The Dr. Grabow Legend: the Physician Behind the Brand Name

The Dr. Grabow legend is the story that has grown up around one of twentieth-century American mass-production pipe-making's best-known brands, and how it came to bear the surname of a physician who had nothing to do with manufacturing. In the trade, a brand name is usually assumed to be a founder's or master pipemaker's signature; here, though, the name belongs to a general practitioner with an office in Chicago.

The Physician Behind the Name

The figure at the center of the story is Dr. Paul E. Grabow. Records place his practice at the intersection of Fullerton and Halsted in Chicago; his family lived in the same neighborhood, on a street later absorbed by the expanding university campus. The physician is said to have had neither a partnership nor any technical connection to pipe manufacturing; in the brand's history his name appears only in a single scene of permission being granted.

The party that used his name was M. Linkman & Co., whose factory stood a block west of the physician's neighborhood, at the intersection of Fullerton and Racine, and which was counted among Chicago's largest pipe manufacturers at the time. The meeting of these two names is explained by nothing more than that shared geographic proximity.