First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 3

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

______________________________________

So began the 1960s, perhaps the greatest confluence of education, affluence, information, and experience in the nation’s history. The decade crackled with the energy of millions of young Americans bent on leaving their mark.

A few weeks after the Fort Lauderdale riot, a small group of black and white men and women, mostly college students, boarded a bus in Washington, D. C. and set off on a near-fatal journey to the deep south to register black voters. Their buses were attacked and burned. One freedom rider was set on fire. Most were beaten and many jailed. The freedom riders’ paths had been paved a year earlier when hundreds of men and women, black and white and mostly young, staged sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, wade-ins at segregated beaches and swimming pools, and pray-ins and study-ins at segregated churches and libraries.

In the spring of ‘62, several dozen students gathered at a camp on the shore of Lake Huron in eastern Michigan and drafted a political statement that they hoped would change, if not the world, at least the United States.

"We are people of this generation," the statement began, "bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world . . . Many of us began maturing in complacency. As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss."

The Port Huron Statement went on to condemn American foreign policy, racism, McCarthyism, capitalism, automation, colonialism, and the military-industrial complex -- and inspired dozens of anti-war, anti-nuclear marches.

Beer inspired marches of another kind during the Fourth of July weekend in 1965. Police and National Guard troops battled thousands of (mostly drunk) young rioters in Ohio, New York, and Iowa. At Arnolds Park, Iowa, one of that state’s most popular summer resorts, five hundred pro-party agitators, "some too drunk to stand up," took to the streets after the bars closed at one a. m.. (*6)

"Hey, punk, we’re going to take over this place," someone yelled, and the chase was on. Revelers threw bottles, chunks of concrete, and anything else they could lay hands on, as police fought back with fire hoses and tear gas. (*7)

From Greenwich Village to Hibbing, Minnesota; from Chicago to Denver and beyond, kids flocked to coffee shops to hear guitar-strumming "folk singers." On the music charts, shoo-bop and doo-wop gave way to youthful angst in the form of "The Sound of Silence” (“Hello darkness my old friend”) and “Eve of Destruction” ("You’re old enough to kill but not for votin'").

Some kids joined communes and organized an alternative America. At Drop City in southern Colorado, the inhabitants built geodesic domes out of scrap material and new lives out of their imaginations. Drop City, said one founders, "was full of vitality . . . ." She and her fellow droppers "had the sense that anything was possible, that the potential was unlimited." (*8)

__________________________

SOURCES:

*6: "650 Youths Seized as Resort Melees Erupt in 4 States," New York Times, July 5, 1965, 1.

*7: Ibid.

*8: Quoted in Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 33.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 2

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

___________________________________

On Sunday night, March 26, the dam of youthful resentment burst. As twilight dissolved into darkness, a gang of boys stumbled out of the Elbo Room and disappointed, perhaps, at not finding Yvette Mimieux and Connie Francis where the boys were, rocked a car and overturned it. Someone tossed firecrackers into the crowd.

The commotion attracted more kids. Auto traffic came to a standstill as people lay down in the street, threw rocks, shouted insults at the cops, and chanted "We want beer. We want beer." (*3)

The crowd had become a mob of ten thousand by the time the sheriff’s department, the highway patrol, and police from seven towns converged on the scene. They and arrested forty-four kids and eventually subdued the beast.

But not for long. Monday night, the mob reappeared. "What do they expect us to do?" shrugged one student. "We . . . didn’t come here to sit in the hotel room and play bridge." (*4) That night the police arrested more than two hundred kids, among them 22-year-old George Dalluge, a senior at Mankato State in Minnesota. George was to have graduated in May, but that plan fell by the wayside after he shinnied up a street light and led the crowd in a stirring rendition of the national anthem and "Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley."

His display of athleticism (he was a physical education major) landed him seventy days in the Fort Lauderdale jail; he would be there when his classmates back in Mankato marched across a stage to pick up their diplomas. "'I was stupid,'" Dalluge conceded after the fact. (*5)

The first wave of legal-aged "war babies" had arrived. News to warm the hearts of beer barons everywhere, especially because the Fort Lauderdale rowdies, most of them born in the early forties, represented but the first surge of a larger tsunami: the millions of post-war babies who had pushed the nation’s birth rate to historic high levels.

Still, the Fort Lauderdale riots left the barons scratching their heads in puzzlement. What was it with these kids? Rioting over beach bans and beer? Throwing bottles at the police? What kind of sense did that make? And their attire! Girls wearing what amounted to underwear in public. Boys dressed only in shorts and loafers, no socks, no shirts. Youthful pranks were one thing, but this was outright rebellion.

__________________________________

Sources:

*3: "'All We Want Is Jade Beach,'" Miami Herald, March 28, 1961, street edition, 1-B.

*4: Ibid.

*5: "'It Was Stupid Thing,' Says Student in Jail," Miami Herald, March 29, 1961, p. 1.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 1

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Part Five --- Part Six --- Part Seven --- Part Eight 

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition is a true folly and a prime example of why my first drafts are so damn long: I research what is intended to be a minor point, become fascinated by this minor point, and next thing I know, I've written an embarrassing amount of completely extraneous text.

The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. The excerpt is long, so I'm breaking it into manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

The time is the early 1960s.

__________________________________________

There had been trouble off and on all week: one kid threw rocks through the windows of a beach shop. A group of rowdies yanked a palm out of its pot and tossed it into the swimming pool at a "swank hotel." Some guys snatched five swimsuits off a clothes line rigged up by Ohio State coeds staying at a motel on Federal Highway. (*1) "Collegiate pranks" were par for the course in late March at Fort Lauderdale, a mecca for college students during spring break. (*2)

But this year, 1961, the city’s police force found the pranks to be a bit more destructive than normal, and the students more numerous than expected.

But whose fault was that? The cops should have known that this year’s horde would be huge, thanks to "Where the Boys Are," a hit movie that premiered in late 1960 and was still running in theaters when spring break rolled around in March. The film, which starred George Hamilton, Yvette Mimieux, and Connie Francis, told the story of four coeds on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, and the romances, broken hearts, tragedy, and happy ending that unfolded at the Elbo Room, on Atlantic Boulevard, and of course, on the beach.

Anyone in his or her right mind should have realized that the movie would bring the kids. And it had. Thousands jammed the sidewalks and spilled out into "Function Junction," the intersection of Atlantic and Las Olas, where boys, who outnumbered girls by about five to one, hopped into female-filled convertibles trolling the scene.

It was as if a collection of aliens had united for a grand convention and were, like conventioneers everywhere, hellbent on having fun.

Back home, they passed as clones of Wally Cleaver or Betty and Bud Anderson, polite youths who wore saddle shoes and letter jackets or dresses plumped full by petticoats. So disguised, they endured a humdrum existence surrounded by eye-rollingly dull old fogies who didn’t understand them. The aliens communed at night when they tuned their radios to the local music station, seeking each other and the solace of rock and roll.

That was home. This was Florida, where they shrugged off the shackles of teachers and parents and frolicked in the company of their own kind. Cast off their dull but necessary disguises and reveled in their natural state of Bermuda shorts, skimpy swimsuits, and sunburned noses.

By day, kids sprawled and crawled the beaches, the boys eying the girls in their bikinis, the girls taking their pick of boys in loafers and plaid shorts. By night, they packed the Elbo Room or twisted hip-to-hip at the Student Prince and Omar’s Tent.

The only flaw in this Camelot-by-the-Sea was that the city father shut the beaches at sunset and banned beer there day or night.

____________________________

*1: "Pranks Replace Beach Parties: Collegiate Night-Owls 'Hooting,'" Miami Herald, March 23, 1961, 2-B.

*2: Ibid.

First Draft Follies: Mendocino Brewing, 1982-1983

Newsflash: pot farmers are a mainstay of Mendocino County, California.

Except it's not news to me. In the 1960s, the region attracted back-to-the-landers, many of whom are still devoted to transforming counterculture into mainstream culture.

But the news report inspires this edition of First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. This edition recounts of the founding of Mendocino Brewing.

As always, the material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. This excerpt from the first draft picks up just as Jack McAuliffe has closed New Albion, the nation's first brewpub.

(Tip o' the mug to David Fahey at the Alcohol & Drugs History Society's Daily Register for the link to the pot farming article.)

________________________________________________

The [Jack] McAuliffe/[Ken] Grossman model [of using scrap material to build microbreweries] inspired most of the first craft brewers, but in the early eighties, two other entrepreneurial structures emerged as well. (*1)

Michael Laybourn and Norman Franks pioneered the combination of craft brewing and American-style pub. Like other craft brewers, the pair practiced homebrewing, and like so many others, dreamed of earning a living making beer. They visited New Albion, talked to McAuliffe, tasted his beer, and left inspired by McAuliffe’s advice and encouragement. They also listened when McAuliffe warned them of the Catch-22, and Laybourn and Franks understood that the retail side of brewing posed more dangers than anything that might infect the brewvat’s contents.

They shaped their own plans accordingly, using the new California law that permitted brewers to retail their beer on site. The trio envisioned a brewery with an attached tavern and garden where people could drink quality beer and enjoy life in general and the California lifestyle in particular.

The location, Hopland, California, about sixty miles north of Sonoma in Mendocino County, proved an inspired choice to build the brewery. Mendocino County was populated by a mix of ranching families who raised cattle and horses, winemakers, and “lots of hippies,” courtesy of a “tremendous migration of back-to-the-landers.” (*2)

The once thriving hops industry had all but vanished in the two decades after World War II, but in recent years, Fetzer Winery had established operations in the county, including a wine tasting room in the old high school in Hopland. T

he town itself was tiny--just a few hundred people--but it sat on Highway 101, the ribbon of road that runs from Los Angeles north to the Oregon border. Every day, twelve to thirteen thousand cars zoomed past.

The perfect location for a place where wine afficianados and tourists, hippies and ranchers, farmers and winemakers could gather to eat and drink, listen to music and dance. A new generation’s version of the pleasure gardens owned by the German émigrés of yesteryear.

Laybourn and Franks wrote a prospectus and shopped the idea in and around the area. Laybourn knew a few people and they introduced him to more: A veterinarian, some doctors, farmers with century-old roots in the area and “money buried in [their] backyards.” Don Barkley’s parents invested. (*3)

The partners, a trio once John Scahill joined the venture, leased a hundred-year-old structure that fronted the highway. A century earlier, the building housed the Hop Vine Saloon, then a butcher shop, and, at the time Fetzer leased it to the partners, an antiques store. They built the brewery out back, choosing a design modeled after a hop kiln.

By that time, New Albion had failed. The Mendocino partners, who had no illusions about their brewing skills, bought McAuliffe’s equipment and hired Jack and Don to operate the brewery.

Mendocino Brewing’s beer traced its ancestry to McAuliffe’s hearty ale and to the “Thunder Beer” that Laybourn and Franks used to brew for their friends. As for the name, the owners wanted something that paid homage to the time and place. They settled on Red Tail Ale, in part because ofhe beer was “sort of reddish” in color. (*4) But the main inspiration came from a song much loved by northern Californians, “The Redtail Hawk,” a simple hymn to the “golden rolling hills” of California, where the redtail hawk “writes songs across the sky.” (*5)

The peregrine falcon, a more “delicate bird,” served as namesake for their second beer, a “golden, delicate ale.” (*6) An image of a black hawk adorned bottles of the brewery’s stout, and Blue Heron, a hoppy spring beer, honored a nearby preserve for that bird.

The labels, vivid ovals of color and life, depicted their respective creatures with wings spread in triumphant salute. The “joint was packed” when Laybourn and the others opened to the public on August 14, 1983. (*7) California’s first brewpub was in business. A new heart for an old community. A beer garden and brewhouse such as to warm the heart of Phillip and Jacob Best. (*8)

______________________

Sources: *1: Jack McAulliffe is credited with founding the nation's first microbrewery. The most substantive account of that event is in Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.

*2: Don Barkley interview with Maureen Ogle, May 8, 2005.

*3: Barkley interview

*4: Daniel Bradford, “Mendocino’s Hopland Brewery,” New Brewer 4, no. 1 (January-February 1987): 21.

*5: “The Redtail Hawk,” music and lyrics by George Schroder, XXXX.

*6: Daniel Bradford, “Mendocino’s Hopland Brewery,” New Brewer 4, no. 1 (January-February 1987): 21.

*7: Ibid., 22.

*8: The Best brothers founded a Milwaukee brewery in 1844; it eventually became Pabst Brewing Co.

First Draft Follies: The "Dry" Assault On American Brewers, 1916. Part 3 of 3

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. All of the previous entries are available by clicking on "First Draft Follies" in the index. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. Whenever the excerpt is long, I've broken it down into several "parts."

This edition concerns the early twentieth century prohibition movement, which eventually produced the 18th Amendment and constitutional Prohibition.

__________________________________

Over the next few weeks, lawyers on both sides wore out themselves and two judges niggling over details and squabbling over motions to quash. Procedural minutia filled newspaper column after newspaper column, but the public was more interested in the activity out in the corridors.

James P. Mulvihill, the chubby, mustachioed vice-president of one of the state’s largest breweries and “reputed leader” of the state’s “liquor forces,” eluded subpoena-bearing marshals for nine days before surrendering to Humes. He’d been out of town, he explained, and unaware--so he said--that marshals had been tracking him all over eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey. (*11)

Mulvihill arrived at the federal building just in time for “the climax of a day of many thrills” that included Hugh Fox’s arrest and his march to the county jail. (*12) Fox had refused the grand jury’s request for the USBA’s records and receipts. There were none to give, he explained; he and his staff destroyed their files monthly. The jury rejected his explanation; the judge pronounced him in contempt; and Fox landed in lock-up.

A few days later, Mulvihill provided a thrill of his own when he “intercepted” a government witness. Seventeen-year-old Katherine Gallagher, a stenographer employed by the Pennsylvania Brewers’ Association, had boarded a train in Philadelphia, subpoena in hand, father by her side, and headed west for her grand jury appearance. (*13)

When the train stopped at East Liberty, a suburban hamlet and station just outside Pittsburgh, Mulvihill hopped aboard and whisked the Gallaghers into a waiting car, stopping for breakfast before depositing father and daughter in the office of George Shaw, one of the brewers’ attorneys.

Mr. Gallagher told reporters that Mulvihill’s appearance took them by surprise. “We expected to go on into Pittsburgh,” he said, where a man from Humes’s office was to meet them at the station. But just outside the city, he explained, Mulvihill “dragged us off . . . to have breakfast with him. In the excitement I left my umbrella behind but it’s all right, I know, because I saw the conductor of the Pullman here this afternoon and he told me where it was.”

The conductor was on hand to reassure Mr. Gallagher about his rain gear because Humes had wasted no time subpoenaing both him and the porter who tended the Gallaghers’ rail car. Poor Katherine entered the jury room not sure what to expect, and left ninety minutes later in tears, clutching her father’s arm, her face buried against his back in an effort to “dodge newspaper photographers.”

The next day, Humes issued a dozen more subpoenas and announced that his agents had located the USBA’s hidden files, fifty-five filing drawers worth, all of them marked “confidential,” and all of them, Humes hoped (as, no doubt, did the ASL), chock-full of sensational evidence against the beermakers.

The affair spiraled downhill from there. On March 3, 1916, the grand jury indicted the USBA and seventy-three breweries on a 101 counts of violating the federal corrupt practices act. The throng of would-be jailbirds realized it was time to end a public feeding frenzy that only strengthened the prohibitionists’ cause. A few weeks later, all parties pleaded nolo contendere and paid fines totaling $100,000, about $1.7 million today.

__________________________________

Sources:

*11: “Hugh F. Fox Committed for Refusing to Show Books of Association,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, February 24, 1916, p. 1.

*12: Ibid.

*13: Remaining quotes are from “Government Witness is Intercepted,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, February 26, 1916, p. 2.

First Draft Follies: The "Dry" Assault On American Brewers, 1916. Part 2

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three

Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. All of the previous entries are available by clicking on "First Draft Follies" in the index. The material is presented "as is" from the first draft of the manuscript that became the book Ambitious Brew. In a few places I added one or two words in brackets -- [like this] -- for clarification. Whenever the excerpt is long, I've broken it down into several "parts."

This edition concerns the early twentieth century prohibition movement, which eventually produced the 18th Amendment and constitutional Prohibition.

______________________________________________________

On February 3, E. Lowry Humes, a United States District Attorney assigned to the Western District of Pennsylvania, issued eight subpoenas to officers of the United States Brewers Association (USBA), the Pennsylvania Brewers’ Association, and the Western Pennsylvania Brewers’ Association. The documents requested the men’s presence at a grand jury that would convene the following Monday to investigate possible violations of corporate tax law and the federal corrupt practices act.

Behind the subpoenas lay revenge. Humes hailed from a long line of Democratic politicians. Before coming to the D. A.’s office, he had served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. There he “brushed up against” and developed a loathing for the “great lobby” operated by the state’s brewers on behalf of the state’s Republicans. (*4) Loathing turned to hatred in 1914, when A. Mitchell Palmer, Pennsylvania Democrats’ party boss and a member of Congress, ran for Senate, a move intended to place him one step closer to the White House.

Palmer marched into the contest dressed in the armor of a corruption-fighting progressive. His opponent, Boies Penrose, limped into the ring burdened with a stinking train of bribes, graft, and election fraud.

Palmer should have won. He did not. Lowry Humes, who hoped to ride Palmer’s coattails to Washington, blamed the defeat on one factor: brewers who had “dumped a large sum of money” into the campaign. (*5)

Now District Attorney Humes (an appointment arranged by Palmer) planned to discredit, demolish, and destroy his enemy, and the public was in for a treat: A courtroom battle between good and evil, with the men in white armed with artillery “of a most sensational nature.” (*6)

Humes himself refused to say much. “I never try cases out of court or in the newspapers,” he sniffed.

So he said. In fact, Humes wanted Pennsylvanians to supply his office with ammunition and his minions leaked several columns worth of newsprint before the jury opened its first session. (*7)

The publicity paid off. Concerned citizens deluged Humes’s office with stacks of letter--some signed, some not--“containing enlightening facts about liquor money in politics.” The D. A. shared a typical example with reporters: a signed missive whose author “offered to prove” that local brewers had spent twenty-five dollars on “every election . . . in the county.” (*8)

Truth be told, the effluence of altruism represented an organized effort on the part of Pennsylvania’s prohibitionists. An unnamed member of the ASL explained that he and his comrades possessed an “‘abundance of interesting information on this subject,’” including evidence that Pennsylvania brewers “‘dominated’” state politics, provided “‘financial support’” to candidates, and in some cases even “‘named’” the winners in many elections. (*9)

Knew in other words, that brewers had been engaged in the same “pressure politics” for which the Anti-Saloon League was famous. (*10)

Ah, but in Pennsylvania, as in Texas, the difference between the brewers and the ASL boiled down to a legal technicality: the brewers, whether as owners of breweries or as members of trade associations, acted through the vehicle of an incorporated body. The ASL had never incorporated at either the national or state level, and was free to engage in as much electioneering and blackmail as it pleased.

___________________________________________

Sources:

*4: “How Keller Aided Liquor Interests,” Indianapolis News, May 24, 1917, p. 1.

*5: “How Keller Aided Liquor Interests,” Indianapolis News, May 24, 1917, p. 20.

*6: “Humes to Call Big Politicians in Liquor Probe,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, February 5, 1916, p. 2.

*7: Ibid.

*8: “Citizens Give Evidence in Brewery Case,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, February 8, 1916, p. 1.

*9: “Brewers Owe U. S. Millions, Is Reported,” Pittsburgh Gazette Times, February 7, 1916, p. 7.

*10: Peter H. Odegard, Pressure Politics: The Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928).