whereby he gained valuable insight into how to run a successful company. Topps just released an insert set entitled the History of Topps and the first card is, fittingly enough, of  Joe Joel Shoirn, his son nephew:



This is a good place to stop for today methinks. Much, much more to come on the Shorin and Jablow families and their involvement with Topps Chewing Gum, including the founding of the firm, shortly. In the meantime, if anyone out there has more details on these early days, please contact me. And thanks for the corrections folks!

The Secret Origins Of The American Leaf Tobacco Company

This post will be part shameless plug and part history lesson. I've been digging deep into the history of the Shorin family and the early days of Topps and their predecessor companies, American Leaf Tobacco Company and American Gas Stations, of late. I'll save my discourse about the latter, much more obscure gas station chain for another day in order to look at the tobacco firm, which I'll dub ALTC for short. First though, my plug for issue #257 of The Wrapper, wherein Les Davis granted me far too much space for a look at these same subjects in an article titled Before Bazooka.



I don't intend to trample on the Wrapper article just yet to allow Les a chance to sell the issue but do want to add some to the back story as I have found out quite a bit more about ALTC since submitting my piece. I'll also save the ancillary stories attaching to the other surprises revealed in the article for another day but suffice to say the early stories of Topps' founding have been greatly burnished.

The standard story goes like this (and does so on about 200 different sites and in dozens of articles):

"Topps itself was founded in 1938, but the company can trace its roots back to an earlier firm, American Leaf Tobacco. Founded in 1890 by Morris Shorin, the American Leaf Tobacco Co. imported tobacco to the United States and sold it to other tobacco companies. (American Leaf Tobacco should not be confused with the American Tobacco Company, which monopolized US-grown tobacco during this period.)

American Leaf Tobacco encountered difficulties as World War I cut off Turkish supplies of tobacco to the United States, and later as a result of the Great Depression. Shorin's sons, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph, decided to focus on a new product but take advantage of the company's existing distribution channels. To do this, they relaunched the company as Topps, with the name meant to indicate that it would be "tops" in its field. The chosen field was the manufacture of chewing gum, selected after going into the produce business was considered and rejected."

Well, not really as each paragraph above is about half true. I suspect this official story was a creation of Topps' publicity department, created when stories about baseball cards started popping up in newspapers and magazines in the early days of the hobby and the company needed some kind of narrative to supply to the various writers who contacted them. For a couple of reasons, I believe this official narrative to date to the early 1960's but again, that's a tale for another time. Let's go back to the beginning then, shall we?

I have spent the last three months wading through all sorts of genealogy webs, news archives and Google Books sites in search of the primordial Shorin's and can tell you I have not found a single factual reference to the actual founding of the company relating to Morris Shorin. Oh, Morris was real enough and I am certain the ALTC was founded in 1890 but the first problem I encountered was that he immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1892, or two years after the founding date of the company and four years after some accounts indicated he made the Atlantic crossing.

The earliest reference I did find about the company was a commerce directory that showed an address at either No. 22 or 23 Central Wharf (the discrepancy is likely due to the Google OCR software) in Boston and listing a Mr. S. Salomon, late of New York, as proprietor. Further notations revealed the company was indeed founded in 1890 but by the same S. Salomon.

A little more digging yielded a major clue. In January of 1888 there was a spectacular failure of a tobacco importer in New York City called M&E Salomon. Among the 13 preferred creditors whose firms were affected was a Mr. Gustave Salomon. The more I looked, the more Salomon's I found and further digging found a story about the failure of a tobacco wholesaler, also of New York City, called Simon Salomon and Son, which was related to the M&E Salomon meltdown. Simon Salomon's son had the first name of Solomon and it seems probable his full name was Solomon Simon Salomon (wow!).

Maddeningly, I can't yet locate the Salomon family genealogy or reliable census records, primarily due to the 1890 U.S. Census archive being virtually destroyed by fire in 1921. I believe with about 95% certainty that Solomon S. Salomon is the same S. Salomon shown in Boston in 1892, that he is the the likely son of Simon Salomon and was the true founder of American Leaf Tobacco Company.

The Salomon's seem to have been major figures in the New York City tobacco business following the Civil War and their roots extend back even farther than that. I cannot fully determine what happened to send our young Mr. S. Salomon off to Boston following the M&E Salomon crash but he may have wanted to get away from the family mess in NYC for a bit. There is also some anecdotal evidence the family had relatives in Boston so more research is going the be required on that front.

Solomon Salomon was back in New York City by 1895 and 1897 is the first year I can find a citation showing the ALTC domiciled in Brooklyn, where they are listed in a City Directory as being on Throop Avenue, regrettably without a street number shown. I have to think Morris owned, or was at least heavily involved with the company by this time as Throop is exactly one block over from Tompkins Avenue, where the family (who were not called the Shorin's at the time--and no, they were not originally Salomon's) lived. Since all of the Salomon's tobacco business seems to have been conducted in Manhattan and not Brooklyn in the 1880's and 90's, I would estimate Morris could have acquired the ALTC or at least was running it by 1895 when Solomon Salomon was back in New York. There is also some evidence Morris Shorin did not have full control though until 1908; still digging there but the date may just refer to a major incorporation or reincorporation of the firm.

Morris, for reasons that will be explained another day, was not lacking for funds from what I have uncovered so his purchase of another company would not surprise me one bit, especially given the later patterns in business of the Shorin family. The deliberate blurring of the ALTC timeline also fits these patterns.

I was unable to find a picture of any buildings housing American Leaf Tobacco anywhere and considering the company eventually had a global presence, this is another quest I will maintain. I managed to unearth scans showing the Central Wharf well before it was destroyed to make room for a rebuilding project though. Two of the best are shown below.

The first is taken from a stereoscopic view that may predate 1892 but could show #22 or 23 (off to the left of the central cupola, probably within the framework of the two ship's masts in the foreground).

(From the collection of Robert N. Dennis)

Another view, from a 1906 print, shows a colorized Central Wharf but is skewed too far to the right to show the ALTC address (numbering is consecutive, each chimney represents a different address). I can't recall where I nicked this scan from but it's nice, no?

Pretty neat! Much more to come come on the early days as 2011 progresses.