Budweiser Clydesdales celebrate 75 years as an American icon

By Heidi Glaus

KSDK -- There aren't many stars in St. Louis with as much pull as the Clydesdales, but what you might not know, is how this tradition began.

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It's a story Tom Shipley, the Director of Budweiser Marketing, has been sharing with television stations around the country in honor of the Budweiser Clydesdales 75th anniversary.

Basically it begins like this, prohibition was coming to an end. April 7th, 1933 would be the day A-B started selling beer again and

Gussie Busch wanted to do something special for his father.

"Gussie went to the board of directors and got permission for approval for the capital to buy six horses at the time and a restored hitch and the he recruited two of the former drivers," Shipley explains.

"He set all this up as a big surprise for his father August Busch SR. August Busch SR. had not only weathered this terrible storm of prohibition, but also was having some health problems so it was really an effort to surprise his dad and cheer him," Shipley added.

It was also a way to commemorate the end of prohibition and as the story goes there wasn't a dry eye around when he made the presentation.

"The citizens of St. Louis and all the Anheuser-Busch employees were so moved by it that it sparked something in Gussie as the brilliant marketer that he was and expand this a little further," Shipley goes on to say.

So he put the Clydesdale hitch on a railroad car and sent the train to Washington and presented a case of Budweiser to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the majestic horses have been front and center ever since.

"There's something about Clydesdale that's so special. They're magnificent, they're huge, but they're also gentle, docile," Shipley points out.

It's that gentleness that makes them perfect for commercials.

"Before we make these commercials the clydesdales spend two or three weeks with a trainer. So there's very little movie magic and a lot more of it is real horses doing real things after a lot of training and time with their handlers here," Shipley says.

There are the holiday commercials like the one that was filmed in 1976 that still airs and then there are the more modern commercials, but what probably gets the most attention is the superbowl ads. And even though though we're still a couple months away from the big game, the big commercials for A-B have already been shot.

"By the time we get to August, September we're already looking at scripts, we'll look at a couple hundred different scripts, different ideas from different agencies and narrow it down," Shipley explains.

So as much as we've heard about change at Anheuser-Busch in the last few months, rest assured the hitch is staying intact.