NC State's Rocky Mountain Prodigal Son

Joe Coors Jr. during his 2012 congressional campaign.

© Tim Peeler, 2019

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With beer sales being the talk of the state as the 2019 college football season opens this weekend, perhaps we should all tip a frosted mug to a former NC State baseball player and UNC soccer player who once ran his family’s brewing and manufacturing businesses: The Adolph Coors Company.

You may have heard of it, since it still boasts the largest beer production facility in world and makes more than 20 different nationally and internationally distributed beer brands.

Joseph Coors Jr., a 1964 graduate of NC State, was a rebel who was once exiled from the family businesses by his father for not waiting until he graduated from college before marrying his prep school sweetheart. It was a marriage that lasted more than half a century before Coors died just three years ago.

“I was my own person,” he told writer Lisa Stroud in a January 1991 edition of NCSU: The Alumni Magazine. “I didn’t do anything to get thrown in jail, but I was always looking for ways to get around authority figures – legally.”

Joe Jr. would likely be proud to know that Coors Light is one of several beers that will be available Saturday when the Wolfpack opens the same way it ended the 2018 regular season, by hosting in-state rival East Carolina. His family has certainly reaped great benefits by selling their products to students and alumni of both schools, even though the golden brew from Golden, Colorado, was banned from the East Coast nearly a century.

(Didn’t know that? Go watch Smokey and the Bandit and offer up condolences to those of us who came of age in the 1980s.)

The story of Joe’s journey from Colorado to North Carolina and back – with detours to New Hampshire, California and Oregon – is both sweet and courageous. It also includes, according to Joe Jr., a few directives from God.

Like his father, uncles and his five brothers, Coors attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, a classic New England prep school for the well-to-do. By the time he enrolled in the late 1950s, the Coors family was among the richest in the world thanks to the beer that was famously made with pure Rocky Mountain spring water. The expectation for every member of the family was to get a secondary education at Exeter, a degree from Cornell’s School of Engineering and a position within the family’s corporate infrastructure to lead various parts of the company.

Shortly after Joe Coors Jr. enrolled at Exeter, however, he met his roommate’s sister, Gail Fambrough, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The two hit it off and exchanged letters for the next eight weeks. Joe Jr. spent Christmas that year in the Triangle, turning the pen-pal relationship into an intense romance. During his senior year, Joe applied to and was accepted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After he arrived on campus, he joined the Tar Heel freshman soccer team, but didn’t last long in the shadow of the Old Well. He transferred to NC State after one semester, enrolling in the applied math department, where he was classmates with another future billionaire, Jim Goodnight, president and CEO of Cary’s SAS Inc.

Coors settled into his new routine in Raleigh and continued seeing Gail, who by then was pursuing and education degree at UNC.

A capable athlete, Coors decided to join Vic Sorrell’s Wolfpack baseball team in the spring of 1962 as a right-handed pitcher. The Wolfpack was hurting that year, after losing two starting pitchers and power-hitting first baseman Roman Gabriel, who had a team-leading five home runs and 19 RBIs in his junior year but was ineligible to play as a senior after signing a professional football contract with the Los Angeles Rams.

Gail and Joe Coors Jr. on their wedding day. (Family photo.)

Sadly, Joe Jr. never got into a game. Midway through the season, on April 14, 1962, he married Gail in a wedding ceremony in Chapel Hill, despite the family’s unwritten rule that none of the male heirs could be married until after they received their college degree.

His father immediately cut him out of the family businesses.

“At the time I was very bitter,” he said in the alumni magazine story. “…[but] in a German family, there are certain expectations. You do what you are told. Obviously, I had some of the blood from my mother’s side of the family. I felt if my life was going to be run for me that way that I would just as soon not participate.

“So I didn’t.”

Joe Jr. never returned to the Wolfpack baseball team. He graduated NC State with a degree in applied mathematics and a minor in ceramics engineering, which was part of what is now NC State’s Department of Materials Engineering.

He didn’t exactly wander in the wilderness after breaking with the family. After graduation, he became a stockbroker in Denver, only about 15 miles away from his family’s 22-room estate on the grounds of the Coors brewery. He later moved to San Diego, where the weather was warm enough for year-round golf, to become a computer programmer and a data processing specialist.

Then, just before Christmas in 1972, Coors said the voice of God told him to “go home.” So he did. He asked for a job within in the company and after two months of somewhat heated familial debate, he was offered a job as a data processor within the Coors Ceramics Inc.

At the time, like Joe Jr., the ceramics company was a dark family secret. Early in the 20^th century, Adolph Coors owned a glassworks company that produced bottles and other porcelain-based pottery. He found ways to incorporate clay dug out of the same waterways that provided the brewery its pure spring water.

That worked well for three years until the onset of World War I, when U.S. companies were barred from importing from Germany the high-quality chemical and scientific porcelain. So Adolph Coors bought the Herold Pottery Company and turned it into a ceramics production company, which sustained the family throughout the decade of Prohibition, along with the production of malted milk and non-alcoholic beer. When Prohibition was lifted in 1933, Coors was one of the few breweries still in business.

When Joe Jr. was accepted back into the family, he went to Hillsboro, Oregon, as a data processor for Wilbanks Inc., a subsidiary ceramics company. He stayed there for 11 years, becoming president and CEO in 1980.

“It was family policy not to talk about that business,” Coors told the alumni magazine some 25 years ago. “I have changed that.”

Joe Jr. returned to Colorado in 1984 and helped introduce several ceramic golf products that were near and dear to his heart: ceramic putters, drivers and golf spikes. CoorsTek, though no longer part of the parent company, still manufactures high-quality golf equipment, along with components for semiconductors, bearings and other technical applications of ceramics. It has more than 6,000 employees and 60 manufacturing facilities in 14 countries.

And it’s no longer a secret.

Joe Coors Jr. at CoorsTek. (CoorsTek photo.)

After taking over the reins of all the family businesses in 1986 and increasing worldwide sales in every division, Joe Jr. retired from the family business in 2000 to a quiet life in Colorado, playing golf most days at The Club at Rolling Hills, where he and Gail were longtime members. The family business was eventually merged with Molson Brewing and Miller Brewing into MillerCoors, which is now the second largest beer brewing company in the country.

It was during a round there that Joe Jr. got his second message from God: Run for Congress.

So he mounted a challenge to his next-door neighbor, incumbent U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D), as a Republican candidate for Colorado’s 7^th District, using “I am not a beer. I am you.” as his campaign slogan.

It did not help, and Perlmutter retained his seat, winning the fourth of his seven terms so far.

Joe Coors Jr. died on Sept. 16, 2016, from the complications of a stroke. He was 74.

Had he lived to see it, Coors would likely be astounded that his family’s signature product will be served in Carter-Finley Stadium and that his alma mater now has its own fermentation science program, a research brewery and its own namesake lager, Old Tuffy Premium Lager, which is being commercially produced by craft beer specialist New Belgium Brewing Company of Asheville.

New Belgium was founded in Fort Collins, Colorado, about 70 miles from where the Adolph Coors began his family empire more than 125 years ago.

On Saturday, Coors Light and Old Tuffy will be sold in cans side-by-side throughout the football game.

Sources for this story include: NCSU: The Alumni Magazine, The Denver Post, the NC State Special Collections Archive and NC State athletics archives.