On September 27, 1911, a group of businessmen headed by Bernhard Carl Ziegler founded the West Bend Aluminum Company. Ziegler was the director and president until his death in 1946. As one of the most influential people in the community, he was…
In 1920 the aluminum cookware industry in Wisconsin gained control of over 50 percent of the total national market, after selling less than five percent in 1910. By 1929, West Bend ranked third in the nation in sales of aluminum cookware; however, during the Great…
With a roster that included Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Ethel Waters, Paramount Records became perhaps the most important blues recording company of the 1920s. Their success was dependent on their ability to recruit black performers and reach a broad Black…
Paramount Record’s parent company, the United Phonographic Corporation, a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company, decided to begin recording and pressing records to include with their phonograph cabinets in the early 1920s. Paramount initially recorded in studios throughout the United States. They…
The Wisconsin Chair Company’s (WCC) decision to enter the record label industry was an economic one. With their subsidiary company, the United Phonographic Corporation (UPC), picking up steam, management at the WCC began pressing records. The UPC’s first record labels, Puritan and…
Founded in 1888 by Frederick A. Dennett, the Wisconsin Chair Company (WCC) was perhaps the most important business in Ozaukee County at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The company, located along the northern shore of the…