Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer Part 8

He threw the meeting open to questions, but none were asked, except by the reporters, who queried the players about their reaction to the boss's comments as the boss looked on. "This is just another example of the first cla.s.s way this club operates," gushed second baseman Dal Maxville. "I bet there's not another club where the president and vice president would take so much time to talk to players, letting them know in the best possible way what the score is, without ruffling any feathers." Team captain Curt Flood's response was less complimentary. "It was something that helped clear the air," he said. Then, in a subtle dig at Gussie, he added that he agreed it was important "not to lose sight of who really pays your salary, and your pension-namely, the fan."

Privately, Flood was seething; he believed most of Gussie's comments were aimed directly at him, the result of their testy off-season contract negotiations. After Flood hit .301 in 1968, won his sixth straight Gold Glove award and was named "Best Centerfielder in Baseball" by Sports Ill.u.s.trated magazine, Gussie offered him a raise of $5,000-from $72,500 to $77,500. Offended, Flood turned him down and held out for $90,000, which, he said, "is not $77,500 and is not $89,999." He suspected Gussie was punishing him for his costly error in the World Series.

Gussie ultimately gave in on the ninety grand, but held on to a grudge over Flood's comment, which he considered disrespectful. After all, he reasoned, he had championed the young man from the moment he first arrived in St. Louis in 1957, believed in him even when his manager and coaches didn't, insisting that they place him in the starting lineup, the only time he'd done that for a player. Flood didn't know it, but shortly after he joined the team, d.i.c.k Meyer had received a complaint about him from restaurateur Julius "Biggie" Garagnani, who was partnered with Stan Musial in one of St. Louis's most popular steak houses, Stan Musial and Biggie's.

Upset that the then-twenty-year-old ballplayer had shown up at his restaurant with a date, hoping to celebrate his signing with the team, Garagnani had refused to serve him and, in his complaint to the Cardinals front office, referred to Flood as a "fresh n.i.g.g.e.r" for even thinking it was a possibility. Gussie and Meyer ignored Garagnani's bigotry and focused instead on Flood's reaction to the incident. The young man had not said a word about it-neither to the Cardinals' management, to his teammates, including Musial, nor, more importantly, to the press. He had kept his mouth shut and played ball. Gussie respected him for that, at least until eleven years later, when he opened his mouth about his pay.

Flood wasn't the only veteran in the clubhouse that thought Gussie's spring training talk was patronizing and demeaning. But the reporters present apparently didn't pick up on the undercurrent and dutifully delivered the positive coverage Al Fleishman had promised his client: "Birds' Players Get Message, Applaud Busch," chirped the headline in the next day's St. Louis Globe-Democrat. "What Mr. Busch said was great, was thoughtful, had to be said, and should have been said by baseball executives long ago," said Globe-Democrat sportswriter Bob Burnes, calling Gussie "a remarkable man" who was "speaking up for the fans."

It turned out that the '69 Cardinals were not the team they were in 1968. The high point of the season might have been on opening day, when Harry Caray triumphantly returned to Busch Stadium, first hobbling onto the field with the aid of two canes, then dramatically flinging the canes aside and walking straight and tall as if he'd been struck by a miracle bolt of lightning from above. The crowd went wild.

It was downhill from there, however, with the Cardinals losing their first five games on the way to a dismal fourth-place finish in the Eastern Division. Gussie's reaction was swift and terrible. On the morning of October 7, Curt Flood got a phone call from a low-level executive in the Cardinals front office, telling him he had been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. The next day, Anheuser-Busch announced it was not renewing Harry Caray's contract as the Cardinals' announcer. The actions belied all the talk about Gussie speaking up for Cardinal fans, who surely would have voted to keep Caray and Flood in their jobs.

Neither man went quietly. At an October 9 press conference to answer questions about his sudden ouster after a quarter century with the team, Caray drank dramatically from a sixteen-ounce can of Schlitz and disputed the company's a.s.sertion that he was let go on the recommendation of the marketing department. "That's a lot of c.r.a.p," he said. "n.o.body's a better beer salesman than me. No, I gotta believe the real reason was that somebody believed the rumor that I was involved with young Busch's wife."

Curt Flood was shocked that Gussie had traded him. Over the years, he'd become close with Gussie and Trudy, or so he thought. An oil portrait he'd painted of Gussie-wearing his jaunty yacht captain's hat-hung in a stateroom on the A & Eagle. Flood's portraits of the seven younger Busch children were displayed prominently in the big house at Grant's Farm. (Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst had a Flood portrait of himself hanging above the mantel in his living room.) Flood had come to believe-as had Harry Caray-that he was part of a greater Redbirds-Budweiser-Busch family. And indeed they both were, but they were also, at the end of the day, Gussie's employees. And in his view, that made all the difference.

Flood didn't let it go, however. Refusing to report to Philadelphia, he challenged Gussie's right to trade him in a letter to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the opening line of which served as his own emanc.i.p.ation proclamation:

Dear Mr. Kuhn:

After 12 years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.

He followed with a $4 million federal lawsuit seeking to have major league baseball's so-called reserve clause declared unconst.i.tutional.* Gussie was not named in the suit, but Flood dealt his former patron a stinging rebuke when ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell said to him in a nationally televised interview, "What's wrong with a guy making $90,000 a year being traded from one team to another? Those aren't exactly slave wages." Flood's response remains one of the most memorable quotes in the annals of both baseball and American labor: "A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave."

There is no record of Gussie's reaction to what must have seemed to him an unforgivable slur. But there's anecdotal evidence to suggest that the travails of 1969 took a toll on him emotionally. At Belleau Farm that fall, sixteen-year-old Adolphus Busch IV was awakened one night when his father came into his room in a state of agitation. "He had tears in his eyes," Adolphus recalled later. "He said he'd had a bad dream and he didn't know what was going to happen. Something had occurred that made him question whether he should stay on as CEO of the company or retire." Adolphus got up and talked to Gussie for a while, but his father could not articulate what happened in the dream that had shaken him so.

"It was a shock to me because Dad was always tough and sure of himself," Adolphus said. "I had never seen him like that before-in tears, vulnerable, doubtful."

8

GUSSIE'S LAST STAND

Thanks to the strike, Anheuser-Busch fell well short of August's 21-million-barrel prediction for 1969. But even with the five-week work stoppage, the company managed a record 18.7 million barrels. And ten months later, August stood in the racking room on Pestalozzi Street, smiling as he watched his father bung the year's twenty millionth barrel.

As Gussie proudly pointed out in his annual letter to shareholders, it had taken 118 years to reach the 10 million mark, and only six to more than double it. He didn't say so, but the stunning growth was a testament to the "preactive" management of August and the corporate planning department. Without the Houston, Columbus, and Jacksonville plants, A-B could not have hit that number, much less the 22.3 million barrels it wound up producing that year, a 19 percent increase over 1969.

The beer business as a whole did well in 1970. America's brewers produced a total of 122 million barrels, as per capita consumption reached 18.7 gallons, the highest level since before Prohibition. According to the National Beer Wholesalers a.s.sociation, however, 50 percent of the output flowed from the five largest companies-Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Pabst, Coors, and Schaefer-further proof that the future of the industry was going to be determined by a battle among a few superpowers. Smaller local and regional breweries were dying off, unable to compete with the national distributors and their big advertising budgets. Of the more than 700 breweries that were operating in the years immediately following Prohibition, only 157 remained. In two more years, there would be only 65.

A-B continued to widen its lead over No. 2 Schlitz in terms of barrelage, but industry experts noted that Schlitz was beginning to close the gap in two other important categories-production capacity and profitability. Schlitz was building new plants, too, and they were twice the size of A-B's plants, capable of producing four million barrels a year to A-B's two million. And Schlitz's new plants were employing a new brewing method the company called "agitated-batch fermentation." It involved adding artificial carbonation to the traditional brewing mix of barley malt, grain, and hops to speed up fermentation, thereby reducing the time it took to brew a batch of beer. Schlitz started calling its process "accelerated" batch fermentation, which sounded better than "agitated." Whatever it was called, ABF allowed Schlitz to cut its twenty-five-day brewing time to fifteen days-compared to Anheuser-Busch's forty-day brewing process for Budweiser.

At the same time, Schlitz was quietly beginning to cut the cost of its goods by partially replacing barley malt with corn syrup and by subst.i.tuting cheaper hops extract and hops pellets for fresh hops. As a result of all the changes, Schlitz was producing its beer far more cheaply than A-B.

The man driving the changes at Schlitz was its CEO and chairman, Robert A. Uihlein (p.r.o.nounced Ee-line) Jr., the scion of a hundred-year-old German-American brewing dynasty with a history almost as colorful as that of the Busch family. The Uihleins traced their stewardship of the company back to August Krug, who came to America from Bavaria in 1848 and established a namesake brewery in Milwaukee. After Krug died without heirs in 1856, his widow Anna Marie (nee Uihlein) married the brewery's bookkeeper, Joseph Schlitz, who changed the company name to his own and ran it until he perished in a shipwreck in 1875. Schlitz, too, died without an heir, so the brewery pa.s.sed into the hands of his closest relatives, stepnephews Alfred, August, Charles, and Edward Uihlein.

By the 1970s, the Uihlein family was one of the richest in America. Its members owned 82 percent of Schlitz stock and held fourteen of the seventeen seats on the company's board of directors. Robert Uihlein, August's grandson, had run the company for ten years, and during that time he and Gussie had become good friends. "Bobby" and his wife, Lorry, regularly joined Gussie and Trudy for weekends of duck hunting at Belleau Farm. Their son Jamie and Adolphus IV were pals; the boys even pledged the same fraternity at the University of Denver (the brothers of Phi Kappa Sigma thought they'd died and gone to beer heaven). So the traditional rivalry between Schlitz and Anheuser-Busch, while at times intense, had always been friendly and respectful. But that was about to change.

Gussie was becoming increasingly crotchety, and more and more, the focus of his irritation was August's corporate planning department, or "the MBAs," as they came to be called around the executive office building. It was part of the MBAs' jobs to question things, but some of their questions infuriated Gussie. Are the Clydesdales necessary? Do the beech wood chips in the Budweiser aging process really affect the taste? Does taste even matter to the average beer drinker?

"The old man started to see [the department] as a threat," said Denny Long. "He didn't want the company to be reorganized and modernized to a point where August was more comfortable but he wasn't. Weinberg would show him some computer model of something, and he couldn't follow it. He thought August was either trying to make him look foolish or push him out."

Gussie responded predictably. The week before the company's annual sales convention in St. Louis, "I was called into d.i.c.k Meyer's office and told that my services were no longer required," Weinberg recalled. "August felt compelled to accompany me to my home when I told my wife that I'd been fired."

Gussie also ordered Denny Long-in August's presence-to "go down there and get rid of that whole d.a.m.n department." That provoked a loud argument between father and son behind closed doors in Gussie's office. After the shouting stopped, August walked into Long's office and stood staring out the window. His father had just demanded his letter of resignation, he said, turning from the window to face an astonished Long with tears in his eyes.

That night, Long and August's best friend, John Krey, drove out to Waldmeister Farm and begged him to give up his fight to reorganize the company for now and work things out with his dad. It wasn't the right time, they told him. Gussie was still too powerful. Think of another way. Wait for another chance.

August took their advice, and instead of tendering his resignation he wrote a conciliatory letter to his father that played up family ties and loyalty. In so doing, he managed to save not only his own job but most of the MBAs' as well. Only a few of the weaker staffers were let go, and Weinberg continued advising August on a consulting basis. Gussie seemed mollified by the sacrifice of Weinberg, boasting in an interview with Forbes magazine that he "recently cracked down on a computer expert" and had "slashed his million-dollar staff."

"When you try to run a company on a computer basis, I have to tell you no," he said. "Beer is a people business."

According to the magazine, when asked if August would succeed him, Gussie replied, "Not necessarily. I hope he can make it. I made it very clear that nothing would please me more than if he took over when I died. But he has to measure up and do the job."

There it was, as clear as he could make it: he intended to hold on to the reins of power until he dropped dead in the driver's seat.

And then came a backhanded, belittling compliment to the kid: "He is a grand, bright lad and he works very, very hard."

Gussie wasn't done yet. Several days after the Forbes interview, he announced at the annual A-B shareholders meeting in St. Louis that he was recommending to the board of directors that fifty-four-year-old d.i.c.k Meyer be promoted to president of the company. He said that he would remain chairman, and, oh yes, he also was recommending August for Meyer's job as executive vice president.

The announcement was nothing less than a public spanking. And it was all the more shocking because it marked the first time in A-B's history that someone outside the family was named president. The financial press jumped on the story, saying Gussie was "teaching his chilly, tough-minded son some humility," and that "growing speculation" favored Meyer to eventually succeed him in the top job.

August's reaction was stoic. If he felt humiliated, he didn't let on; he went about the business of the brewery as if nothing had happened. He did, however, ask Denny Long to start researching how boards of directors were const.i.tuted and elected, and how they governed in the modern business environment, as opposed to that of Anheuser-Busch, where they both had spent their entire professional lives.

Gussie soon was caught up in the hoopla surrounding the Memorial Day grand opening of the company's third brewery-adjacent theme park. Busch Gardens Houston was a $12 million, forty-acre Asian wildlife extravaganza that featured a monkey island, an elephant compound, a deer park, a Bengal tiger temple, a rhinoceros enclosure, a petting zoo, a free-flight bird cage where visitors could stroll among a hundred species of exotic birds, a miniature turn-of-the-century railroad called the Orient Express, and a canopied boat ride through the "Ceylon Channel." There was also an incongruous refrigerated geodesic dome called "The Ice Cave" that housed polar bears, penguins, and sea lions. Apparently, Gussie couldn't restrain himself. The company predicted that the Houston facility would draw between 700,000 and 800,000 paying visitors ($2.25 for adults, $1.25 for children) during the first year.

August made a public break with his father in November 1971, when he officially came out as a Republican. Appearing at a $500-a-plate fundraising dinner at the Greenbriar Country Club, he said he supported the GOP because he was "concerned about the success of this country over the next 10 years. I'm concerned about the will to do a day's work for a day's pay, which we've lost sight of. That's what made this country great, wasn't it?"

When a cheeky reporter asked him if his father knew where he was, August smiled and replied, "We have a great philosophy in our company: Everyone is encouraged to express his individual views."

Gussie's views had not changed since Prohibition-he remained a dyed-in-the-wool FDR Democrat. "I don't bite the hand that fed me," he liked to say. He was a close friend of former president Lyndon Johnson, who'd been aboard his yacht on more than one occasion, and he'd entertained Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, at Grant's Farm when Humphrey ran against Richard Nixon in 1968. There was one Democrat he couldn't abide, however: Bobby Kennedy. His animus stemmed from a meeting the two had while Bobby was serving as his brother John's attorney general in the early 1960s. According to the story Gussie told among friends and family, when he was escorted into the AG's office, "that arrogant little p.r.i.c.k" didn't even stand up to greet him, but rather remained seated, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk. Gussie took that as a sign of disrespect that bordered on contempt, and he never forgot it. When Bobby was a.s.sa.s.sinated in June 1968, his reaction was simply, "Serves him right."

Still, it was a stunner when Gussie announced in September 1972 that he was supporting a Republican for president. "I have examined the record of President Nixon and Senator George McGovern on the issues," he said, "and I feel that, all things considered, President's Nixon's re-election would be in the best interest of the nation and the future." Of course, the man who recruited him to the other side was Nixon's treasury secretary, former Texas governor John Connally, an old friend of Gussie's and a Democratic icon for having been wounded while riding in the open convertible with President Kennedy the day he was a.s.sa.s.sinated in Dallas.

McGovern's dumping of Missouri senator Tom Eagleton as his vice presidential running mate a few weeks earlier likewise may have had something to do with Gussie's sudden appreciation of Nixon. Eagleton was practically a member of the Busch family. His father Mark, a prominent St. Louis attorney, was a longtime Gussie confidant who had represented him in his divorce from Elizabeth. Tom Eagleton's first job out of Harvard Law School was as a.s.sistant general counsel at Anheuser-Busch, and Gussie had generously backed his subsequent political rise. McGovern picked Eagleton to be on the ticket with him on the last day of the Democratic National Convention. He asked him to withdraw eighteen days later when it was revealed that the first-term senator had once undergone electroshock therapy as a treatment for depression.

It's doubtful that Gussie took much joy in Richard Nixon's reelection, however; by that time he was fighting battles in every corner of his kingdom, with some embarra.s.sing results.

It started with Cardinals pitcher Steve Carlton, who, after winning twenty games in 1971, held out for $10,000 more than Gussie wanted to pay him in 1972. When Carlton failed to show up for spring training in February, Gussie ordered him traded to the Phillies. "The sonofab.i.t.c.h is gonna go no matter how good he is," he bellowed.

Two weeks later, the Cardinal players voted 350 to join nine other teams in authorizing the Major League Baseball Players a.s.sociation to call a strike unless the owners contributed more money to the players' pension fund. Gussie promptly blew his stack. "They can have a strike as far as I'm concerned," he told reporters. "I'm fed up to here [indicating his eyebrows]. They are going to ruin baseball the way they are going. I'm against knuckling under, and you can quote me."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did more than quote him. The newspaper published a baldly affectionate editorial t.i.tled "Gussie at the Bat":