Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(3)
We’d been to FAO Schwarz—my favorite destination—a few times before. Just down from the Plaza Hotel, the toy-store windows sparkled with elaborate displays, beckoning to every child passing by. One year an entire kingdom of Madame Alexander dolls inhabited castles and locked towers, fought dragons and rescued princesses. “Okay,” I said shyly, not wanting to show my father how much I’d hoped he would suggest it.
My father took a second roll, this time from my plate, and smiled at me. Whenever he was happy, I felt I was at the center of a benevolent universe.
Having thrived in Detroit for five generations, my father’s clan was infamous for spending money nearly as quickly as they made it, my father’s generation in particular.
My great-great-grandfather, Bernhard Stroh, had come over from Kirn, Germany, in 1848 with a family recipe. In 1850 he established the Lion Brewing Company in Detroit because the local water tasted so good. Bernhard made a Bohemian-style brew in his basement and sold the barrels door-to-door out of a wheelbarrow, saving every spare penny to buy a horse-drawn carriage. Later, thanks in no small part to Henry Ford and his Model T trucks, Bernhard’s sons, Julius and Bernhard Jr., expanded the company’s distribution throughout the entire Midwest, renaming it the Stroh Brewing Company.
By the 1970s, the third and fourth generation of Strohs were running the family-owned brewery. They made a regional beer brand—Stroh’s Beer—that went national in the early 1980s after the purchase of the Schlitz and Schaefer breweries, a consolidation of the industry that landed thirty beer brands in our portfolio, making the family company the third-largest beer maker in the United States, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller. The majority of Stroh’s brands targeted inner-city subcultures, the blue-collar segment, and—because the beer was cheap—college kids. At its peak, the Stroh Brewing Company launched an enormous commercial and residential real estate project in downtown Detroit, built its own biotechnology research center in Durham, North Carolina, and underwrote a private plane for its CEO. Named in the Forbes 400 list from 1984 to 1992, the Stroh family possessed the largest private beer fortune in America.
For decades, the money was flowing and the Strohs lived like kings. My father’s notorious collecting landed him on every dealer’s A-list, making him the poster boy for the Strohs’ spending habits. He loved the attention, the grandiosity, and the elusive hit of immortality he felt when he walked into a shop. It seemed inexhaustible, the pipeline of beautiful objects—and the money to buy them—and we never grew tired of wandering the shops’ dusty back rooms.
But as my father’s health declined in the decades to come through the various stages of heart disease, and my life and work took me elsewhere, our shopping trips gave way to brief visits in this or that city, to catch-up calls with tenuous overseas connections, and the team we’d formed in my youth slowly dissolved.
My father died alone in the hospital in 2009. I was stunned he hadn’t wanted me at his side. He hated to show vulnera bility, of course; still, it hurt that he’d been so stubborn all the way to the end. In my sorrow I realized that the small girl who so loved and admired him had never really left. It was that same small girl who despairingly called his answering machine in Michigan for months, until the house was sold, just to hear his voice on the outgoing message, incredulous that he was no longer there.
When the time came for me, as the executor of the estate, to put my father’s collections up for sale, a crippling fatigue settled in; I yearned to wade in my grief for as long as my spirit needed to, not haggle over consignment agreements and auction contracts. My father had left me the whole of his collections—a nod to the years we’d spent together buying them, and perhaps, as some sort of apology. The gesture, though, was like a loaded pistol; the Stroh Brewing Company had been sold ten years before, in 1999, and my father had spent the bulk of his share of the proceeds. The collections—and the Grosse Pointe house in which they sat—were all that remained of my father’s legacy, and disinheriting my brothers seemed nothing less than cruel.
It felt as if the collections and the money they represented had formed an invisible web in which I’d been caught all my life, and I found myself secretly wishing I could give everything to charity with a single phone call. But as I’d decided to split my father’s possessions with my brothers, or at least their value, assessing, dividing, and selling off the collections was what I had to do. The freedom I’d coveted came only gradually, as things of real value so often do.
Lucky
STROH BREWERY
(Copyright 1973 The Detroit News, All Rights Reserved)
Detroit, 1973
Lock your doors, kids,” my father said as we crossed into Detroit on Jefferson Avenue, leaving behind the wide green lawns and lakefront mansions of Grosse Pointe.
Dropping their MAD magazines on the backseat, Bobby and Charlie sat up at attention. I hugged my Barbie to my chest. We had entered the fear zone. Miles and miles of derelict buildings stretched before us, four-story prewar brick buildings with boarded-up windows, peeling advertisements, and torn awnings. Many of the structures looked as if they once had been rather grand houses or apartment buildings, their graceful stone steps rising up to paneled, arched wooden doors. I imagined women in wide feathered hats coming out of those doors, their uniformed drivers waiting outside in horse-drawn carriages. Now the buildings’ brick walls were collapsing.