I recently had occasion to drop by Jack Sullivan’s blog Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men! on blogspot.com and was sad to see that the latest post was Jack’s obituary. Jack died on August 16, 2025 at 90 years of age.
I first met Jack over two decades ago when I drove down to the Alexandria, VA area from Philadelphia to attend a local bottle show. The show was ridiculously tiny – ten or so tables in total (if memory serves correctly). There was only one shot glass on offer, which I bought, and then got chatting with the dealer, who turned out to be Jack Sullivan.
This was around the time when I was gathering information on whiskey brands, liquor dealers, distilleries – anything related to the pre-pro whiskey industry – with a view to building databases that could be used to research the origins of shot glasses. I’d already acquired the copyright to HSG and OASG from Barb Edmonson, Howard Currier had donated his brand database that he’d compiled using Bob Snyder’s Whiskey Brands, and I’d also purchased all of Bob’s research material, including government warehouse transaction copies that I used to form the beginnings of the distillery database. What was missing was copies of city business directories that Barb E. had used to research glasses in HSG and OASG. When I contacted her to find out what had happened to them, she thought that she’d donated them to Mark Pickvet (author of Shot Glasses: An American Tradition). When I wrote to him asking whether he still had them, he failed to respond, so the trail was dead.
To my surprise, Jack revealed that he’d bought the city directories from Barb E to support his research on whiskey dealers for the many articles that he’d published in various bottle and club magazines over the years. Even better, he was happy to donate them to the cause! Some time later, I drove back down to Alexandria to pick them up and the City database was born.
I stayed in touch with Jack over the years and frequently ran into him at local and national bottle shows. He also “nipped” (his term for copy and pasting) many shot glass photos from the website to illustrate his articles that appear in Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men! and his other blog Memories and Miscellany (originally named Bottles, Booze, and Backstories), which I was more than happy to contribute given his kind donation of the directories.
Not only was Jack a prolific writer, he had wide-ranging collecting interests. He is perhaps best known for his jug collection, which he eventually donated to a museum. In more recent years, he moved on to whiskey-related paperweights, much to my chagrin. Paperweights had been a side-interest of mine for some time, but now was regularly losing out to Jack when they showed up on eBay.
Jack will be missed, but he turned ownership of his articles and blogs over to the FOHBC so they’ll remain available to us indefinitely.