Dr. Grabow

Dr. Grabow is the brand that took its name from a Chicago physician and brought the series-production briar pipe to a wide audience in North America. It represents not the signature of a single craftsman but a factory-scale production system, the naming fashion of its era, and a succession of changes in ownership.

Origin of the Name

The brand's name comes from Dr. Paul E. Grabow, a physician with a practice in Chicago. Linkman, which ran a large pipe factory in the same city, asked in 1930 for permission to use the physician's name for the new line it was about to launch; according to accounts, this permission was not tied to a contract or a royalty payment. Production began in 1930-31 under the roof of M. Linkman & Co.

Giving a pipe a physician's name was a familiar sales method of those years. Between the wars, lines marketed with a "doctor" attribute and countless "system" pipes appeared in both America and Europe. The health superiority implied by these names belongs to the advertising language of the period; it has no valid basis today.