Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (17 page)

When dinner was served, my mother sat at the head of the table in the dining room, her knitting pushed aside in a
forlorn pile on the kitchen counter. She absently redistributed the food on her plate while Bobby, Whitney, and I discussed the agenda for the meeting the following day.

When the conversation lagged, we sat around the table staring at one another, unable to eat the tough, bone-dry goose meat. Whitney shifted restlessly in his chair, scuffing the wood floor. Bobby absently pulled on his mustache and looked at his watch. Charlie crossed and recrossed his legs impatiently, looking as if he might climb the walls. We all could have used a drink just then, but Charlie, he clearly
needed
one.

Whitney jumped up from the table first—to meet his friends at a bar. “If you’ll please excuse me,” he said in an official tone as he exited. “I’m expected elsewhere.”

Bobby, too, stood up, and then Cheryl. “Thank you, Arkady,” she offered sweetly in her Southern lilt. From the window, I watched them get into their car with somber faces and drive away.

Charlie dropped his napkin on the table and quietly went upstairs. My mother insisted I follow him. “Go up and make sure he doesn’t take anything,” she whispered. All evening, she’d been trying to head off some imaginary disaster.

Reluctantly, I stood up and, to appease her, I followed Charlie upstairs. I remembered a Christmas long before when he’d been accused of stealing forty dollars from my grandmother’s purse. The family had made too big a deal out of it, talking in hushed voices about the pilfered money. He’d stolen from everyone else in the family as well, I knew, with the exception of perhaps me. From the very beginning, he’d always had my back.

As soon as I reached the top of the stairwell, I veered into my room.

Charlie had gone into Whitney’s room, where I knew some of his old clothes still hung in the closet, along with some World War II Russian uniforms Whitney had collected.

“Franny, do you think Whitney’ll mind if I take one of these shirts?” Charlie, who must have heard me, called out.

I walked through the shared bathroom into Whitney’s room, where Charlie held up a blue oxford shirt on a hanger.

“Why not? Those shirts have been there for years. Whitney has all his clothes down in Florida.”

“Okay, just checking.” He sniffed the shirt. “Boy, you’d think Mom might get ’em cleaned once in a while, though.”

I took the shirt and looked it over. “Maybe just keep it out overnight? The smell will go away.”

“So you’re staying here, huh?” he said without the slightest trace of resentment. “I’ll stay down at the River Place Inn.”

I pictured the shirt hanging off the bedpost in his hotel room, at Stroh River Place, the hotel that we’d developed, owned, and then lost in foreclosure, while Charlie slumbered underneath the sterile covers. “Yes,” I said. “But I never sleep well here.” I wished I could give him my room.

“Too bad. You could have joined me at the bar.”

“I know.” I hugged him. “Hey, I’ll see you in the morning, though, at the meeting.”

After Charlie left, Arkady and I cleared the table while my mother scrubbed the pots with a Brillo pad, steam rising around her exhausted face. The goose grease sat in a tomato-soup can by the sink.

“Make sure you never give Charlie anything for Christmas that he could sell for drugs,” she warned. “Remember the time Bill Penner sent him the big-screen TV? He’d wanted one so badly, and then he sold it within a week.” She shook her head sadly and went over to take a pie out of the oven. The party had broken up before dessert was even served.

I sat down at the kitchen table. “Obviously I’m going to send him a Christmas present,” I said.

“Socks or underwear, though. That’s what I do every year.” My mother gave me this same advice every so often. I had yet to follow it.

“Come on, Mom, realistically how many pairs of socks and underwear does he need?”

“At least he’ll know you were thinking of him.” She dropped the pie from her oven glove onto the counter, knocking off a bit of crust. “Poor Charlie. He was never as smart as the rest of you. I spent years helping him with his speech, helping him learn all the things that came naturally to you and Bobby, and Whitney. He got a great deal of attention. More than all the rest of you put together, in fact.”

“Yeah, well, Dad was pretty hard on him,” I said. I flashed to Charlie quickly gathering up all the Indian beads on the bed as my father’s footsteps came down the long hallway, toward his room.

“Genes play a much larger role in how we develop than environment. The more I look around, the more I see this.” My mother sliced the pie and brought two plates over to the kitchen table. “When Gari and John married Susie and Lou, there just wasn’t enough variety of genes.”

For as long as I could remember, I’d been hearing my mother say the Stroh family’s paltry gene pool came from those two brothers marrying two sisters—Susie and Lou, who drank martinis as if they were water. I myself leaned more toward the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.

“Dad picked on the defenseless ones, if you ask me,” I said. “Bobby and I turned out okay because he liked us better, don’t you think? I mean, we could stand up to him, for one thing.” Bobby had once told me a story about throwing a baked potato at my father in the course of an argument, which caused my father to back down with a sort of respect.

My mother chewed her pie. “I still think nearly all of it’s genes.”

“Genes are very important,” Arkady agreed. “They decide almost everything.”

I looked at my boyfriend as he loaded the dishwasher and for a moment wondered what planet he was from. Of course that’s what had attracted me to begin with—his utter certainty about things.

I took a bite of pie and thought about all the years of misplaced blame in our family. Whether it was the business going down the tubes or Charlie’s demise, no one wanted to take responsibility; even our genes seemed little more than convenient scapegoats.

“You’re probably right,” I told my mother. I didn’t have the heart to challenge her; the truth would be too much to bear.

“I know I am,” she said.

DETROIT, CIRCA 1972

(by Eric Stroh)

A
t eight thirty the next morning, the family assembled in a meeting room in our office building at Stroh River Place to await the presentations. Forty of us—cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and parents, whether related by blood or by marriage—sat united in our morbid curiosity about the fate of the failing business, as well as our current or future financial interests.

The room hushed when Charlie entered, and you couldn’t blame anyone. In the glaring light of day, he looked like a homeless man as he ambled through the room, his skin leathery and blotched, eyes gazing vacantly ahead, making eye contact with no one—a homeless man dressed up for church by community do-gooders. His large nose appeared to have taken over his face, a face cut into an apple and left to dry. The blue oxford shirt from Whitney’s closet seemed to constrain his gestures, while the gray flannels and loafers he’d also taken from the house no longer fit his diminishing frame.
He pulled out the chair next to mine with difficulty, catching the white tablecloth and disturbing the glasses of water at each place. The acidic fumes of stale alcohol rose off his skin and breath.

I felt at once shame and compassion. This was my brother, even if many of the people in this room could hardly recognize him. Yet I was ashamed of what he’d become, as if his state somehow reflected on me. And recognizing my own wish to escape implication made me feel only worse. Waiting for the meeting to begin, Charlie crossed his legs and fixed his eyes on the overhead projector.

I wasn’t sure how much he would be able to take in. Surely, he’d been absent for so long that the perils of the Detroit real estate market, the pension fund, and our biotechnology interest would mean little to him.

My cousin John, smart in a blue blazer and perfectly tailored gray flannel trousers, walked to the front of the room. Having replaced Peter as the board’s interim head in 1997, he still acted as our CEO and chairman. He welcomed the group and, smiling, began his opening presentation.

“Allow me to state the obvious: the fact that we continue to meet in this building—in a city that is literally falling apart all around us—is not exactly good news.”

Everyone laughed grimly. At dinner the night before, Bobby had characterized the situation with brilliant shorthand, “Replacing Peter with John was like rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
.”

Bobby had nailed it, though his metaphor left out any hint of responsibility. The fact was the Stroh Companies, Inc.,
board, as well as the family members who’d elected them, were responsible for this shipwreck. They had placed that fatal iceberg right in their own path.

“If we could pick this building up and put it down somewhere else,
anywhere
else,” John continued, “we’d be okay. But for better or worse, our real estate holdings are in Detroit.”

“We can thank the United Auto Workers for bringing Michigan to its knees,” one of my cousins piped in.

“The unions certainly haven’t helped us,” John agreed. “If U.S. manufacturing had remained affordable for the Big Three, this wouldn’t be the ghost town that it is.”

Passing the buck, it seemed, had reached epidemic proportions in this family, and I wanted some accountability. “John, did we ever consider moving our headquarters elsewhere?” I asked. “After the Detroit brewery was closed in the mideighties, for example, and we had breweries all over the country?”

“No one had a crystal ball, Franny,” John responded smoothly. “And uprooting management was not exactly an attractive option.”

He went on to deliver the complexities of the bad news with a confident sort of complacency that seemed to belie the dire circumstances in which we found ourselves. The business—now a holding company called Stroh Companies, Inc. (SCI), with a basket of declining assets—would cease to exist within a certain number of years, and no one knew the exact number. Dividends would cease even sooner.

As the automotive industry had declined and businesses had moved out of the city, so our real estate holdings had plummeted. Stroh River Place had been our most disastrous
investment, representing a loss of close to $300 million, some of which had been bank loans, triggering foreclosures on the hotel and the apartment building. As for the office building we sat in, at 50 percent occupancy it was now worth but a tiny fraction of what the family had invested in it.

John moved on to the next line item: Spain. The Spanish government was suing us for a tax they believed we owed on our Spanish brewing interest—Cruz Campo—which we had sold to Guinness in the early nineties. For years, we’d been fighting the tax in the Spanish courts; if enforced, it would have totally wiped us out. In the meantime, the SCI board had voted to pay a substantial portion of the company’s remaining equity out to the shareholders.

“So save your money,” John advised ominously. “We’ll be dissolving the company soon.”

My relatives masked their panic by taking studious notes or simply staring ahead with blank expressions. Like my father, most of them had enjoyed quarterly dividend checks for as long as they could remember. Some had been saving; some hadn’t. In our branch of the family, with my father as the only shareholder, my brothers and I had never received SCI dividends, and probably never would. I looked across the room and noticed that my father and Elisa were just coming back from a cigarette break, giggling like teenagers, as if utterly oblivious to the bad news.

“Elisa and I are having a ball spending your inheritance,” my father loved to tell me. I knew he wasn’t joking, but now even his own money supply was on the verge of tapping out. The company had been imploding while quarterly reports sat
in an unopened pile on my father’s kitchen counter, he and Elisa busy spending the dividends before the checks had even arrived.

Next, John moved on to our biotechnology interest, Apex Bioscience, the company Uncle Peter had founded in the early nineties with $100 million of SCI funds. Just a few years later, John would sell this division to a German venture capital firm for nothing but a minor equity stake in lieu of proceeds. On an annual basis, the Germans initiated additional funding rounds in which we had to participate in order to keep our stake intact.

“Should we invest more funds in biotechnology?” John asked the group. The venture capitalists were raising money for a phase-two drug trial. We weren’t ever asked to vote, or even to give our opinions. “They’re asking for a minimum investment of two million dollars. We haven’t committed at this level in over a year.” Clearly John was stumped, and the board always deferred to the family, meaning to John and Pierre, cousins who’d inherited board seats from their fathers. For the very first time, John was turning to the family for direction.

We wrote our votes on scraps of paper and put them into a hat. I voted in favor of the investment. What difference did it make? We were going down so fast we couldn’t count our losses. And while it was a gamble, Apex Bioscience was the only investment in our portfolio that had any potential at all. As my father sometimes said, “We should be a Harvard textbook case study on how
not
to run a business.”

“Family-owned and operated since 1775,” our beer labels
had boasted, but that was exactly our problem: in our system, fathers promoted their sons, sons who too often had neither attended business school nor proven themselves in other corporate settings. Running a regional brewery was a far cry from running the beer giant we’d become in the eighties and nineties. And . . . we’d simply blown it.

When Alan Bond, the Australian financier, had made the Stroh Brewing Company a billion-dollar offer in the mideighties, our family-run board turned him down. Within just a few years we were taking less than half that number from Coors, only to watch them back out of the deal. Our fire sale to Miller and Pabst in the late nineties had been the ultimate humiliation. At the last moment, Pabst backed out of the Stroh Brewery’s pension liability and still we’d agreed to the sale, shouldering that liability ourselves.

Like most family members, I’d watched our business decline year after year from the sidelines. I could see now that many of these strategic pitfalls might have been avoided, had seasoned professionals been at the helm. Family-owned and with a family-run board, we’d been in way over our heads once we became the third-largest North American brewer. Anheuser-Busch and Miller—number one and number two, respectively—were publicly traded companies with diversified boards and shareholders who kept a sharp eye on strategic decisions. Stroh shareholders, unless they happened to sit on the board, had no voice at all. These meetings were nothing more than elaborate smokescreens designed to foster a sense of agency, however false, among the rest of us.

When Uncle Peter retired in 1997 some of us had pushed for hiring outside talent instead of appointing yet another Stroh family member to run the business, but with the family divided on the question, the status quo had prevailed, and now, yet again, it seemed we were paying the price.

Suddenly, Charlie spoke up. “John, I have hepatitis C and, well, I need financial support for my medical care and living expenses.”

The room gasped: the drug addicts’ disease. Or one of them, anyway. Everyone looked at Charlie, stunned. “So how would I go about getting a guarantee of financial support?” he continued.

John, who had married a wealthy woman, cleared his throat. “Those of us who need support,” he intoned, brows raised in seeming concern, “will have to turn to our parents.”

My father shot Elisa a theatrical look of alarm. She grinned wanly and patted his knee. My mother did not lift her eyes from her knitting. Charlie crossed his arms and sank into his chair. I was proud of him, though, for speaking up. Many of us had watched our parents’ generation spending the family wealth all our lives, but only Charlie had showed the courage to ask, “What about me?”

I leaned back into my seat and stared up at the ceiling. Every time I attended a Stroh business weekend, I swore I’d never attend another one. I felt forever caught between wishing we’d just hurry up and lose it all, and hoping we could save ourselves. But John’s response to Charlie’s question seemed to make it perfectly clear there would be no road back.

A
t lunch, everyone steered clear of Charlie. I walked over and sat down in the seat next to him.

“Hey, Franny,” he said, his mouth full.

“How’s the pasta?” I asked, knowing the food would be perfectly tasteless.

Charlie pulled his napkin onto his lap when he saw me do it. “Not bad. Better than that goose last night.” He laughed. “Hey, I like Arkady, though. You know? He’s a good guy. I just couldn’t stick around after dinner. Mom was too nervous. I can’t stand being around her when she’s like that.”

I spotted my mother at a table across the room with Nicole and Pierre. “What did you think of the meeting?”

“Nothing new, right?” said Charlie. “This ship’s been sinking since I can remember.”

“No kidding.”

“Anyway—sorry about the goose,” he said. “Arkady worked like hell on that meal. It really wasn’t his fault.”

“He likes you, too, Charlie.”

Later, back in San Francisco, Arkady would tell me that Charlie had pulled him aside and said, “You take care of my princess, okay?”