Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer (15 page)

There was no question that Gussie loved Harry, and however mad he may have been at him for messing around in his family, he needed Caray in the Cardinals' broadcast booth in the spring of 1969. The winds of change were rustling through the well-manicured world of professional baseball, signaling the arrival of the 1960s nearly a decade behind schedule. Players were sprouting mustaches and sideburns; clumps of hair were starting to poke out from under their caps. Moreover, a new militancy was on the rise in the form of the Major League Baseball Players Association and its director, Marvin Miller. Deadlocked in negotiations with team owners over pension benefits, Miller had organized the first ever players' boycott of spring training in January. Confronted with the failure of four hundred players to report to camp, the league capitulated and ponied up more pension money, and spring training finally got under way three weeks late.

All of which was sticking in Gussie's craw on March 24, five days before his seventieth birthday, when he and Dick Meyer, the Cardinals' executive vice president, presided over an unprecedented meeting at the team's spring training facility in St. Petersburg. The players were surprised to find reporters present when they walked into the clubhouse at Al Lang Field, invited by Al Fleishman.

“I don't mean to give you a lecture,” Gussie said, “but as president of this club I have a right to speak to you as men, frankly and straight from the shoulder.” He then delivered what sounded a lot like a lecture. Pointedly mentioning that the team's $607,000 payroll was “the biggest in the entire history of baseball,” he took the players to task for being greedy, rude, spoiled, and ungrateful. “I don't mind negotiations—that's how we get together—but ultimatums rub me the wrong way and I think they rub the fans the wrong way.... I am not suggesting that you should not have individual business managers or even press agents. That is your privilege … but too many fans are saying our players think of money more than the game itself. We are told too many players are refusing to sign autographs, pushing kids aside when they try to take pictures.... When the media people lose interest and when kids don't want your autographs, then we better begin to worry.”

He didn't lose his temper and bang the table and shout, but in his rambling discourse he made quite a few intemperate remarks, including one that seemed to minimize their role in the organization: “It takes hundreds of people working every day to make it possible for 18 men to play a game of baseball that lasts for about two hours.”

“This is no pep talk,” he said in closing. “I haven't bawled you out. But I've tried to point out that baseball is at a serious point in its history.”

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 class 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 Illustrated
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, Dick 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 nigger” 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 assertion that he was let go on the recommendation of the marketing department. “That's a lot of crap,” he said. “Nobody'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 emancipation proclamation:

He followed with a $4 million federal lawsuit seeking to have major league baseball's so-called reserve clause declared unconstitutional.
^*
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.”

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 Association, 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 substituting 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 (pronounced
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 (née 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 passed 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.