The Prince of Beers Read Online Free

Post-Dispatch headlined, "What's wrong with us? Too hot to say." He speculated that the city had always been doomed because it had been settled by pioneers too lazy to go further west. He was joking, but the fact that the Post-Dispatch mocked its hometown so openly was telling.
    Anheuser-Busch was the best antidote to the city's inferiority complex. It employed thousands of people in jobs prized by both blue- and white-collar workers. The Busches rewarded loyalty and long hours with above-market salaries. But the company's local influence went far beyond its economic impact. People around the world knew The King of Beers, the Clydesdales, the red wagons. Along with the Gateway Arch, the Anheuser-Busch brewery is the city's top tourist attraction. A mile south of downtown, the brewery is an attractive campus of red-brick buildings. It could pass for a retro apartment complex if not for the smell of roasted malt that hangs deliciously in the air. Hundreds of thousands of people visit each year to see the Clydesdales, walk past the giant fermenting tanks and bottling lines, and sample a beer or two.
    Of course, other cities have their own hometown champions, some larger than A-B. Atlanta will always be known for Coke, Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble. But Anheuser-Busch was a family as well as a company. The Busches played a unique role in St. Louis. The city and its suburbs have long suffered from an identity crisis. Geographically, St. Louis is located at the boundary of the Midwest and the South. But it's still only a two-hour flight from New York. It has an excellent private university, Washington U. Some of its wealthier citizens fancy themselves as transplanted Boston Brahmins, sending their children to Ivy League schools, summering on Cape Cod.
    Not the Busches. They had no interest in the East Coast's effete pleasures. They faced south and west. They hunted ducks at a Missouri farm known as the Shooting Grounds and bigger game at a ranch maintained by Anheuser-Busch in Montana. They loved NASCAR and nitro-fueled drag racers. On summer weekends, they flew their helicopters and planes to the Lake of the Ozarks, the drinkin', fishin', and misbehavin' capital of the red states. They had messy divorces and nephews older than their uncles. Their genealogy looked like the Saudi royal family tree, with Adolphus Busch playing King Abdul-Aziz. Gussie, who ran A-B from 1946 to 1975, was a profane, skirt-chasing tyrant with eleven children by four wives. As one of those fancier Missourians told me, the Busches were Appalachia with a few billion dollars.
    The family's messes might not have played in the leafy, wealthy precincts around Forest Park, but lots of folks in St. Louis didn't mind a bit. If anything, the problems humanized the Busches. Gussie in particular had been adored — someone told me that his unofficial title had been "King of the Peasants." Further, while the Busches weren't quick to give away their own fortunes, the brewery's corporate largesse was legendary. St. Louis churches, charities, and civic groups all counted on A-B.
    The ultimate example of the relationship between company and town is a zoo called Grant's Farm, which Anheuser-Busch operates on a Busch family-owned estate in the western St. Louis suburbs. Aside from a $12 per vehicle parking charge, the zoo is free — the best bargain in town. Like the brewery, Grant's Farm even offers free beer. To make sure that everyone understands who's responsible, signs around Grant's Farm — even now — feature the slogan, "From our family to yours."

* * *
    Sep. 27, 2006.
    The day had finally come. All those years shaking hands with distributors, giving speeches at wholesaler conventions. All those years learning the business so he didn't sound like an idiot when the Wall Street guys asked their questions. He'd even gotten married. They'd all wanted him to get married, prove that he'd put his partying days behind. He'd never been able to pull the trigger. In 1990,