I felt thrilled. And doubtful. Though my father constantly bought expensive things, my mother often worried that we couldn’t afford them. “Really?” I asked tentatively. “I could live there?”
“Sure.” My father smiled. “You can do anything you want. All it takes is money.”
I could feel the solid warmth of my father’s hand as he led me along the sidewalk to lunch; his happy mood seemed to promise me the world.
We walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Regency Hotel into the dining room and were seated and given menus. Plates traveled past us to other tables in the hands of black-tied waiters. My stomach knotted with hunger. The menu looked like the one at our country club—lamb chops, filet mignon, whitefish. My father glanced around for the waiter.
“I’ll have a hamburger, extra well done, please,” he said when the waiter arrived. The waiter raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, cook it like a hockey puck.”
My father turned to me. “My daughter would like a hot dog, French fries, and a Coke.” With the exception of the Coca Cola, the items he ordered were not on the menu.
The waiter came by with a tray of rolls and placed one on each of our plates with a set of silver tongs. Perfect balls of butter sat atop crushed ice in a silver bowl.
“How about we swing by Schwarz after lunch?” my father asked me. He took a roll and slathered it with butter. “Then we’ll have tea at the Plaza.” His light-blue eyes fixed on mine, and I felt a rush of excitement. He’d remembered.
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.