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Sam Bronfman was born in Soroki, Bessarabia (then in Imperial Russia), on February 27th 1889.  
 
He was one of eight children of Mindel and Ekiel Bronfman. His parents were refugees who immigrated to Wapella, Saskatchewan, but soon moved to Brandon, Manitoba.  
 
In 1903, the family bought a hotel business, and Samuel, noting that much of the profit was in alcoholic beverages, set up shop as a distributor, founding the Distillers Corporation in Montreal in 1924, specializing in cheap whiskey, and concurrently taking advantage of the U.S. prohibition on alcoholic beverages.  
 
The Bronfmans found great success bootlegging to the northern cities of the U.S. such as Boston and Chicago during the Prohibition era, while operating from the perimeters of Montreal, Quebec where alcohol production was still legal. Mr. Bronfman died July 10th 1971  
 
The Yiddish translation for Bronfman is “whisky man” and the boys of Harry’s age teased him with taunts of “Hay, whisky man!”