Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (2 page)

FRANCES STROH, 1973

(by Eric Stroh)

T
he shopkeepers of my youth were eager men and women who would turn up the lights and smile extravagantly when my father and I walked though their doors.

“
Hello
, Mr. Stroh” echoed through the dusty chambers of Madison Avenue antique stores, Broadway camera dealers, the elite pipe shops of London. My father always addressed the shop owners by their first names, as if they were old friends, while they led us toward elegantly appointed back rooms. Armored doors opened into velvety interiors with the most prized discoveries of the season: a pair of nineteenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes; an engraved gold-and-silver-plated antique firearm set. My father handled the items with confidence and familiarity, a cigarette hanging off the corner of his lip, the muted excitement in the room making my breath uneven.

I remember one of our trips to Madison Avenue, when I was six. My father and I stood in the back of the shop
inspecting a pair of ivory-inlaid revolvers. The dust in the room spun around in a beam of light from the window. The shop owner broke the silence with chatter, perhaps trying to ease any guilt he imagined my father might feel at spending such excessive sums.

My father interrupted him. “Are the holsters original? I bought fakes in Chicago once.”

“Those are double loop Western holsters, Mr. Stroh, by A. M. Nash. A hundred percent antique.”

My father ran his thumb over the embossed leather, scratching the finish with his thumbnail. “Patina’s good,” he said.

The shop owner nodded. “You won’t find a better set.” His few strands of hair, combed over an expanse of receding hairline, had been carefully gelled into place. He walked over to a dusty shelf of books and pulled out a volume. “Oh, and I meant to call you about this Dickens series, Mr. Stroh.” He opened the gold-embossed leather-bound book. “It’s a first-edition collection of the totality of Dickens’s novels, circa 1880. Twenty-nine in all.”

My father put the holsters down on a table and took up the volume. “
A Christmas Carol!
” he said, smiling over at me.

I leaned against a silk-upholstered divan and dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my Sunday overcoat, a vague feeling of dread constricting my throat. We had watched
A Christmas Carol
three Christmases in a row in the library, our tree sparkling in the corner of the living room, glasses of eggnog sitting on coasters next to us. I watched the movie only to please my father. The truth was, I always had terrible nightmares afterward, my sleep haunted by the three ghosts.

As he looked through the volumes, my father’s face succumbed to that expression I’d seen so often on these shopping trips, the sort of glow I’d seen on worshippers’ faces at Christ Church as they sang from the hymnbooks, and I knew my father would buy the Dickens set no matter the cost, putting him in a good mood for at least a few hours or, if I was lucky, the entire day.

Afterward, my father and I walked over to Park Avenue in the brisk April wind to have lunch at the Regency Hotel, my father’s English leather shoes grinding the pavement as I struggled to keep up with him. He took my hand and led me across the street against a throng of rushing people. My father pointed up at one of the tall buildings. “That one there?” he told me. “It’s the most expensive apartment building in the world.”

The limestone building rose up toward the sky, as if primed to launch, with perhaps a thousand windows. Power surged from its interior, as if the game of the world—a monstrous game of Monopoly always under way—were being played day and night by its inhabitants. The air around us seemed to crackle with excitement, and I felt at once proud that my father knew such things and disappointed to be only passing by. I wished we could go inside the building’s walls of polished stone, ride the elevator to the top floor as we had at the Empire State Building, and look out on the world.

“Maybe you’ll even live there someday,” said my father, sensing my fascination.

I felt thrilled. And doubtful. Though my father constantly bought expensive things, my mother often worried that we
couldn’t afford them. “Really?” I asked tentatively. “I could live there?”

“Sure.” My father smiled. “You can do anything you
want
. All it takes is money.”

I could feel the solid warmth of my father’s hand as he led me along the sidewalk to lunch; his happy mood seemed to promise me the world.

We walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Regency Hotel into the dining room and were seated and given menus. Plates traveled past us to other tables in the hands of black-tied waiters. My stomach knotted with hunger. The menu looked like the one at our country club—lamb chops, filet mignon, whitefish. My father glanced around for the waiter.

“I’ll have a hamburger,
extra
well done, please,” he said when the waiter arrived. The waiter raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, cook it like a hockey puck.”

My father turned to me. “My daughter would like a hot dog, French fries, and a Coke.” With the exception of the Coca Cola, the items he ordered were not on the menu.

The waiter came by with a tray of rolls and placed one on each of our plates with a set of silver tongs. Perfect balls of butter sat atop crushed ice in a silver bowl.

“How about we swing by Schwarz after lunch?” my father asked me. He took a roll and slathered it with butter. “Then we’ll have tea at the Plaza.” His light-blue eyes fixed on mine, and I felt a rush of excitement. He’d remembered.

We’d been to FAO Schwarz—my favorite destination—a few times before. Just down from the Plaza Hotel, the toy-
store windows sparkled with elaborate displays, beckoning to every child passing by. One year an entire kingdom of Madame Alexander dolls inhabited castles and locked towers, fought dragons and rescued princesses. “Okay,” I said shyly, not wanting to show my father how much I’d hoped he would suggest it.

My father took a second roll, this time from my plate, and smiled at me. Whenever he was happy, I felt I was at the center of a benevolent universe.

H
aving thrived in Detroit for five generations, my father’s clan was infamous for spending money nearly as quickly as they made it, my father’s generation in particular.

My great-great-grandfather, Bernhard Stroh, had come over from Kirn, Germany, in 1848 with a family recipe. In 1850 he established the Lion Brewing Company in Detroit because the local water tasted so good. Bernhard made a Bohemian-style brew in his basement and sold the barrels door-to-door out of a wheelbarrow, saving every spare penny to buy a horse-drawn carriage. Later, thanks in no small part to Henry Ford and his Model T trucks, Bernhard’s sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., expanded the company’s distribution throughout the entire Midwest, renaming it the Stroh Brewing Company.

By the 1970s, the third and fourth generation of Strohs were running the family-owned brewery. They made a regional beer brand—Stroh’s Beer—that went national in the
early 1980s after the purchase of the Schlitz and Schaefer breweries, a consolidation of the industry that landed thirty beer brands in our portfolio, making the family company the third-largest beer maker in the United States, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The majority of Stroh’s brands targeted inner-city subcultures, the blue-collar segment, and—because the beer was cheap—college kids. At its peak, the Stroh Brewing Company launched an enormous commercial and residential real estate project in downtown Detroit, built its own biotechnology research center in Durham, North Carolina, and underwrote a private plane for its CEO. Named in the Forbes 400 list from 1984 to 1992, the Stroh family possessed the largest private beer fortune in America.

For decades, the money was flowing and the Strohs lived like kings. My father’s notorious collecting landed him on every dealer’s A-list, making him the poster boy for the Strohs’ spending habits. He loved the attention, the grandiosity, and the elusive hit of immortality he felt when he walked into a shop. It seemed inexhaustible, the pipeline of beautiful objects—and the money to buy them—and we never grew tired of wandering the shops’ dusty back rooms.

But as my father’s health declined in the decades to come through the various stages of heart disease, and my life and work took me elsewhere, our shopping trips gave way to brief visits in this or that city, to catch-up calls with tenuous overseas connections, and the team we’d formed in my youth slowly dissolved.

My father died alone in the hospital in 2009. I was stunned he hadn’t wanted me at his side. He hated to show vulnera
bility, of course; still, it hurt that he’d been so stubborn all the way to the end. In my sorrow I realized that the small girl who so loved and admired him had never really left. It was that same small girl who despairingly called his answering machine in Michigan for months, until the house was sold, just to hear his voice on the outgoing message, incredulous that he was no longer there.

When the time came for me, as the executor of the estate, to put my father’s collections up for sale, a crippling fatigue settled in; I yearned to wade in my grief for as long as my spirit needed to, not haggle over consignment agreements and auction contracts. My father had left me the whole of his collections—a nod to the years we’d spent together buying them, and perhaps, as some sort of apology. The gesture, though, was like a loaded pistol; the Stroh Brewing Company had been sold ten years before, in 1999, and my father had spent the bulk of his share of the proceeds. The collections—and the Grosse Pointe house in which they sat—were all that remained of my father’s legacy, and disinheriting my brothers seemed nothing less than cruel.

It felt as if the collections and the money they represented had formed an invisible web in which I’d been caught all my life, and I found myself secretly wishing I could give everything to charity with a single phone call. But as I’d decided to split my father’s possessions with my brothers, or at least their value, assessing, dividing, and selling off the collections was what I had to do. The freedom I’d coveted came only gradually, as things of real value so often do.

STROH BREWERY

(Copyright 1973 The Detroit News, All Rights Reserved)

L
ock your doors, kids,” my father said as we crossed into Detroit on Jefferson Avenue, leaving behind the wide green lawns and lakefront mansions of Grosse Pointe.

Dropping their
MAD
magazines on the backseat, Bobby and Charlie sat up at attention. I hugged my Barbie to my chest. We had entered the fear zone. Miles and miles of derelict buildings stretched before us, four-story prewar brick buildings with boarded-up windows, peeling advertisements, and torn awnings. Many of the structures looked as if they once had been rather grand houses or apartment buildings, their graceful stone steps rising up to paneled, arched wooden doors. I imagined women in wide feathered hats coming out of those doors, their uniformed drivers waiting outside in horse-drawn carriages. Now the buildings’ brick walls were collapsing.

We pushed down the plastic knobs at the tops of our doors, listening for that reassuring
click
of safety, and sat silently for
the remainder of the drive to the brewery, as if being quiet might attract less attention to our father’s silver Chrysler.

“We’re only as safe as the locks on our doors,” my father always said.

We knew why—because all the people on the street were black. Men and women walked into liquor stores that had the word
LOTTO
spray-painted on their awnings, cradling brown paper bags when they came out. Cadillacs crawled along side streets where the houses had been burned in the riots and left to disintegrate. Women wore short skirts in November, their legs muscular and lean above high heels. Men circled in the middle of the road, back and forth, back and forth—angry, wild-eyed, shouting at each other.

I wasn’t as afraid as my father. Sometimes, when my parents traveled with their friends to Bermuda or the Bahamas, I stayed in a black neighborhood in Detroit with our housekeeper, Ollie. I climbed trees with Tony and Dana, Ollie’s grandchildren, and sang gospel at her church. I ate Ollie’s Southern cooking and watched her husband, Raymond, blow cigarette smoke out of his tracheotomy hole. Raymond was dying of lung cancer. I could hear Ollie crying at night through the paper-thin wall and Raymond comforting her by humming old songs, and I wondered why, when it was perfectly safe to stay at Ollie’s, we had to lock our doors to keep the black people on the street out.

“Damn riots,” my father said. “Changed everything. We could hear the gunshots and smell the smoke all the way up in Grosse Pointe.”

They had come the year after I was born, the riots, in
1967. My father said the blacks had changed after that, but of course he wasn’t talking about Ollie. The whites fled Detroit for the suburbs, and the Grosse Pointe police force doubled in size.

“Any nonresident black found within the city limits will be escorted back to Detroit,” I’d once heard a police officer say to a woman who’d complained about black kids swimming at the Farms Pier pool. She’d been dressed in a monogrammed pink-and-green sweater, and her husband’s khakis were cuffed at the ankle, like my father’s. They looked like everyone else in Grosse Pointe, the kind of people who drank cocktails from glasses etched with the motto “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” and whose black cooks and maids were treated entirely differently from the blacks on the streets or at the parks.

“Whites aren’t safe down here anymore,” my father said, switching lanes to avoid hitting a man who carried a boom box on his shoulder. “Coleman Young’s made sure enough of that.”

Coleman Young was the mayor of Detroit. My uncles, who ran the family company, were always having meetings with “Mr. Young,” making “deals” with him. Uncle Peter and Great Uncle John ran the brewery, Uncle Gari the ice cream division. As children, we understood Coleman Young to be the king of Detroit, someone our family had to please at all costs, because we were white.

I could see the Stroh’s Beer sign just ahead, hovering above the brewery in red block letters that lit up the sky. It always startled me, seeing our name like that, and I looked away as
we turned into the parking lot, focusing instead on the rows and rows of blood-red beer trucks,
Stroh’s Beer
inscribed in gold across their sides.

My father swung open the door to the Brewhaus, allowing Bobby and Charlie through. My father smiled down at me as I passed through in my red winter coat, one of my mittens trailing on the floor from the string connecting them through my sleeves.

All through the cavernous space was the pungent scent of hops and wheat. Enormous copper cauldrons of brew, one after another, emitted their noxious steam as we walked a catwalk running along the perimeter of the space. We looked down at the blue-uniformed men adding ingredients to the brew through sliding hatches on the sides of the cauldrons, their rosy copper gleaming under the fluorescent lighting.

“Can you smell that beer?” my father shouted over the din of machinery. “It’s cooked with real fire.” He pointed to a row of six copper cauldrons that had been tiled around their sides, like bathtubs. “The fire’s inside.”

I was just learning to read. I remembered seeing the words
Fire-Brewed
on a beer bottle in our refrigerator.

“Only fire-brewed beer in the U.S.,” my father told us as he stamped out his cigarette on the catwalk. “We do it the old-fashioned way.”

My father worked in the marketing department. Sometimes he flew to Hollywood to oversee the production of Stroh’s Beer commercials. Later, he’d show me the ads on TV while we sat eating pizza in the library at home. My favorite was an ad in which a pretzel climbed up a bottle of beer to take a sip.

My father led us around the perimeter of the Brewhaus. He tapped his cigarette pack on his open palm to knock one out. He wore a dark-gray pinstriped suit with a white shirt and a burgundy tie dotted with tiny tennis racquets. He had on businessman shoes—lace-up black barges with pointy toes and tiny eyelets in the hard leather, shoes that weighed as much as a small dog when I picked them up in his closet, especially with the shoe horns still in them.

“Dad, wear
these
,” I would say as he dressed for work, holding up the leaden shoes. He had at least ten pairs to choose from.

He always walked over in his black socks, held up by suspenders just below his knees, and took the shoes. “Thanks, Minuscule.”

My father leaned into the railing of the catwalk. He looked at Bobby and Charlie, as he drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “You two will work here someday. This is your company.”

“I know, Dad,” said Charlie, as if he’d heard my father say this many times.

Bobby and Charlie studied the men who loaded the hops into the vats. Bobby brushed his auburn curls out of his eyes. At twelve and fourteen, my brothers were big boys and, with their tweed jackets and corduroys, seemed nearly ready to don their own business suits. Fair skinned and freckled, like my mother, Bobby went to a boarding school in Connecticut called Kent—the same name as my father’s cigarette brand. Charlie, too, would soon go away to school. He shared my father’s coloring—straight blond hair, blue eyes, rosy skin—
none of which stopped my father from favoring Bobby, his firstborn.

“Dad, can I have
that
job?” Charlie asked excitedly, pointing down at a man who took the temperature of a glass of golden liquid.

“Sure, Chas,” said my father, “maybe some summer when you’re in college.”

Where would I work at the company? I wondered. I’d seen only one woman since we’d arrived—at the reception desk. “What about me, Dad?”

My father smiled his Hollywood smile. “You? You’re going to be a movie star, right, Franny?”

This was one of our inside jokes. My father adored old movies—anything with Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby—and their beautiful leading ladies: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn.

We crossed into the bottle shop, where an endless procession of dark-brown bottles were filled with beer, labeled, and sorted as they traveled through a mechanized assembly line—a miniature of the one I’d seen at the Ford plant on a school field trip. I watched, fascinated, as the bottles marched along, like ants, toward some mysterious place where they would be loaded into cases and trucked away.

“My father built this packaging facility just before he died, in the late forties,” my father said with pride. “Should have put in a can plant, too, of course. That had to be added later.”

These were some of the only facts he ever shared about my grandfather, who’d died of lung cancer in 1950 when my
father was seventeen. Sometimes I wondered if my father had even really known him.

Bobby’s freckles glistened in the rising heat. He pulled at his shirt collar. “I want to sell beer, Dad,” he said, turning to our father. “Can I?”

“Sure, why not?” My father turned and walked us around the length of the bottle shop. I tripped in my winter boots, and Charlie took my hand. Bobby removed his jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He wore a brass Stroh’s belt buckle.

My father unlocked a door that opened onto a long corridor lined with portraits of our beer-making ancestors and their wives—Bernhard, Eleanora, Julius, Hetty. Some of the portraits had been painted by Gari Melchers, a well-regarded American Impressionist who also happened to be my great-great uncle.

My father stopped in front of a painting of Julius Stroh, his grandfather, who gazed quizzically at us through a monocle, severe and determined in his morning coat and cravat.

My father smiled up at the portrait. “I used to sit on Julius’s lap and he would always say, ‘Have you been a good boy today, Eric?’ and I knew I had to lie. ‘Yes, Grandpoppy, I have.’” My father laughed. “The old kraut could be awfully punitive. So could my father, for that matter.”

He flicked open a gold Dunhill lighter, one I recognized from our trip to London the previous summer, and lit his cigarette. He bought the lighter the same day he took me to the Tower of London. I remembered him pointing out the medieval torture devices used on the kings’ disobedient subjects. The chopping block still had the ax marks where real heads
had been severed. Afterward, we’d gone to Harrods, where my father had bought me a pile of new summer dresses. But by the time the dresses arrived home, I had already outgrown them.

“What a
terrible
waste of money,” my mother complained. “Eric, how could you be so reckless? This is why I never buy children’s clothes new.”

My father stood in the dining room, emptied the shipping box, and looked through the dresses, a defeated expression on his face. He had been so excited to see me in them. I’d worn only one blue chiffon dress on the night we’d gone to see
Alice in Wonderland
at the theater.

We all regarded the painting of Julius hanging menacingly over our heads in its heavy gilt frame.

“Would Julius have spanked us?” asked Charlie.

“Would he have
spanked
you? You kids don’t know how good you have it,” my father said wistfully.

Next he led us down the corridor to a heavy wooden door that opened to the Rathskeller, a light-filled welcome room for brewery tour guests arranged with red-and-white checkered tables and decorated with Stroh memorabilia—antique beer trays with the old Stroh’s logo, hurricane lamps, air balloons, and giant, brightly painted toy beer trucks—all with
Stroh’s Beer
decaled in gold. I wanted to touch everything, run the trucks across the floor like my brothers used to do at home, but most of it sat on high shelves well out of reach.

We were the only guests. Everyone who worked in the Rathskeller greeted my father. The bartender, a bald man wearing an apron and leaning against the wooden bar, seemed
especially friendly to my father, like all the bartenders at the clubs my father frequented.

“Well,
hello
, Eric.”

“Hello there, John.”

“You’ve got your brood along with you today.”

“Most of ’em, anyway.”

Whitney, the baby, had stayed home.

“A good-looking lot, they are,” said John.

“Let’s have a drink, kids,” said my father, heading for the bar.

Bobby, Charlie, and I settled at a table and waited quietly. A waitress brought us cheese, crackers, and three Cokes. No one said any more to us, and I began to feel as if the staff in the Rathskeller were waiting for us to leave; they were expecting a tour group “any minute,” I heard John tell my father.

My father came over carrying a pile of T-shirts that said “Stroh a Party!” across the front, and we put them on over our clothes. We sat saying nothing in the too-big T-shirts while my father had another drink. And then, from the factory floor, came the hiss and roar of the flames firing up underneath the copper cauldrons.

Charlie broke into a wide, bucktoothed smile. “Cheers, Franny,” he said, tapping my glass with his. He tossed the Coke back in three quick gulps—a perfect imitation of my father.