The Death of an Heir

by Philip Jett

  “I lived with him for two and a half years and never got acquainted with him,” said J. H. Hannah, manager of the Perlmor Apartments till August 1958, speaking of the man he knew as Walter Osborne. “Spoke with a middle-west accent; was refined, polite, and courteous.… He went in for athletic stuff. I remember he got some barbells through the mail, and a camera, and he liked to fish and shoot.”

  “My only real conversation with him was about hunting,” Mrs. Merys added, who assumed management of the Perlmor from Mr. Hannah.

  As the clerk continued to ring up the items, he looked at the tall, thin customer with a high forehead and eyeglasses and asked, “Whatcha doin’ buying all this stuff in the middle of winter?”

  Corbett glared and said nothing. When the clerk appeared uneasy, Corbett replied, “I like to camp in winter. I’m going to camp this winter in the mountains.”

  The clerk shuddered as if cold and handed Corbett his sales receipt. “Thank you for shopping at Sears.” Corbett crumpled the receipt into a ball and dropped it in the sand-filled ashtray lid of a trash can beside the checkout counter as he walked away. But the cash register had kept its own receipt that would go to the store manager at the end of the day—a paper record listing the date, sale number, amount, type of transaction, and clerk.

  Once back home, Corbett opened the trunk of his automobile and, with three trips, carried his purchases upstairs to his third-floor studio apartment. He didn’t unpack those in boxes. There’d be time for that later. He stacked everything inside a tiny closet that stored his firearms, fishing gear, and other equipment. Corbett had grown up in Seattle, near mountains, rivers, and lakes, and he enjoyed the outdoors, whether it was camping, hunting, or fishing for trout. One of his favorite fishing spots was on the Blue River near Dillon, Colorado. But for now, his mind was on more serious matters, and he needed some rest. He stretched out his lanky body on the sleeper couch. The day was dark and gray, shining very little light between the cracks of the pulled blinds. He fell asleep. His preparations were almost complete.

  * * *

  Golden, Colorado, is home to the Adolph Coors Company. For many, the Adolph Coors Company is home to Golden, Colorado. The small town was incorporated in the Colorado Territory in 1871, a mere two years before Adolph Coors arrived from Germany and started his brewery. Until the 1950s, Coors employed more workers than the town had people. As the population of Golden grew during the ’50s, however, so did the “difficulty” between management and workers.

  “I don’t know of anybody who didn’t like Ad Coors. He was never a part of the difficulty at the brewery, as far as I know,” Golden’s city manager and former classmate of Ad Coors, Walter G. Brown, later said to a reporter for The Denver Post.

  Workers at the world’s largest single brewery were unionized as members of Local 366, part of the International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink, and Distillery Workers of America, which in turn was part of the AFL-CIO. The Coors family had gotten along fine with workers, but merely tolerated the union. Coors paid less than some, but Mr. Coors paid a large Christmas bonus if the company had a good year. Also, open beer taps stationed around the plant enabled employees to have a little libation during the workday.

  Unions were at their pinnacle of power in the United States by the 1950s, and national union leaders were strong-arming companies all around the country, demanding better wages and benefits for their members. Tensions strained to the point that the moment had come to show who was boss in Golden.

  “The electricians are still talking about a strike,” said Bill Coors to his brothers after hanging up the telephone in their common office. “That was Russ Hargis [Coors’ personnel director]. He heard it on the floor.”

  “You know, if the electricians go, the whole brewery might go like last time,” Ad said on that first business day back from Miami.

  The last strike had been in 1957, and it was the worst strike the brewery had witnessed. Picket lines formed in front of the brewery, the porcelain factory in Golden, and the Coors warehouse in Denver. Incendiary speeches berating the company and maligning the Coors family followed. Tires were slashed, punches thrown, windows broken, and threatening calls made to Coors management and anyone who crossed the picket line. When more than eight hundred workers and their families took to the streets, the Jefferson County sheriff asked the governor to call in the National Guard to disperse the crowd. Security was added at the plant, and members of the Coors family were careful not to place themselves in harm’s way. Fortunately, that strike was settled without incident. But the possibility of a company-wide strike was always of concern.

  The brothers had been discussing the issue of a strike just days earlier before Ad and Mary left for the brewers’ convention in Miami. Ad’s secretary walked in and heard them talking. It was a discussion she was becoming more and more accustomed to hearing from them. “Excuse me. Ad? Your father wants to see you. He’s in his office.”

  “You in trouble, Ad?” asked Bill with a grin.

  “Not that I know.” He smiled.

  Ad ambled down the hallway, stopping outside his father’s office door. He stood a little straighter and cleared his throat before going in.

  Despite his age and thinness, Mr. Coors was not decrepit. On the contrary, he was tough and intimidating. Mr. Coors walked about the plant floor six days a week and sometimes half a day on Sunday, oftentimes registering an impressive three miles a day, checking not only how the brewing was progressing but also uncovering employee infractions. Any transgression, no matter how big or how small, drew a stern warning from the company’s chief. He never gave a second. “[Mr. Coors] would eye our desks, and if everything wasn’t in place,” remembered one female employee, “he’d tell us to straighten it up.… When you left at night, there literally couldn’t be anything on top of your desk—even your phone. You had to put it in your desk drawer. And you didn’t dare leave a sweater on the back of your chair!”

  Yet many employees liked and admired their austere employer. “On Saturday afternoon, he’d come down to the lunchroom and have a beer with us,” one employee recalled. “He’d have this small cup with him, and after a first beer, I’d ask him if he wanted another. ‘Just half,’ he’d say, and he meant it. He always stressed economy.”

  Adolph Coors, the company’s founder, had granted control to Mr. Coors while he was young, yet at seventy-four, Mr. Coors wasn’t ready to relinquish ownership. His adult sons, now in their forties, held various positions in the company but owned none of the stock and thus had none of the control. They lived off a salary that was more like a child’s allowance, an allowance that might seem outrageous to a worker filling beer bottles on the plant floor for $2.23 an hour, yet meager compared with that received by sons of other multimillionaires they knew.

  Ad was a man of few words and rarely stood up to his father, despite holding the positions of chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and director of sales and marketing. Much of Ad’s silence could be attributed to Western stoicism, but he also possessed a natural reserve, even shyness, attributed to an upbringing where children spoke only when they had something important to say. “[My father] believed if he showed affection, it would spoil me and my brothers,” recalled Bill. “There was no levity in the house, no idle chatter at the dinner table. If you didn’t have something worth saying, my father felt you shouldn’t say it.” Some of Ad’s quietness was caused by an affliction he’d suffered since childhood. As Coors employee Clyde Ellis told a newsman for The Denver Post: “I’ve been here thirty years and I never seen [Ad] blow his stack at anybody. If he was upset, he wouldn’t let you know it—the only way I knew was ’cause he’d start stuttering—then you knew somethin’ was up.”

  When Ad stepped inside the office, his father was sitting behind the rolltop desk that had belonged to Ad’s grandfather. A painting of Adolph Coors hung above it, his ever-watchful eyes gazing down on his brewery and its caretakers.

  “Yes, sir? Jo A
nn said you asked to see me.”

  “Hargis stopped in to tell me about the electricians. You boys handling that?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re discussing it now.”

  “What’s to talk about? Fire the whole bunch with my blessing.” Mr. Coors’s antipathy toward the union was no surprise to Ad. Mr. Coors would pull an electrician off a job to make him sweep or perform some other menial task not in his union contract’s “job description.” Interestingly, his concerns about harm coming to his family physically or financially through kidnapping, or any other way, did not interfere with his toughness as an employer where disgruntled or terminated workers might harbor grudges.

  Ad responded, “Yes, sir. We will if we have to. Bill’s already hunting for replacements.”

  “See that he does. That’s all, son.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, son?”

  “Sir?” Ad said, turning as he stopped near the office door.

  “You boys don’t let this get out of hand while your mother and I are in Hawaii. I don’t want reporters hounding us. You go ahead to the convention in Miami, but if a problem comes up, you hightail it back here. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stepping back into the hallway, Ad was relieved that he’d commanded his urge to stutter, which angered his father. He was the oldest son, and following Coors tradition, his father had named him chairman of the board and chief executive officer overseeing all company operations. But his stutter prevented him from being placed in charge of the day-to-day operations of the brewery like his father and grandfather before him. The person who runs the brewery must also run the workers, which means holding employee meetings and speaking to the press, sometimes during very tense times. Because of Ad’s shyness and stutter, his father did not want the embarrassment. Another imperfection that prevented Ad from being a brewer was even more embarrassing to his father—he was allergic to beer.

  Ad returned to the brothers’ office. The last thing they needed was a plant-wide strike. They had warehouses full of orders to fill. (At that time, Coors only distributed to an eleven-state area, not yet commencing distribution east of the Mississippi.)

  There was no question who would handle the negotiations. Joe handled the porcelain workers; Bill the brewery workers. Joe was the youngest son, and though he wasn’t allergic to beer, he hated its taste, so he was placed in charge of Coors Porcelain, which fashioned fine china, chemical crucibles and dishes, and other porcelain products, located a stone’s throw across Clear Creek from the brewery, where he kept his main office. (Profit from the Coors Porcelain factory, along with the production of near beer and malted milk, had kept the brewery from going under like most breweries during Prohibition.) Joe had taken the confrontational lead on behalf of Coors Porcelain when the strike was settled in 1957.

  Bill, the second born, was president of Adolph Coors Company, in charge of the brewery’s daily operations. No one ever questioned Bill’s engineering and problem-solving skills. He was a fixer, no matter if it was an intricate corporate matter or a malfunctioning boiler valve. A year earlier, he had gained international notoriety for perfecting the aluminum can, whereby soon all soda and beer cans would be aluminum. Coors started a separate aluminum can company, Coors Container, which would become the largest aluminum can–producing plant in the world. He also was the first to pay a penny deposit in order to recycle aluminum cans. And almost as famously, he substituted cold filtering for hot pasteurization, preserving the fresh taste of beer.

  Bill was often criticized, however, for being mule-headed and intolerant. He had been the brewery’s outspoken vanguard during the last union strike. Bill and the Coors family firmly believed in the classes of America, the haves and the have-nots. To him, the haves ran the company; the have-nots worked in the company. And there was no way the have-nots were going to tell the Coors family how to run its brewery. The company paid employees well and provided safe working conditions. The Coors family believed there was no need for unions to “protect” Coors employees. Union leaders believed otherwise, hence the acrimony between the two sides, though the bitterness had not yet risen to the dangerous heights of 1957 when the union last struck.

  The Coors family’s views were well-known throughout the plant, including the family’s conservative beliefs, whether those beliefs concerned unions, activists, homosexuals, or government mandates. Because of Ad’s stutter and quiet disposition, he was not as visible or vocal as Bill and Joe about union matters or family ideologies, usually voting in agreement with his brothers behind the scenes without receiving the bad press his brothers received.

  So on that Monday afternoon on February 8, 1960, when word of an electricians’ strike that might spread to the brewery was again in the air, the brothers stood in a small circle in their office, symbolic of circling wagons before an attack, discussing how best to deal with the possibility. They agreed to take it up at their weekly executive committee meeting at 10:30 the following morning.

  “I don’t think Ad had an enemy in the world,” Bill said to a reporter two days later, who had asked if Ad may have been harmed by a union member. “Revenge isn’t a part of this. If it had been Joe or myself, then maybe I could understand it.”

  * * *

  Corbett drove south of Denver to scout for camping sites. He took a route he’d taken before, turning off Highway 105 near Sedalia, in western Douglas County. He drove up Jackson Creek Road as the asphalt turned to gravel and then to dirt and mud. At seven thousand feet, he pulled over on the side of the narrow, rutted road at a garbage dump tucked away in the pines. A sign with a six-pointed star at its apex flanked on each side by the symbols for Venus proclaimed the garbage belonged to “Shamballah Ashrama—The Brotherhood of the White Temple.” Corbett laughed. The first time he’d seen the sign with the odd name a few weeks earlier, he thought it was some kind of men’s club, like the Shriners or the Elks, only for foreigners.

  “Nope,” replied W. C. Benson, operator of the Sprucewood Lodge located three miles northwest of the dump. “It’s not one of them fraternal orders. About fifteen year ago, this fella named Claude Doggins from Oklahoma bought property up yonder and started callin’ himself Dr. Doreal, sayin’ he was some kinda prophet or somethin’. Built a church settlement and called it ‘Shamballah Ashrama.’ He told his followers a nuclear apocalypse was comin’. Gobs of folks believed ’im and settled in the commune. Said they’d be safe up there in the mountains ’cause lead in the rock would protect ’em from the fallout.”

  Corbett chuckled again before exiting his car at the crest of a hill. He opened a gate beside the road and entered a fenced property. It was the tiny community’s garbage dump, covering an area about seventy by forty feet, small compared to a municipal dump. It was not an ideal place for camping, but it was a great spot for hunting. A dump attracts wild animals, including some dangerous ones, like wolves, bears, mountain lions, and bobcats.

  Carrying a rifle he’d withdrawn from the back seat, Corbett came across a warm, flat boulder to sit on while he waited for an animal to scavenge through the garbage. He’d seen tracks of a three-pawed bear that were fresh, the tracks of the same bear he’d seen before and told a coworker of weeks earlier, but as one o’clock turned to two without a sign of anything other than prairie dogs, Corbett decided to shoot at cans and bottles.

  Corbett fired several shots. He was surprised he’d missed a few times. He didn’t miss often. He lifted the barrel of the rifle and inspected the gun sights.

  The wind soon picked up and grew cold against Corbett’s face. He decided to head down the mountain. Tossing his rifle on a blanket in the back seat, Corbett navigated his car down the rough road, now deeply rutted from the snow thaw during the sunny afternoon.

  About halfway down the mountain, with Devil’s Head still in full view to the south, he remembered he’d forgotten to do something at the dump. He stopped his car and removed an object from the trunk. It wasn’t in a box, bag, or blanket. He carried th
e heavy object in both hands about fifty feet into the thick pine trees and brush. He dropped it in the dense forest. A bell dinged. He was glad to be rid of it. He wouldn’t need it anymore.

  Mr. Benson at the Sprucewood Lodge would later recount to the FBI how a man matching Corbett’s description had frequented the lodge. “Came three times as I remember. Carried a paperback book and read while he ate. Ordered a cheeseburger and beer every time. First time was in January. Asked where he could go camping. Last time I seen ’im was first week in February. Haven’t seen ’im since.”

  Incredibly, just weeks earlier, Corbett encountered another man while on one of his expeditions who also would later tell his story to the FBI. Apparently unconcerned about being remembered or just simply overconfident, Corbett stopped near the entrance to an old mine shaft, which lay only 150 yards from Turkey Creek Bridge. “Hey, mister. I’m searching for a place to do some shooting practice. I saw the mine over there and wondered if I could take a look around.”

  Hilton Pace, a roofer and part-time miner, answered the stranger’s questions in an unfriendly voice, all the while doing a little surveying of his own, curious about this stranger who looked more like a college professor than a sportsman—starched white shirt, brown hat, eyeglasses.

  “Yes, sir. It was in December. He was drivin’ a gray-and-off-color-white Ford,” Pace told an FBI agent later. “Asked me if I was workin’ the mine, and I said I was part-time, mostly weekends and nights. He asked me how deep the mine was.… Yeah, and he asked where Four Corners Mine was and whether it connected with this mine up near Turkey Creek Bridge. I got the first two letters off his plate if that helps any—AT.”