Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
Frances Stroh
PROLOGUE
I stood in the center of a white room, darkened and soundproofed, with six videos playing on screens surrounding me, each one featuring an enormous talking mouth. I was trying to see the installation as others saw it. Visitors to the exhibition took in the cacophony of voices—a family of six telling the family story from disparate points of view.
As I stepped closer to each screen, I could single out its distinctive voice.
“There were years and years during which our family lived in denial of who and what we really were,” said one young man.
“I’m sure there are families with problems similar to our own,” offered another, “somewhere out there . . .”
“My life has not unfolded as I thought it would,” the mother said. “I lived in a dream when I was young.”
“Happiness is not something you turn on and off like running water.” The father smiled and puffed on his pipe. “Life doesn’t work that way.”
Over and over again, I had listened to these pronouncements in a cramped, dark editing room. I was a twenty-six-year-old installation artist whose work had been selected for this group exhibition at San Francisco Camerawork Gallery, The Family Seen. The ruined family projected on the screens was my own.
The people around me gazed at the talking mouths as if hypnotized, unaware that one member of this family stood in their midst. No one knew they were watching me reflect on my own father’s alcoholism or my brother’s drug addiction. Nor could they know we were part of a multigenerational corporate legacy whose products were all-American household names. But, then, we’d all been groomed since birth to never discuss this, least of all in front of a camera.
When my brother Charlie said, “Let’s hope the family business picks up so I can take early retirement along with everyone else,” viewers might have assumed he was a hardworking employee at, say, a faltering hardware store, not a brewery heir turned convicted drug dealer.
When my own mouth on the screen spoke—“I always felt I was somehow special because I was my father’s favorite”—I alone knew that my father had abandoned his dream to be a career photographer in order to join the family business, then rejoiced when I myself took up photography. I also knew this video piece could not have been what he had in mind when he gave me my first Nikon at age sixteen.
It was revenue from Stroh’s Beer, Old Milwaukee, Schlitz, and Schaefer that paid for things like that fancy camera. My family had been brewing beer in Detroit since long before the invention of the assembly line and the Model T. We’d survived Prohibition by selling ice cream and malt syrup for home brewing, and then entered the mid-twentieth century with a beer brand emblematic of the American dream itself—Stroh’s. Our products came to symbolize at once the American working class and, by way of college kids who drank Schlitz at Nantucket beach parties and served Stroh’s on draft at their campus fraternities, the carefree youth of the seventies and the eighties. By the mid-1980s, taglines like “Stroh’s Is Spoken Here” and Old Milwaukee’s “It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This” were as recognizable as Budweiser’s “The King of Beers.” But within a handful of years a century-and-a-half-old brewing tradition would be verging on extinction, Stroh’s Beer vanishing from the national landscape.
Our family business blazed the trail of economic decline in America. By the late eighties our beer sales were faltering even as our personal tragedies had begun to mount: my brother Charlie’s drug conviction, my parents’ divorce. By 1993, the time was ripe for my video piece; my immediate family members all agreed to the interviews, the floodgates opened, and the story of a real American family flowed forth.
It had filled with people now, the small installation room. They stood in tight clusters, the ambient light of the screens flickering off their faces. The scent of gallery red wine floated in the air. No one seemed to notice my absorption in the content of the interviews.
I stepped closer to Charlie’s screen. “As a kid I used to lie to Dad, and he used to whip me. But the only reason I lied to him was because I was intimidated by him.”
I moved toward my brother Bobby’s screen. “My father is a very talented, very artistic person, and I think it’s a shame he hasn’t done more with himself.” He frowned through his mustache. “When he’s dead and gone I wish there would be more he could leave behind, like gallery shows or what-have-you.”
I walked over to my brother Whitney’s screen. “Dad is an overbearing, controlling son of a bitch. I’ve tried to get along with him but he’s always a prick to me, so f*ck him.”
The crowd bristled with tension.
“It’s so cathartic,” one viewer said to her companion in a hushed voice.
“If you like your catharsis with a side of explosives,” he whispered back.
We’d each said things to the camera that we wouldn’t want the others to overhear. Now our voices rang out in a nexus of crossed indictment. To anyone else, the effect might have been “cathartic” and “explosive”—but not to me. After all, I had lived it. And our downward spiral unfortunately had a long way to go yet.
Many years would pass before I would come to see that the Stroh’s Beer story, my family’s story, and the story of the once great city of Detroit were all intertwined, our destinies and histories so enmeshed that in their final days the brewery, the family, and Detroit all tumbled together, a long-eroded cliff falling whole into that inland sea.