Antique 1930s FIXACO Throat Confection Tin 🎩 St. Louis Drugstore Cough Lozenge Pocket Tin

What Was FIXACO Throat Confection? 🎩 The Dandy on the Lid

Size: 2" x 1 1/4" ~ Some light age wear, colors still bright.

I always liked these little drugstore tins, small enough to disappear into a coat pocket and loud enough to grab your eye on the counter. This is a FIXACO "The Unique Throat Confection" pocket tin from The Fixaco Co. of St. Louis, Missouri: a two-piece lithographed tin with a flat lid that slides down rails along the long edges. Inside, both halves are plain gold lacquer. The face is bright orange over a navy band, with FIXACO in heavy dark letters outlined in cream, "REG. U.S. PAT. OFF." underneath, "The Unique Throat Confection" in script, and "FOR COUGHS VOICE • BREATH" next to the price, 10¢. Striding across it is a grinning dandy in a checked suit, a little banded hat and a bow tie, swinging his cane. Some dealers call him the Monopoly Man, and you can see why. The real Monopoly man didn't turn up in the Parker Brothers game until 1936, though, and he wears a tall top hat, not a little number like this one. By then the FIXACO name had been around since 1924. The checks on his suit vary from tin to tin, tight squares on some and a dotted weave on others, just the way the plates ran.

💊 Hold It in the Roof of Your Mouth

The back gives the pitch in the company's own words: "FIXACO is something different. It is highly concentrated and effective. Don't chew Fixaco. Hold in roof of mouth until dissolved. Use freely. For Coughs, Colds, Sore Throat, Hoarseness. Excellent for Children's coughs." It goes after a particular crowd, "For Singers, Speakers, Teachers, Etc.," and adds, "After smoking, Fixaco moistens mouth and throat, also sweetens the breath," signing off with "Fixaco contains no harmful ingredients" and THE FIXACO CO., ST. LOUIS.

🏙️ A St. Louis Throat Lozenge

The Fixaco Company of St. Louis and San Francisco first used the FIXACO name on May 20, 1924, for a "confection to be used in the treatment of coughs, colds, sore throat, and hoarseness," and the trademark was registered on February 10, 1925. That "REG. U.S. PAT. OFF." on the lid means this tin came after that date. The company was chartered in St. Louis in 1925 with $75,000 in capital, and in December 1924 it was already talking prices with the St. Louis Retail Druggists Association. It advertised right where the singers and speakers were: there's a Fixaco ad in the 1931 program of the Muny, St. Louis's outdoor Municipal Opera, and a St. Louis United Railways streetcar carried a "FIXACO COUGHS VOICE BREATH" card. In 1945 the company hired the Anfenger Advertising Agency for its throat lozenges, so the little tin had a good long run.

The story that goes with this tin is that a batch of unused ones turned up as old stock in a factory building in St. Louis, decades after they were packed. More than one dealer has told it, and it's a fun bit of collector lore.

🕵️ What Became of the Name

The story takes a hard turn later on, and I want to say up front that none of it touches the little tin in these photographs. The FIXACO mark was filed in 1924 and changed hands more than once; just when its last owner picked it up is still an open question. But the name surfaces again in 1967, and not behind a drugstore counter.

That year federal agents found roughly 625,000 amphetamine tablets at a motel in Imperial, Missouri, south of St. Louis. Time put the haul at some 650,000 “bennies” and named the outfit as Fixaco, working out of the motel. Behind it was John P. Kauffmann, a lifelong St. Louis man who owned the motel and the company both. He was ordering amphetamine sulfate powder in bulk and pressing it into pills, and he sold an estimated million of them to undercover agents.

Twelve years after that, his name turned up in the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The committee examined Kauffmann, along with a St. Louis patent attorney named John Sutherland, over a bounty said to have been offered in that city on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Kauffmann had died in 1974, five years before the report was printed.

A dime lozenge for singers, speakers and teachers in 1924; a name in a federal pill case and a congressional assassination inquiry four decades on. This tin — spelled-out REG. U.S. PAT. OFF., ten-cent price — belongs to the first chapter, most likely by a long way. I just think the whole arc is worth knowing.