by Wally Lamb
Uh…just researching for now.
That right? What are you researching?
Well…the old breweries. Their, uh…their marketing.
Business book, then. Well, if you want to know about my career at Rheingold, I guess I better begin at the beginning. I was twenty years old when I started there. Now this was wartime, see? Nineteen forty-two. I had tried to enlist, but they wouldn’t take me on account of my flat feet and something else I didn’t even know I had: an inguinal hernia. That thing gave me trouble later on, but that’s a different story.
Actually, the time period I’m interested in is—The Brooklyn plant, this was. The main plant. I’d been moping around for a while, kind of lost because most of my buddies had enlisted. But I had this cousin worked for Rheingold, see? My cousin Hyman. And he was always saying how Weismann Breweries treated their workers right. Sponsored a bowling league, a summer picnic, gave out turkeys at Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. It was a family-owned operation back then, see? The Weismann family. German Jews, they were. But anyway, I guess I better back up a little and tell you about the Weismanns, because anyone reading a business book’s gonna want to know how a family starts from scratch over in Germany and ends up with the top-selling beer in New York. So tell me something. You writers are smart guys. What was happening back in 1864?
Well, like I said, the time period I’m looking at is—
See, you struck pay dirt with me, Jake, because I’m not only a thirty-four year employee of Weismann Breweries. I’m also a student of history. I read it, think about it, connect the dots between this thing and that thing. You ask my daughter what’s the two things I watch on television, and it’s either Law & Order or the History Channel. When I can get her away from the shopping channel, that is. All day long, those yentas with their junk jewelry, Joan Rivers and her face cream. Funny gal, but those plastic surgeons have stretched her face tighter than a sheet of Glad Wrap over a bowl of leftovers. Don’t look natural, in my opinion. Okay, so answer my question. What was happening in 1864?
Uh, well…the Civil War.
That’s right. Can’t argue with that. But listen, Jake. It’s a big world out there. The North and the South may be going at it on this side of the ocean, but over in London, Karl Marx is writing Das Kapital, and to the east, in Bavaria—where the Weismann family’s from—they’ve just crowned a new king. King Ludwig II, his name was—eighteen years old. His old man kicks the bucket and boom! They stick the crown on his head and hand him the scepter. See, Germany’s not united at that point in time; it’s all these different states: Prussia, Bavaria, etcetera, etcetera. So, Ludwig’s the new king of Bavaria. Now you tell me what kooky teenager, past or present, is gonna be fit to run a country?
I’m afraid I’m not making the jump here.
Then listen, already. Okay, so Ludwig’s a young, good-looking kid—very popular with the people, like what’s his name, over there in England, Princess Diane’s son. The Swan King, they nickname Ludwig. The Fairy Tale King. There’s only one problem: poor kid doesn’t want the job. And he stinks at it. The politics are way over his head, he’s scared to death of the public. The only thing he’s really interested in is opera, see? You much of an opera buff, Jake?
Me? No, I’m not.
Well, Ludwig’s a goner for it, and you know who his favorite composer is? That no-good, Jew-hating son of a bitch Wagner, that’s who. Ludwig idolizes the guy. Knows his operas, memorizes the librettos. So one day he says to himself, “Hey, I’m the king, right? If I want to meet the maestro, I can summon him here.” So that’s what he does: has his ministers track down Wagner and bring him to the palace.
But Mr. Schissel? Peppy?
And the two of them hit it off: the teenage king and his musical hero. And the kid starts making promises: he’s gonna build Wagner a big festival theater in Munich, finance productions of his four Ring of the Nibelung operas. They figure they’ll start with the first one in the series, Das Rheingold. You know the Das Rheingold story, Jake? The golden treasure hidden at the bottom of the Rhine River, guarded by the beautyful Rhinemaidens? Then the dwarf steals it and the brave hero, Siegfried, has to steal it back?
Not ringing a bell, Peppy.
No? One of the most famous legends in Germany! Well, anyway, Ludwig and Wagner talk into the night, and they get so hepped up about their big plans for Das Rheingold that they decide to take a moonlight ride out in the country. They wake up the carriage driver, and two or three of the royal ass-kissers, and the party takes off. Only it starts snowing, see? It’s the middle of the night by now. So they pull up to this little roadside guesthouse. Zum Stern, it’s called—nice little family inn where they make their own beer. And who do you think owns the place?
Couldn’t tell you.
The Weismanns!
Ah, the family that—
That’s right! Now, at this point in time, you’re maybe saying to yourself, “Gee, you ask Peppy for the time of day and he tells you the history of the cuckoo clock.” But let me ask you something, Jake. When a contractor builds an apartment house, what’s he start with? The fifth floor or the foundation?
Okay. So—
So start writing some of this stuff down already.
Well…the tape recorder’s on.
Oy! You see that—what I mean about memory? The gizmo’s sitting here, staring me right in the face! Okay, so there’s a bang, bang on the door at Zum Stern, and the Weismanns’ son, Otto, gets up and answers it. Tells them they’re closed for the night. Then the others step aside and who’s standing there, wearing his fancy frock cloak and fur hat?
King Ludwig.
Right. It’s a moment in history, see? The king and the commoner, probably about the same age, standing face to face. So Otto swings the door open and lets them in—the king, the composer, the royal tukhes lechers. Couple minutes later, the whole family hustles down and goes to work: start cooking up a feast and pouring the Weismannbrau…. Now, by the time the sun comes up, the bellies are full and the snow’s stopped and the whole world is beautyful white. The maestro, who’s half in the bag, tells everyone to grab a farewell glass of beer and follow him outside for a toast, and so they do: the king and his lackeys, the Weismanns, and I don’t know who else. And word’s leaked out by now, see? So there’s a little crowd out there—everyone waiting to get a peek at the Fairy Tale King and the big shot composer. Wagner raises his glass. “To Ludwig, Bavaria’s very own Siegfried!” he shouts. Now, you remember who Siegfried is?
He’s, uh…the character in Das Rheingold.
Not just the character, Jake—the hero. So, it’s quite a compliment, see? “May King Ludwig forever rule in the light!” Wagner says. And everyone drinks up. Then Ludwig—who’s probably as soused and happy as he’s ever been—he steps forward and makes his own toast. “To Bavaria!” he says. “To Bavaria!” everyone answers. And just then, Ludwig happens to notice the way the sun’s caught his glass of beer. He looks at its golden color, twists the glass back and forth, then says, “To the best beer in all of Bavaria—the Weismanns’ Rhein gold.” You get it, Jake? The Rhine river, the golden treasure hidden on the bottom? “To the Weismanns’ Rhein gold!” the crowd shouts. And with that, the king and his party chug-a-lug their beers and take off. Now, Mr. Business Book Writer, what do you think happens next?
Well, the Weismanns have just gotten a pretty big celebrity endorsement. So I’d say they probably cash in.
Correct! Word spreads about the king’s visit, and now everyone wants to stop at the inn where the Fairy Tale King stopped to taste “Rheingold,” the best beer in all of Bavaria. From then on, the Weismanns are in business. And speaking of business, I have to take care of a little myself. Excuse me a minute, Jake. Hey, barkeep! Where’s the men’s room? And where’s our cocktail and our coffee?
Yeah, give me another minute, Pops. I’m just finishing up my inventory.
What? Your inventory’s more important than your paying customers? Oy!
So, Pepp
y, that was quite a story. Where’d you hear it?
Hear it? Who heard it? I read it, before you came to pick me up. Reread it, I should say. When you said you wanted to learn about Rheingold, I dug around in my old stuff, found the book the company came out with on their seventy-fifth anniversary. The History of Rheingold Beer, it’s called. A lot of employees, when they got that memorial book, probably tossed it out, but not me. Because, like I said, I’m a student of history. I got it back at my daughter’s if you want to take a look at it.
No, that’s okay. Now, if we can switch gears to when you were involved with the Miss Rheingold contest—
Not so fast, Jake. There’s more. See, when Ludwig walked through the door at Zum Stern that night, politics walked in with him, and the Weismanns’ business got hitched to the king’s fortune. Which didn’t turn out so good after all. As king, the kid was a disaster! He pulled temper tantrums with his ministers, hit the servants, hid behind the potted plants at state functions. He was engaged to an Austrian princess for a while, but her family broke it off. Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?
You read all this in The History of Rheingold Beer?
No, no, this I got from another book, Roots of the Third Reich. I connect the dots, see? That’s what us history buffs do. Then this crazy Ludwig starts raiding the royal treasury for his two cockamamie obsessions. One of them’s opera, like I already told you about. The other is castle-building. See, he commissions these expensive, full-scale Wagnerian operas—costumes, sets, the best singers and musicians in Bavaria—but nobody can see them except him. Says when there’s an audience, everyone stares at him with their opera glasses and it ruins it for him. Worse than that are the castles—these medieval replicas he has built all over Bavaria, and when they’re done, they just sit there, empty. And Ludwig’s goofy make-believe is breaking the bank. He was like what’s-his-name—that shmekel with all the plastic surgery.
Joan Rivers?
No, no. The goofy one with the one glove. The singer.
Michael Jackson?
Right. So no one’s too happy about the way things are going. Now, the Prussians are watching all this, see? Circling Bavaria like vultures. Bismarck’s already got the other German states to sign on to his North German Alliance, but Bavaria’s the biggest prize and the only holdout. So Bismarck comes up with a plan. He goes to Ludwig’s old buddy, that son of a bitch Wagner. Wagner’s all for a big German Empire, see? So he pays a little visit to the kooky king, and by the time he leaves, he’s got a letter for Bismarck that says Ludwig’s joining the Empire and is gonna transfer power to the Prussian Kaiser. Now when the loyalists find out their king’s signed away their Bavarian sovereignty, the wind shifts for the Weismanns. The famous inn where Kingy Boy stopped on that snowy night becomes a target, see? They take the torch to Zum Stern, burn the place down to the ground!
No kidding.
I kid you not! Now, it ended bad for Ludwig. They declare the royal schlemiel insane and jail him inside one of his fancy castles. Put him in the care of the doctors of the Munich Asylum. Then one night, Ludwig and his head shrinker go for a walk by the lake and guess what? They find them both the next morning, floating facedown in the water. Was it murder? Suicide? No one knows. But, of course, everyone knows what happened once Bismarck unified Germany. What that led to…. Give me a minute, will you?
Here. Take a napkin….
But, Mr. Business Book, a king can fall and a commoner can rise! Because after Zum Stern burned down? Otto Weismann didn’t sit around, crying in his beer. He booked passage and came to the U.S. of A. Started all over again, with just his brewing recipes and his business smarts. And in 1886—the same year they fished King Ludwig out of the lake—Otto opened the Weismann Brewing Company of Brooklyn, New York. Corner of Forest and Bremen Streets. Rheingold beer—named by a German king after a German myth—becomes as American as apple pie! So there.
So there.
And look who finally finished his inventory.
Sorry for the wait, guys. You wanna pay for these now or run a tab?
Run us a tab, Jake. And why don’t you make me another one, so it’ll be ready by the time I finish this one.
You got it, Pop.
Pop? Nah, it wasn’t me. Must have been the milkman. If I was your father, you wouldn’t have turned out so goddamned good-looking…. See, there’s a good tip for you, Jake. Compliment the barkeep and he might get a little heavy-handed when he’s pouring your next one.
Right. Hey, Peppy, I’m sorry to rush us along, but I promised your daughter I’d have you back by six o’clock, and what I’m really interested in—
So we call her, tell her we’re running late. So I don’t get home in time to watch Judge Judy read the riot act to some poor schmuck. So what? You want to hear about Miss Rheingold or don’t you?
I do. Particularly the—
Okay then. So Otto opens the Brooklyn brewery. It’s slow for a while, but little by little, sales pick up. Brewery gets its lucky break in 1898, when New York consolidated the boroughs. Before that, Brooklyn was a separate city, see? But now—
Hey, but you know what? Since my focus is on the contest years, why don’t we cover that stuff today? Then maybe we can schedule another time to discuss the earlier era. Because it’s fascinating, but—
Go backwards? Doesn’t make sense to do it that way, Jake. History’s all cause and effect. If I’m gonna show you how Rheingold became a success story, I gotta show you how they met the challenges along the way: anti-German backlash during WW1. Then Prohibition, the Depression, WW2.
And I want to hear all that. But let’s table it for next time, and then I’ll cut and paste it all together later on. That’s what writers do, you know?
Well, I don’t see the sense of it, but you’re the expert. How about if I tell you about the year I come aboard? Nineteen forty-two?
Fine. Start there.
Because, come to think of it, that was when the Miss Rheingold promotion was just getting started. Company’d put the gals at a table in the lunchroom, have them sell War Bonds to the workers. “Keep on buying, keep our boys flying!” If you signed up, they’d take it right out of your paycheck, see? Which I did, of course. I’m a young guy with all my parts working, including the part that responds to the opposite sex, and I’m going to say no to some of the most beautyful girls in Manhattan? By the way, I’m just curious. How old would you say I am?
Couldn’t tell you. So you started in forty-two and—
Go on. Take a stab. Not gonna cost you anything. Just keep in mind that I walk two miles in the mall every morning with the Senior Strollers and that every single tooth in my head is au naturel.
Seventy-three? Seventy-four?
Eighty-four, this coming April!
No kidding? Wow. Okay, let’s get back to business.
You’re the boss. Now Otto Weismann was long gone by the time I started at Rheingold, and it was the second generation of Weismanns running the show: Otto’s sons, Isadore and Herman, and their kid sister, Sadie. All three were in their fifties by then, each going about their business the way their father had laid it all out. Isadore oversaw the plant’s day-to-day operation and Herman was their chief buyer. He was on the road a lot, making deals with the grain merchants, the tin and glass companies. Now as far as the hops, the old man had been a shrewd one, see? He’d arranged a marriage between his son Herman and Greta Schein, daughter of Gustav Schein, who was the biggest hops merchant back in Munich. Can’t brew beer without hops, right? So Rheingold married into the family discount. Of course, Otto hadn’t figured on Hitler. Nineteen thirty-seven, thirty-eight, the Nazis arrest Schein and seize his business. This was before the U.S. of A. entered the war, of course. Lot of American companies, Jewish included, were still looking the other way at what was going on over there. But not the Weismanns. The company took a stand: refused to trade with the Nazis on principle. So Rheingold took a hit—had to reduce production, lay off some of their people.
Meanwhil
e, Herman Weismann found out his in-laws—Greta’s family—had been sent to the camps. He got the State Department involved, went over there himself two or three times to try to get them out. But after the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, everything fell through. Poor Greta lost everyone—parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. Later on, Rheingold put up a memorial park in their honor. Right across from the Brooklyn plant, this was. Had a fountain, a wishing pond, a beautyful flower garden. Sometimes you’d see Greta Weismann over there, fussing with the flowers or brushing off the stone benches with a whisk broom. They had people coulda done that stuff for her—the Weismanns were millionaires by then—but she had to do it herself. It was a sight to make you cry: this fine and fancy lady, watering plants, pulling weeds. Trying to make something nice out of her terrible loss.
Now Sadie Weismann—you remember her? Otto’s daughter? Usually it’s the eldest son who calls the shots, but it was Sadie who had inherited her father’s business smarts and the old man knew it. So before he died, he set things up so that Sadie held the purse strings and had final word on the big decisions. And what was even more unusual about the Weismanns was that both brothers went along with it. No power struggles, no hatchet jobs. Nothing like that…. Odd duck, Sadie was, though—six foot tall and three foot wide. She was married for a little while, but it didn’t take. Never had kids of her own. But you know what I always liked about Sadie? She was never too good to speak to her rank-and-file. She’d look you right in the eye, ask you how things were going, ask your opinion on things. Then she’d listen to your answer. That’s smart business, see? Creates loyalty. I tell you, Jake, I loved working for Rheingold. I’d come up from the subway every morning, get a whiff of the aroma coming from the plant, and walk a little faster just to get there.
