Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Clubmakers

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Clubmakers

Hillerich & Bradsby
Louisville, KY

The cooper, Johann Michael Hillerich. and wife, Appollonia née Ritter, emigrated to the United States from Germany (company histories say Baden-Baden though it was actually Seckmauern in Landgrafschaft Hessen-Darmstadt) with their family in 1842 on the Schiller from Bremen to Baltimore and, after a brief sojourn there, ultimately settled in Louisville.

His son, J Frederic, born in 1833, opened his own business there in 1859, J F Hillerich, Job Turning. He was joined in it by his son, John A “Bud” Hillerich as a 14 year old apprentice in 1880. He was supposedly the first in the family to make a baseball bat, providing a replacement in 1884 for local player Pete Browning who broke his bat during a match Bud had skipped work to watch. His father was initially sceptical of this sideline benefiting the business but, in 1894, registered the name “Louisville Slugger” as a trademark for the product which grew and grew in popularity both in the professional leagues and with amateurs. Consequently Bud was made a partner in the business in 1897, the name of which changed to J F Hillerich and Son.

For all the credit given to Bud in company histories, a local paper reported that an era had ended in 1914 with the death aged 70 of ‘Andrews Hillerich’ (actually Andreas Martin Hillerich) ‘the company’s veteran maker of baseball bats’ who had sold them to players in leagues right around the country but ensured his popularity locally by selling them to the boys in his hometown at cost price.

Disaster befell the company in 1910 when the bat factory burned down. During the rebuilding process (which is probably when “Bud” took control of the company from his father and it changed its name to the J A Hillerich Co, by 1913 at the latest) they hired Frank Bradsby in 1911. He was a buyer from Simmons Hardware, who had handled the non-pro baseball bat sales, and was to oversee the company’s sales policy. He rose rapidly and in 1916 was offered a partnership in the company now called Hillerich and Bradsby. He was secretary-treasurer with J A Hillerich as president. It was announced in August 1916 that the factory would start producing golf clubs ‘after more than a year spent in experiments’, these involving the wholesale production of heads and shafts then complete clubs white-labelled for resale by stores. The first advertisements for their own brand clubs seem to have appeared in 1917 with local exhortations from retailers The Sutcliffe Co., to buy in order to give work to Louisville men (this before the US entered WWI) and also making a feature of their cork grip clubs.

Also around this time one sees the arrival of a Hillerich and Bradsby trophy to be competed for at the Audubon club in Louisville.

Fred, the founder, died aged 90 in January 1924 after breaking his hip in a fall on the ice.

In 1925, when they claimed to be the ‘largest bat factory in the world’, they bought the John Finzer Tobacco plant, dating back to 1882, on Jackson Street, Louisville, with the new space devoted to the production of golf clubs. Nevertheless, even by the end of the decade their advertisements tended to mention golf in a final sentence after a paragraph on baseball.

The company had paid Honus Wagner in 1905 to use his name on a baseball bat and they went down that route in golf also. Their first autograph model was marked ‘designed by Stewart Maiden’. Many featured the ‘B’Bolt hickory shaft which is flat at the back. In 1933 it officially introduced the PowerBilt name for clubs, although early models had been used by Olin Dutra to win the USPGA in 1932 and the US Open in 1934. H&B continued with the range until the division was sold to Hilco Streambank in 2016.

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