William Coors, Ultraconservative Head of Brewery, Dies at 102

William K. Coors, who led one of America’s biggest beer makers for decades, but whose ultraconservative speeches and anti-union policies incurred boycotts and the wrath of organized labor, civil rights groups and minorities, died Saturday at his home in Golden, Colorado. He was 102.

The death was confirmed by Colin Wheeler, a spokesman for the Molson Coors Brewing Co.

A grandson of the stowaway from Germany who founded the Adolph Coors Co. in the foothills of the Rockies in 1873, Coors was chairman from 1959 to 2000 and vice chairman until 2002, building a regional brewery into the nation’s third-largest, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller.

William Coors, a Princeton-educated chemical engineer whose first job was sweeping company floors, was widely credited with developing the recyclable aluminum can that has become standard for beer and soft drinks. In 1959, long before recycling was common, Coors offered a penny for each can’s return.

Following longstanding family tradition, he kept Coors marketing expenses to a minimum, spending a fraction of what the leading competitors budgeted for advertising. “We don’t need marketing,” Coors proclaimed in 1975. “We know we make the best beer in the world.”

Along with his younger brother, Joseph, a Coors executive who supported Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, William Coors, although not as overtly political, championed bootstrap success and free enterprise, and was widely admired by conservatives.

But he alienated unionists, blacks, Hispanics, women and gays with views and policies that critics called racist, sexist and homophobic, and members of those groups joined informal boycotts of Coors beer in increasing numbers in the 1970s.

Coors brewery workers struck in 1977 over many issues, including the use of lie-detector tests to ferret out employees who were gay or whose politics were considered radical. Workers who crossed picket lines voted the union out. The AFL-CIO declared war, calling for a boycott that lasted 10 years and caused Coors sales and market shares to fall sharply.

At labor’s behest, many black, Hispanic, gay and feminist groups joined the boycott as time went on, adding to its power.

For years, a favorite theme of Coors was that America was a land of opportunity for immigrants, whether legal or illegal, including what he called “wetbacks” crossing the Rio Grande. And in February 1984, Coors, speaking to minority business owners in Denver, was quoted by The Rocky Mountain News as saying that black people lacked “intellectual capacity”

In the ensuing uproar, the NAACP in Los Angeles called for a boycott of Coors beer, and 500 liquor stores in Southern California joined it. Coors apologized for his comments the day after the article appeared, but he also sued the newspaper for libel, saying his words had been distorted. (The suit was later dropped.)

Seven months later, Coors responded to mounting pressure by signing separate agreements with black and Hispanic groups to increase its minority hiring, to develop minority distributors and to invest in banks, law firms, advertising agencies and other businesses in minority communities over five years. One pact, with a coalition that included Operation PUSH and the NAACP, pledged up to $325 million; another, with the Hispanic organization La Raza, pledged up to $300 million. Both packages were contingent on increasing Coors sales in minority communities.

In the 1980s, with William’s approval, two nephews, the sons of Joseph Coors, began taking day-to-day control: Jeffrey as company president, in charge of diversified nonbrewing businesses that included bottling, packaging, trucking, food products and recycling, and Peter as president of the brewing division that generated the vast bulk of the revenues. Both were market-oriented, image-conscious executives, as conciliatory as their father and uncle had been combative.

In 1987, after negotiations with Peter Coors, organized labor ended its boycott. A year later, Coors brewery workers again voted to reject union representation. But a groundswell of change had begun at the company, and William Coors was still at the top of the corporate pyramid.

William Kistler Coors was born in Golden, Colorado, on Aug. 11, 1916, the second of three sons of Adolph H.J. Coors Jr. and Alice May Kistler Coors. His father became head of the company after the founder, William’s grandfather, whose original name was Kuhrs, committed suicide in 1929. Adolph III, the elder brother of William and Joseph, was murdered in 1960 after being kidnapped for ransom.

William graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and studied chemical engineering at Princeton, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1938 and a master’s in 1939. He had taken piano lessons from an early age, and his mother wanted him to be a concert pianist. But after college he honored family tradition and his father’s wishes by joining Coors.

In 1941, he married Geraldine Louise Jackson. The couple had three daughters: Margaret, May Louise and Geraldine, the eldest, who suffered from depression and committed suicide in 1983, and a son, William Kistler Jr., who died in infancy. The marriage ended in divorce in 1962. He and Phyllis Mahaffey, the company secretary, were married in 1963. They had one son, Scott, and were divorced. In 1995, he married Rita Bass, who died in 2015.

Coors is survived by two daughters, Margaret Coors Beresford and May Louise Coors; his son, Scott; seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 1959, Coors obtained $250,000 from his father and developed the aluminum cans that became the industry standard. As he rose to corporate leadership, he presided in the 1960s and ‘70s over a regional brewery that sold 300,000 barrels a year. He took the company public in 1975, but it was not until the 1980s that Coors, finally spending large sums on marketing, achieved international distribution. It eventually sold more than 45 million barrels a year in his later years as chairman. (Molson Coors was the product of a merger in 2005.)

For all his family fortune, Coors lived modestly in Golden, an unpretentious middle-class city of 13,000 just west of Denver. He had a vacation home in Aspen, but rarely went abroad. People in town called him Bill, and he went to work without a jacket or tie, a tall, thin, balding man who looked more like a tractor salesman than a tycoon.

Coors, a trustee of his family’s philanthropic foundation, which gave millions to environmental, educational and cultural causes, retired in 2003 from the boards of the Adolph Coors Co. and the Coors Brewing Co., but remained a technical adviser.