Wagner's "The Mariner's Return"

Amy Vach

Catalog Numbers: 2011.014.111 & 2011.014.124

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

For more than 70 years, La Crosse’s Heileman Brewing Co. incorporated the painting “The Mariner’s Return” into advertising for its product, Old Style Lager, after acquiring the original painting.

The German artist Fritz Wagner (1896-1939) was known for his paintings of European tavern scenes depicting merry drinkers. “The Mariner’s Return” features three gentlemen in a tavern listening to a seafarer share his adventurous tales.

Over the years, Heileman Brewery used “The Mariner’s Return” on numerous advertising and promotional items.

As late as 1991, the company featured the modified print on Old Style Lager steins. The La Crosse County Historical Society artifact collection contains a few examples of Heileman Brewing Co. advertising using Wagner’s painting.

The first of the two shown here is a simple composite wooden tray with a print adhered to the surface from the 1940s. The second example is a calendar produced from 1942. If you look closely at the image on this calendar, you can see that the image has been modified to advertise Old Style Lager.

The stained-glass window in the top left corner has the Heileman Grenadier in the center. It also has a yellow shield-shaped Heileman’s Old Style Lager sign outside the tavern above the door. A ribbon below the print reads: “‘The Mariner’s Return’ painted by Fritz Wagner depicts a tavern of the 17th century. Relaxed and with rapt admiration, fellow townsmen listen to the tales of the daring voyager. Today America relaxes and finds companionship in a brew far more delicious than the most noted of that day.”

The brewery was inspired by Wagner’s artwork to create a hospitality room for distributors visiting the plant. The hospitality room was designed to embody the scene in the painting. They called this room the “Bier Stube,” or beer room. In addition to inspiring the Bier Stube, a large reproduction of Wagner’s painting was included in the room. The room was built and decorated by several local companies. According to the La Crosse Tribune, the brewery reproduced the scene to carry out “the traditional flavor of Heileman’s famous product known as the only beer with an old-world flavor made in America.”

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 29, 2018.

These objects can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

Doerflinger's Holiday Box

Robert Mullen

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Catalog Number: 2006.003.04

This Christmas box from Doerflinger’s will bring back holiday memories for some.

The red and silver gift box could have held a pair of gloves, a man’s tie, or a woman’s scarf — a present for that special person in your life.

Mention the name Doerflinger’s among a group of older La Crosse residents, and you will open a floodgate of nostalgia.

These memories come from a deep sense of kinship the people of the city had for their long-established, homegrown department store, Doerflinger’s.

You will probably hear memories of children gazing at the elaborate Christmas displays in the store’s windows. Or eating lunch at the Halfway Tea Room on the balcony. Or the fascination with the ancient pneumatic tubes used by the clerks to retrieve your change when you checked out.

Or pondering the amazing selection at the candy counter on the first floor. Or riding the elevator operated by Dave, an employee hired just to deliver you to the third floor where you could hear the squeaky floorboards as you walked across the furniture department.

Many more Doerflinger memories return when walking through the store of the building’s current tenant, the Duluth Trading Co.

Doerflinger’s Department Store was started in 1881 by William Doerflinger and E. Bosshard in a small shop near Cameron Park. Because of its location, the shop was nicknamed The Park Store.

Doerflinger, who was born in 1857 on a farm near the La Crosse bluffs, purchased Bosshard’s share in the store 10 years later. After several location changes and a huge fire in 1903, the building at Fourth and Main streets in downtown La Crosse was constructed, becoming the anchor store for the business district through much of the 20th century.

William Doerflinger died in 1924, and a few years later his daughter Viola Doerflinger Fellows became president of the store. Viola’s son Samuel Fellows took over the management in 1954, and the family-run business prospered into the 1970s.

Unfortunately, debt from opening branch stores in Valley View Mall and other local shopping centers was too heavy for the company to handle.

Doerflinger’s, among the oldest family-operated department stores in the country, closed its downtown store in 1984, shortly after closing its branch stores.

This Doerflinger gift box, probably from the 1960s or 1970s, is a part of the La Crosse County Historical Society’s artifact collection.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 22, 2018.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

A Fishing Boat Built in La Crosse

Robert Mullen

Catalog Number: 2018.021.01

If you grew up in La Crosse, you probably went fishing on the Mississippi River at some point.

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If you were fortunate, you went out on a boat and found a place where the fish were biting and ate some pan-fried sunfish, perch or maybe walleye that night. Fishing has always been considered a leisure activity that also brought food to the table. You could say that fishing is in the blood of many La Crosse families.

That was certainly true for Walter Kofta, a La Crosse native born in 1928. He grew up in La Crosse and married Agnes McCabe here. He worked at the Auto-Lite plant on the city’s north side. And Wally loved to go fishing on the river in his boat.

The boat in this picture was purchased by Wally in 1952. It is a flat-bottomed wooden boat, 16 feet long, and it carries an 18-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Wally’s boat was handmade in La Crosse from a popular boat pattern by his friend Frank Voigt. While Voigt was not in the business of making boats, he made four more of these boats for local fishermen.

Agnes didn’t like that the boat sat quite low in the water, but she still liked going on the river with her husband and cooking the fish they caught for supper.

A bit of a daredevil, Wally even took his boat out fishing when there was considerable ice in the river. He used two home-made eight-foot pikes to drag the boat through or over the ice to get to where he wanted to fish. He recalled that he once saved his friend Frank Voigt on a winter evening when Frank got trapped for three hours on an ice floe that broke away and floated downstream.

Wally moved to Waterloo, Iowa, to work at the John Deere plant after the La Crosse Auto-Lite plant closed, but he often came back with his boat to fish in his home territory on the Mississippi.

Walter Kofta died in 2017. His family donated the boat, motor, pikes and other related material to the La Crosse County Historical Society earlier this year.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on December 15, 2018.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.