“Stuart Bloch Meets the Barnstormers“
by Bill Vint – Winter 2011 edition of the ‘Mail Pouch Barnstormers’ newsletter
Stuart Bloch, the last member of the Bloch family to head the company that founded Mail Pouch Tobacco, was a guest speaker at the Mail Pouch Barnstormers’ 10th anniversary picnic (note: this was actually the 9th anniversary, but 10th picnic) in Belmont, Ohio, in July 2011.
Bloch provided the gathering with unique insights into the company. Here’s a summary of his comments:
Mail Pouch Tobacco got its name, Bloch said, in the 1870s when the cigar-making industry was a huge part of the business climate in Wheeling, W.Va.
“Making cigars is like making a skirt,” Bloch said. “There are a lot of cuttings left over in the process, so (my great-grandfather) decided he could package the cuttings from cigars to make chewing tobacco.
“In those days, chewing tobacco was plug tobacco – small, compressed, heavily-sweetened rectangles
which users would cut off a chunk. (My great-grandfather) came up with idea of flavoring cuttings and
putting them in a package, but the product should have a name.
“The barges that worked the Ohio River at that time would carry mail and drop off mail pouches. Everyone would run down to the dock to get their mail and see what was new. “Mail Pouch” had a nice, warm feeling in people’s minds, so they decided to call the product Mail Pouch and that’s how it got started.
“The painting idea – it’s hard to figure out whose idea it was, but it must have been my grandfather
who was in charge of sales back in the late 19th century. In the beginning he’d select barns that faced in the right direction and you would get a subscription to a magazine like Colliers or Life or the magazine of your choice (if you’d let him paint your barn). As you can imagine that was pretty economical.
“As time went by, he began to pay cash for the signs and we sent out teams of painters. One guy was in charge of signing up the barn and the painters would come along later to paint. The way we knew how to pay the painters was we’d multiply the length of the sign by the height by how much we were paying per square foot. We’d take a picture and send it to the office. Then we’d send money to the guy who was in charge every week and he’d pay his painters.
“We painted more and more signs as the business expanded. Coal miners were big users of chewing tobacco, along with steel workers and farm workers. And as people moved west into Oklahoma and Texas to work the oil fields, pretty soon we had an office in Oklahoma and Texas and one or two in Kansas, and eventually we expanded into California.
“One interesting thing about the signs in California was that we painted them on the roofs rather than the sides because of the terrain. The roads would be going up the sides of hills and you couldn’t see the sides, but you could see the roofs.
“Over time, costs continued to increase and we couldn’t find people to take the place of our barn painters. Harley (Warrick) tried to train a couple people, but today’s youth weren’t as tough as Harley. They couldn’t cut it, so Harley was left in the last years of his life as the final barn painter and he made a
lot out of it. He enjoyed being the last barn painter. He painted a sign on a restaurant in New York, in
all kinds of interesting places. One is at the World’s Fair in Charleston in the cultural center. I think his place in history is assured.”
What is the state of the company today? “Back in the ‘60s the surgeon general’s report came out and for the first time, tobacco was really labeled as dangerous to your health, and chewing tobacco was included with cigarettes,” Bloch said. “There was real concern among our management that we were a one-trick pony, so we decided in 1968 to sell the company to Helme Products company because they had three legs on the stool.
“(Helme) had snuff, they had candy and they had pretzels and snacks. That seemed to provide
us a lot more insurance for the future if tobacco was going to be more and more restricted by the government. From there the company was sold to Swisher International (in 1986).
“Ten years ago the snuff business was moved from New Jersey to Wheeling, so now we make snuff and chewing tobacco, and we’ve got about 175 people working in Wheeling.
“They’re kind to me,” he added. “I still have an office in the building that I use, along with my regular financial business. I sit at the same desk where my great grandfather sat back in 1910.”
Is there an archive of old photos of barns that were painted? “We had every barn automated on a punch card system,” Bloch said. “Back in the 1950s or ‘60s, we had 2,500 signs that had been sent in. We re-painted them every five to seven years.”
Mail Pouch Tobacco also once had a coupon program. “When Cellophane came along, we’d wrap coupons in between the Cellophane and the tobacco package, and you could get an amazing amount of things if you save enough coupons,” he said. “We had catalogs we would send people, and you could even get a piano if you saved enough. If a church or some kind of group needed a piano, they’d get all the members of the congregation to save the coupons. There was a lot of that. I think we even had an organ on the list.
“That program was discontinued in the ‘30s. I don’t know why, but when I was in charge of advertising, I started it again and I only put one item on the package – a pair of shears, or something tied to various promotions we’d do in the course of the year.”
Bloch also noted “There has been an accumulation of (Mail Pouch-branded) things in our warehouse over the years. We found things were starting to disappear from the room where a lot of the stuff was stored, and from time to time they’d turn up on eBay. So we put the rest of it under lock-and-key.”
The nature of the tobacco business, he also noted, has changed forever. “There’s no advertising any more, so we were meeting coal miners coming out of mines, going to state fairs, going to steel plants…”
where samples could be given away without violating the law.
“One thing you might be interested in is that we’ve been making Mail Pouch since 1879 and there has never been an oral cancer complaint,” Bloch concluded. “Most people wouldn’t believe that, but it’s true.
“The biggest problem we had was that every once in a while, someone would send in a package with a dead mouse and say we put it in. The easiest thing to go to take care of it was send them a case of Mail Pouch and we never heard from them again. It wasn’t possible, of course. Every package went through an x-ray and if there was anything inside, the line would stop and the package was removed.”