“Whites aren’t safe down here anymore,” my father said, switching lanes to avoid hitting a man who carried a boom box on his shoulder. “Coleman Young’s made sure enough of that.”
Coleman Young was the mayor of Detroit. My uncles, who ran the family company, were always having meetings with “Mr. Young,” making “deals” with him. Uncle Peter and Great Uncle John ran the brewery, Uncle Gari the ice cream division. As children, we understood Coleman Young to be the king of Detroit, someone our family had to please at all costs, because we were white.
I could see the Stroh’s Beer sign just ahead, hovering above the brewery in red block letters that lit up the sky. It always startled me, seeing our name like that, and I looked away as we turned into the parking lot, focusing instead on the rows and rows of blood-red beer trucks, Stroh’s Beer inscribed in gold across their sides.
My father swung open the door to the Brewhaus, allowing Bobby and Charlie through. My father smiled down at me as I passed through in my red winter coat, one of my mittens trailing on the floor from the string connecting them through my sleeves.
All through the cavernous space was the pungent scent of hops and wheat. Enormous copper cauldrons of brew, one after another, emitted their noxious steam as we walked a catwalk running along the perimeter of the space. We looked down at the blue-uniformed men adding ingredients to the brew through sliding hatches on the sides of the cauldrons, their rosy copper gleaming under the fluorescent lighting.
“Can you smell that beer?” my father shouted over the din of machinery. “It’s cooked with real fire.” He pointed to a row of six copper cauldrons that had been tiled around their sides, like bathtubs. “The fire’s inside.”
I was just learning to read. I remembered seeing the words Fire-Brewed on a beer bottle in our refrigerator.
“Only fire-brewed beer in the U.S.,” my father told us as he stamped out his cigarette on the catwalk. “We do it the old-fashioned way.”
My father worked in the marketing department. Sometimes he flew to Hollywood to oversee the production of Stroh’s Beer commercials. Later, he’d show me the ads on TV while we sat eating pizza in the library at home. My favorite was an ad in which a pretzel climbed up a bottle of beer to take a sip.
My father led us around the perimeter of the Brewhaus. He tapped his cigarette pack on his open palm to knock one out. He wore a dark-gray pinstriped suit with a white shirt and a burgundy tie dotted with tiny tennis racquets. He had on businessman shoes—lace-up black barges with pointy toes and tiny eyelets in the hard leather, shoes that weighed as much as a small dog when I picked them up in his closet, especially with the shoe horns still in them.
“Dad, wear these,” I would say as he dressed for work, holding up the leaden shoes. He had at least ten pairs to choose from.
He always walked over in his black socks, held up by suspenders just below his knees, and took the shoes. “Thanks, Minuscule.”
My father leaned into the railing of the catwalk. He looked at Bobby and Charlie, as he drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. “You two will work here someday. This is your company.”
“I know, Dad,” said Charlie, as if he’d heard my father say this many times.
Bobby and Charlie studied the men who loaded the hops into the vats. Bobby brushed his auburn curls out of his eyes. At twelve and fourteen, my brothers were big boys and, with their tweed jackets and corduroys, seemed nearly ready to don their own business suits. Fair skinned and freckled, like my mother, Bobby went to a boarding school in Connecticut called Kent—the same name as my father’s cigarette brand. Charlie, too, would soon go away to school. He shared my father’s coloring—straight blond hair, blue eyes, rosy skin— none of which stopped my father from favoring Bobby, his firstborn.
“Dad, can I have that job?” Charlie asked excitedly, pointing down at a man who took the temperature of a glass of golden liquid.
“Sure, Chas,” said my father, “maybe some summer when you’re in college.”
Where would I work at the company? I wondered. I’d seen only one woman since we’d arrived—at the reception desk. “What about me, Dad?”
My father smiled his Hollywood smile. “You? You’re going to be a movie star, right, Franny?”
This was one of our inside jokes. My father adored old movies—anything with Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby—and their beautiful leading ladies: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn.
We crossed into the bottle shop, where an endless procession of dark-brown bottles were filled with beer, labeled, and sorted as they traveled through a mechanized assembly line—a miniature of the one I’d seen at the Ford plant on a school field trip. I watched, fascinated, as the bottles marched along, like ants, toward some mysterious place where they would be loaded into cases and trucked away.