Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (54 page)

Gussie Busch at age thirty-seven, a budding beer baron serving restlessly under his older brother. He took control of Anheuser-Busch in 1946, when Adolpus III died of stomach cancer, and led the company to heights his grandfather Adolphus had never imagined.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis

August A. Busch Sr.
(center)
and his sons, Adolphus III
(left)
and August Jr. (“Gussie”), packing the first case of post-Prohibition Budweiser for shipment to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. August A. took over the brewery when his father, Adolphus, died, and guided it through Prohibition and the Great Depression.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis

August Busch Jr. and August Busch III raising a stein of beer in celebration of the 10 millionth barrel of beer from Anheuser-Busch, as captured by staff photographer David Glick on December 15, 1964.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis

Gussie and Trudy Busch with their children in the great hall of the mansion at Grant's Farm in the early 1970s.
Standing, left to right
: Adolphus IV, Gussie, and Peter.
Seated
: Andrew, Trudy, Gertrude, Christina, Billy, and Beatrice.
Courtesy of the Busch family

Trudy with Christina, the baby of the family, whose death following a car accident in 1974 marked the beginning of the end of the “Camelot” years at Grant's Farm. Gussie would never fully recover from the loss of the little girl he called “Honeybee,” and neither would his marriage to Trudy.
Courtesy of the Busch family

Octogenarian Gussie, “the Big Eagle,” as St. Louis Cardinal fans would always remember him, urging on both the crowd and his beloved Clydesdales before a championship game.
David Glick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

August Busch IV in the spring of 2008, raising a bottle of Bud to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of Prohibition. Having finally completed his rise to CEO, he began his rapid descent. He would be the last King of Beer.
Courtesy of Whitney Curtis Photography

William Knoedelseder spent twelve years as a reporter at the
Los Angeles Times
, where his groundbreaking coverage of the recording industry for the newspaper's financial section resulted in the critically acclaimed book,
Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia
. Knoedelseder has also been a television executive, creating, managing, and producing news programs for Knight Ridder, Fox, and the USA Network. At USA, he was vice president of news. His most recent book,
I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy's Golden Era
, has been optioned for film by actor Jim Carrey. He lives in Woodland Hills, California.

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Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

Eagle illustration © CSA Images

BITTER BREW.
Copyright © 2012 by William Knoedelseder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-06-200926-5

Epub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062096685

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*
Flood failed in his lawsuit, which he appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his action is credited with eventually pressuring major league baseball into doing away with the reserve clause in favor of free agency, thus ushering in an era of ever-escalating player salaries—exactly what Gussie feared.

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Gussie showed his appreciation to St. John's by donating color televisions for every patient room in the hospital.

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Jemima Boone and two of her friends were captured by a Shawnee war party outside Boonesborough, Kentucky, on July 14, 1776. Her father and a group of men chased after them and rescued the girls three days later. The painting still hangs on the wall in the dining room at Grant's Farm, along with another Wimar epic,
The Attack on the Emigrant Train.
Billionaire Phillip Anschutz recently offered the Busch family $7 million for the pair.

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The case was settled out of court.

*
August would eventually decide it wasn't hops that caused his head feel. Rather it was a certain grade of rice that included broken kernels.

*
Stroh had just acquired the Schlitz brand.

*
Undercover narcotics officers arrested Whitlock at a St. Louis Steak & Shake later that year. He was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. Released after only three, he became a barber. He is the father of Kimora Lee Simmons, the wife of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.

*
Billy raised Scarlett to adulthood along with his six other children from his long-term marriage to his wife Christina.

*
Katz would later file a multimillion-dollar gender-discrimination lawsuit against the company, claiming, among other things, that management encouraged and maintained a “locker room” and “frat party” atmosphere. The case is pending as this book goes to press.

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The company agreed to pull both products off the market.