Hamm's Beer bear
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The Hamm's Beer bear was a cartoon mascot used in television and print advertisements for Hamm's beer. Typically, the bear would dance around in a pastoral setting while the "Land of sky blue waters" jingle was sung in the background. Its name (never mentioned in the commercials) is Sascha, after the wife of the founder of the company.[citation needed]
The Hamm's Beer bear was created by Patrick DesJarlait, an Ojibwa, in 1952 for an advertising campaign produced by the Campbell-Mithun advertising agency. For a period, a real bear named Sascha trained by Earl Hammond appeared in commercials as well.
The Hamm's Beer bear was featured on endless array of signs, glassware, and tchotchkes such as clocks, ceramic miniatures, and ashtrays. It was so well-known and identified with Minnesota that the St. Paul Pioneer Press named the bear as a runner-up on its list of "150 Influential Minnesotans of the Past 150 Years" in 2000. By that time, however, parent Miller Brewing had discontinued it over concerns it might be interpreted as marketing beer to children; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco had recently been forced to discontinue its Joe Camel character for similar reasons.
In 2002, to commemorate the bear's 50th anniversary, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based group of Hamm's memorabilia collectors called the Hamm's Club proposed erecting a six-foot granite statue of the bear. The monument would stand near a waterfall named for William Hamm, a former company president, in Como Park, and would not mention the word "beer," but the City Council declined the offer in 2003, in part because the original location which was near a playground. The statue was placed on the 7th Street Mall in September 2005.
Patrick Desjarlait went on to become a successful artist and is well-known for his striking use of watercolors depicting Ojibway life in his ancestral home of Red Lake, Minnesota. Desjarlait's family still reside in Red Lake and he has one daughter, Patricia, living in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico.
