Savoy Special (and knowing and not in the age of AI)

( source )

My friend Raj is an investor. It’s fair to say he’s passionate about finding material on Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. In following this passion he came across my writing on Munger. He lives here in Southern California, we corresponded then met up, became friends IRL. He sends me items of interest about Buffett and Munger and related characters.

The other day he sent me a 1993 NYT profile of Herbert Allen, he of the Sun Valley conference. This detail caught my attention:

Over the past year, Mr. Allen has also led a $400 million financing drive, with his company a big investor, to help Victor Kaufman, former head of Columbia Pictures, begin a new studio, Savoy Pictures Entertainment. In October, Savoy will release the first of a dozen films (“A Bronx Tale,” Robert De Niro’s first effort as director) in a bid to succeed where M-G-M, Carolco and Orion have not.

Regular readers of Helytimes will know Savoy’s been on our mind. We hope to soon be traveling back there.

The word Savoy, via the London neighborhood where several nobles from there nine hundred years ago -> famous hotel -> Harlem ballroom, a big band hit, etc came to be associated with elegance, fanciness, a good meal, a good time.

So this caught my eye. Savoy Pictures.

(Their record was mixed.)

Where did Savoy Pictures get its name? From Wikipedia I learn:

Kaufman has claimed that the name came from the Savoy Special bat Robert Redford‘s character used in The Natural.[1]

Aha. In the novel and movie, there’s a character, Bobby Savoy, a batboy.

Was there a meaning ascribed to this name? I decide to plug the question into Perplexity AI. In three seconds it produces a decent-seeming report. This caught my eye:

Cultural Reference:
• There is also a real-world reference: “Savoy Special” was a brand of beer in the 1930s, made by the United States Brewing Company. However, within the context of the film and novel, the naming is primarily a nod to Bobby Savoy, and there is no explicit explanation in the narrative that connects the bat’s name to the beer brand.

Interesting! I ask Perplexity about the history of Savoy Special. The answer is unsatisfying, mostly citing auctions for vintage cans. I ask ChatGPT and Claude. They give me a nugget or two:

Savoy Special Beer was a product of the Savoy Brewing Company, based in Chicago, Illinois. Evidence of its existence includes a 12-ounce flat-top can from 1960, which was manufactured by the American Can Company and featured their “Keglined” technology—a method designed to prevent the beer from interacting with the metal can, thereby preserving its flavor. This particular can was recently listed for auction, indicating its status as a collectible item among vintage beer enthusiasts. 

Finally I ask DeepSeek. In two seconds a what looks like a deep and thorough report:

Origins & Early Years**

The Savoy Brewing Company was founded in 1881 by John Koehn, a German immigrant, and originally named Koehn Brewing Company.It was later renamed Savoy Brewing Co. (after the Savoy Hotel, which Koehn owned) and became known for its Savoy Special beer.The brewery was located at 18th & Lydia Avenue in Kansas City.

I follow up with a question about sources:

Primary Sources & References**

“The Breweries of Kansas City: An Informal History” (1998) – Thomas M. SpencerDiscusses the history of Savoy Brewing Co. and its founder, John Koehn, who also owned the Savoy Hotel.Notes that the brewery was renamed after the hotel.

I look into this book on Google. It doesn’t appear to exist? I ask DeepSeek: can we just doublecheck?

“Yup, sorry, made that up.” It hallucinated a book.

I press on, and DeepSeek does seem to find some verified deep cuts:

Did this robot train on The Kansas City Star archives? Maybe, or it’s yanking those citations from one of the books it cites that DOES exist: Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland (2012) by Pete Dulin.

Missouri’s Breweries: 1800–2000 (2019) by Henry Herbst, Don Roussin, & Kevin Kious, while close to some things that may exist, appears to be another hallucination.

There’s a pretty thorough-seeming history of the Savoy Hotel of Kansas City here, and it doesn’t mention beer or Koehn.

I get myself a Kindle edition of Kansas City Beer, and find the word Savoy does not exist in the text.

DeepSeek nonetheless insists on this June 12, 1904 ad in The Kansas City Star. But I track that down: also doesn’t appear to exist:

We enter a strange information landscape. What will be known? What can we count on? What’s reliable? It’s always been a question. But it’s extremely eerie to have robots that produce so much information that’s so close to being accurate. It seems like it could be accurate, but it’s not. And this is a computer, why isn’t it double-checking its own work? This is a case of “not even wrong.” It’s very unsettling, I don’t like it. Plus I’m out $12 for a Kindle of Kansas City Beer. I’ll write that off as a research expense.

The closest I can get to seemingly human-checked information is this Tavern Trove citation that the United States Brewing Company of Chicago produced Savoy Special beer from 1932-1951.

We can see right on the can that Savoy Special was produced by Atlantic Brewing Company, perhaps picking up where United States Brewing left off. Tavern Trove confirms this as well. There may be someone out there who remembers drinking this beer, even helped make it – do reach out on the comments – but our search will end here.

Can any historical truth be more knowable than the text on an old can, a solid archaeological object?

As for Savoy, they could’ve gotten the name from anywhere. There’s a Savoy, Illinois, apparently named in honor of a visit from Princess Maria Clotilde:

The Princess spent some time in exile in Prangins:

which would have been part of the historical Savoy before it ended up in Vaud, a canton of Switzerland. (Source)

How far can we go back on the word “Savoy”? From a footnote in The Fall of the House of Savoy by Robert Katz:

Savoy itself becomes known to us for the first time in the fourth century A.D. through the eyes of that wandering Roman historian Amaianus Marcellinus. Describing the tortuous course of the Rhone as it issues from Lake Geneva, Amaianus wrote that “without losing any of its majesty, it flows through Sapaudia and the land of the Sequani. • . .Sapaudia, or Sabaudia, is what we call Savoy, a word whoseorigins are somewhat obscure. One school traces it to Sapp-Wann, Celtic for “the land where the pine trees grow”; another to Sapp-Aud, “the land of the many waters.” But fourteenth-century Savoyard princes, apparently unsatisfied with such pacific and pastoral images, made their Savoy originate from Salva via (“save the way”), which held fast for centuries, although it was, presumably unwittingly, close to the roots of savage. Such etymological fictions and, as we will see, genealogical fables as well, helped to saturate the generations with a sense of mission and hold them steady on the course of aggression.

(You can maybe see why this book was not a bestseller?)

That’s in a book, the book was written by a human, a man with a reputation who put his name on it. Is it more trustworthy than the AI? I’d say so.

One thing I know: I’d love to crack open a cold Savoy Special in the kegliner can. That’s a feeling the AI can never really understand.

What more is there to know?