First-Draft Follies: Budweiser, Baseball and . . . Communism. Part 1 of 4

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four Welcome to First Draft Follies, an ongoing series here at the blog. 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.

This edition of the Follies concerns Gus Busch and the fallout from his purchase of the St. Louis Cardinals. __________________________________

All told, 1954 was not a particularly good year for Gus Busch, and not just because of his pricing blunder. [He'd raised the prices of his beer; sales plunged.] He spent part of that year wondering if he’d made a mistake investing in baseball, [namely] the St. Louis Cardinals, which he had bought in 1953.

This was a risky move. Baseball attendance nationwide had suffered in recent years, another victim of [the new technology of] television as viewers chose to stay home and watch rather than take themselves out to the ballpark. In theory at any rate, a corporate parent like Anheuser-Busch could suffer empty seats with more patience than other owners: the advertising would reach consumers whether they were sitting in easy chairs at home or hard seats back of the outfield.

Gus Busch scoffed at the notion that he’d bought the team only for its sales-pitch potential, but he and everyone else knew that it wouldn’t hurt to have Anheuser-Busch signs plastered all over the infield and scoreboard. The new owner knew little about baseball but he dived into this new adventure with the same gusto with which he grabbed everything else in life; this was a man, after all, who hated to lose.

"'We hope to make the Cardinals one of the greatest baseball teams of all time,'" he assured St. Louisans and anyone who cared. (*1)

Never mind that Griesedieck Western Brewing (cousins of the Falstaff Griesedieck) owned the radio and TV contract for the 1953 season. Never mind that state laws banned the sale of beer at the ball parks where the Cards’ farm teams played. (Four months later the Texas legislature legalized the sale of beer at that state’s ballparks.)

Minor details, those, and not enough to dampen Gus’s enthusiasm. He even traveled up to Milwaukee in April to enjoy a joint celebration with Fred Miller, whose company had just helped negotiate (and pay for) the purchase of the Boston Braves. Miller had been named to the new Milwaukee Braves board of directors and he hosted a luncheon for city officials, Braves president Lou Perini; Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball; Warren Giles, president of the National Baseball League, and Miller’s good buddy Gus Busch.

A bemused Gus posed for pictures with the group, standing behind the seated Fred and with his hands on Miller’s shoulders, as if to say "Down, boy, down!" In the center of the luncheon table sat a cake decorated with small figures of two baseball players, one in a Cards’ uniform, another dressed as a Brave, foreheads touching, leaning into an imaginary shouting match as a tiny "impassive" umpire stood nearby. (*2)

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Sources: *1: "'Sporting Venture,'" Time 61 (March 2, 1953): 46.

*2: "Welcome Braves to Beer Capital," Modern Brewery Age 49 (May 1953): 14.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 8 of 8

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.

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A different music-and-drugs scene unfolded in and around San Francisco. Since the 1940s, physicians, psychiatrists, and others had been experimenting with the therapeutic possibilities of LSD, but in the 1960s, some northern Californians began investigating the drug as a source of creative work.

In 1961, Myron Stolaroff founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study, where he and others studied on the effects of LSD on volunteer participants. Stolaroff, an engineer and the first employee hired by Alexander Poniatoff (who founded Ampex Electric, a pioneer in the development of electronic recording devices), tested the drug on Douglas Engelbart; Stewart Brand, who later created the Whole Earth Catalog; Bob Sackman, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; and more than three hundred others, including faculty from Stanford and San Francisco State College, physicians, and other middle-class professionals.

The experience filtered through the minds, offices, and designs of the men and women laying the groundwork for the nation’s computerized future. Ken Kesey forged another kind of drug scene. In the early sixties, Kesey participated in university-sponsored experiments with psychoactive and psychedelic drugs. He smuggled LSD out of the lab so he could share it with friends.

His gatherings, first in Palo Alto and then nearby La Honda, attracted other young men and women interested in “alternative” thinking: Jerry Garcia and Allen Ginsberg showed up. So did Neal Cassady, Larry McMurtry, and Hunter S. Thompson (who brought along his buddies, the Hell’s Angels). Hugh Romney, later known as Wavy Gravy, [dropped in] for acid-laced venison stew, but in 1965 he headed south to a mountaintop overlooking the San Fernando Valley where he founded Hog Farm, one of the most important and long-lived of the sixties’ communes.

California’s allure destroyed San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, a longtime hangout for beats, poets, artists, serious young men, celebrities, and drop-outs. In the mid-sixties, an influx of tourists, “topless bars” and kids drove up the area’s rents and “destroyed” its “Bohemian” character. (*20)

One resident complained that North Beach had deteriorated into a bastion of “‘commercialism.’” (*21) He and others shifted their base of operations to Haight-Ashbury, prized for its cheap housing and enlightened mix of lesbians, “marijuana users,” people of “artistic bent”; “‘hippies,’” “‘heads,’” and “beatniks”; “crusaders for all kinds of causes,” and homosexuals, “artistic gentlemen” who took “tremendous pride” in refurbishing the area’s dilapidated real estate. (*22)

[But] one North Beach devotee headed to a different San Francisco neighborhood.

[At which point I finally got where I was headed, namely to Fritz Maytag and the founding of Anchor Brewing. See Chapter Seven of Ambitious Brew.]

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Sources:

*20: Lew Bryson, “Fritz Maytag.” (Lew originally provided me with a paper copy of the interview, but it's now available online.)

*21: “A New Paradise for Beatniks,” San Francisco Examiner, September 5, 1965, p. 5.

*22: “Haight Street Hippies--Are ‘Beats’ Good Business?,” San Francisco Examiner, September 8, 1965, p. 11.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 7

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.

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That Lewis and his lawbreaking students hailed from California was no surprise. The state was epicenter of culinary experimentation, as well as resistance, rebellion, and general weirdness. In 1962, Look magazine described California as a "window into the future," a "laboratory of social and cultural change" where "almost incomprehensible new forces" were "reshaping the lives of men" -- and women. (*17)

Hyperbole matched reality. At Palo Alto and Stanford University, engineers, mathematicians, and scientists explored human intelligence, electronic engineering, and communications, and the relationship among them. Hewitt Crane and Douglas Engelbart, seminal figures in the creation of the computer as we now know it, worked at Stanford Research Institute. John McCarthy, who coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" in the mid-1950s, founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1963.

To the south at Big Sur, Michael Murphy founded the Esalen Institute, a "think tank" that drew such names as Paul Tillich and B. F. Skinner. At the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, psychologist Carl Rogers pondered the nature and potential of "human relations."

The University of California-Los Angeles housed a laboratory where W. Ross Adey and his colleagues used electronic probes to explore the physical brain and the mechanisms of thought.

Other Californians employed less conventional methods to explore life’s meaning. The “freak” scene in Los Angeles, named after the bizarrely clothed dancers who followed The Byrds from performance to performance, congregated around the dance clubs and coffeehouses that lined Sunset Strip: the Whisky A Go Go and Fifth Estate, London Fog, and the Trip.

From there the scene rippled out to Laurel Canyon, where barefoot girls "wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls" and long-haired boys decorated in motley outfits pulled from secondhand stores wandered in and out of the neighborhood’s winding lanes and ramshackle cottages. (*18)

Drugs flowed freely and so did the creative imaginations of Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills, Judy Collins, and other singers and musicians who, "pouring music down the canyon," packaged their stoned sensibility for mainstream America. (*19)

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*17: Special issue on California, Look, 30, no. 13 (June 28, 1966): 30.

*18: Joni Mitchell, "Ladies of the Canyon," Ladies of the Canyon, Reprise Records, 1970. *19: Mitchell, "Ladies of the Canyon."

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 6

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.

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So, too, beer. In 1963, sales of imported beer rose nine percent, a heady gallop compared to domestic sales’ trot of two percent. Choosing an imported beer over a domestic one, opined an advertising manager for Heineken, was like buying a Cadillac instead of a Ford. The decision bespoke sophistication, worldliness, an appreciation for "the finer things." (*14)

"It’s fun," said a man from suburban Los Angeles, "when you have guests in to ask, 'Would you rather have German or Mexican beer?'" (*15) He stocked up at Tony’s Liquors, where thirty-two different imports lined the shelves.

But even those on Ford budgets could enjoy a Cadillac-type brew by making their own at home. Unlike homemade wine, homebrewed beer was illegal, thanks to an oversight written into repeal laws back in the 1930s. That didn’t stop anyone.

Michael Lewis knew that for certain. Lewis, a biochemist in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California-Davis, specialized in brewing yeasts and processes. (*16) He’d joined the faculty in 1964 and immediately suffered an inundation of homebrewing enthusiasts who bombarded him with phone calls and letters, each one wanting to know why his or her beer had gone bad or what kind of yeast to use.

A year of that was quite enough. In 1965, he began teaching homebrewing through the university’s extension program to a mixed lot of students. Some had discovered stouts and ales while traveling or living abroad. Many had begun homebrewing while working for multi-national corporations in Muslim countries where alcohol was not available. Lewis cautioned his students not to sell their beers and to avoid discussing their hobby too openly, just in case.

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*14: "Snob Suds," Newsweek 63 (February 17, 1964): 80.

*15: "Snob Suds," 80.

*16: Michael Lewis interview with Maureen Ogle, May 18, 2005.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 5

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 itinto manageable bits and posting those bits over the next few days.

___________________________________

Where food went, drink followed.

Since the end of prohibition, the nation’s wine had consisted of cheap, generic jug drinks that leaned toward the sweet. That changed during the sixties, in part because of people like Robert Mondavi, a member of an long-established California wine-making family. He first visited Europe in 1962 where he tasted explored vineyards and local vintages and experienced a “revelation” about what wines could be. (*12) In early 1966, Mondavi opened his own winery with the goal of creating excellent but affordable wines and teaching Americans that wine could and should be part of a quality life.

He was not alone. In the second half of the sixties, dozens of small wineries opened in the United States, the first wave of what would become a flood of “boutique” wineries in the 1970s. The revolution in wine also followed another, less conventional route: tens of thousands of Americans--as many as 200,000 by 1969--began making their own wines at home.

Patrick Baker was one of them. Baker, a chemist by trade, fell into the hobby after he planted grapevines as a way to conceal a fence he’d built in his backyard. Grapes. Chemistry. Homemade wine. (*13) At first he ordered supplies from shops in England and from the American agent of a British company located in Minneapolis, but in the late sixties, he began operating a mail order supply business out of his basement.

Stanley Anderson cashed in, too. Anderson, a Canadian, owned Wine-Art Sales, a chain of homebrew supply stores.He licensed his first American shop in 1969. By late 1970, there were thirty Wine-Art stores in the U. S., six of them in California and seven in New York, and the rest scattered more or less randomly from coast to coast: two each in Washington, Oregon, and Iowa, the rest scattered from Colorado and Oklahoma to Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Georgia.

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Sources:

*12: Paul Lukacs, American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 149.

*13: Information about Patrick Baker from interview with Maureen Ogle, March 31, 2005.

First Draft Follies: "Kids," Beer, and the 1960s, Part 4

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.

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But the sixties was more than kids. Most of the decade’s adults had graduated from high school, a fact that distinguished them from earlier generations, and an unprecedented number had also attended college. Television [which first entered homes in large numbers in the early 1950s] was no longer a novelty, and, whatever its flaws and faults, the "boob tube," as critics called it, transformed the planet into a global village and enlarged Americans’ perceptions of the world.

Record numbers of Americans worked in "white collar" information jobs, thanks to an economy based in large part on federally funded research and development in sciences old--physics and chemistry--and new--electronics and computing.

Many of the nation’s best minds worked in research parks, universities, and federal offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Washington, D. C., and Palo Alto, and at installations affiliated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Defense Department. They sent men into space and laid the foundations for the computer age that defined the last quarter of the century.

Travel enlarged Americans’ perspectives. In 1950, fewer than a million citizens traveled outside the United States. In 1960, 1.6 million ventured abroad; by decade’s end more than five million people a year were heading overseas for pleasure, and million more lived abroad as military personnel or as employees of multi-national corporations or the U. S. government.

One of them was Julia Child. She and her husband Paul lived in Europe from 1948 to 1961, when they returned to the United States and Julia published Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She sold thirty thousand copies of the book in just a few months, but her impact widened in early 1963 when [the television program] "The French Chef" debuted in Boston. By late 1964, the program aired in fifty cities coast to coast, and more than one hundred by 1966, evidence that Americans’ rejection of Bland Nation in favor of a more sophisticated palate.

In late 1966, Child’s face graced the cover of Time magazine, and the nine-page essay inside analyzed Americans’ embrace of "high" cuisine. A shop owner in San Diego reported that he stocked three thousands different "fancy foods, from kippered sturgeon and kangaroo tails to pickled rooster combs." (*9)

A grocery store manager in Washington, D. C. explained that just ten years earlier, an average chain store carried perhaps a half dozen kinds of cheeses. Now, he said, smart grocers stocked "at least 50 assorted, high-powered imported cheeses." Residents of small towns could enjoy the new food by joining the "Shallot-of-the-Month" club. (*10)

An array of photographs illustrated the report, most of them showing Americans at work in their kitchens. It’s a measure of the times (and their difference from our own) that the "celebrities" included Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an MIT provost, the wife of an architect, and historian Barbara Tuchman. August Busch III, son of Gussie, was there, too, fixing one of his favorite dishes: "white-winged doves," broiled with butter and served rare. (*11)

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*9: "Everyone’s in the Kitchen," Time (November 25, 1966): 74.

*10: Ibid.

*11: Ibid.