When you live in a fairy tale, it’s easy to assume that it has always been and always will be magical. There is no sense that there was a “before” or that there could ever be “The End.”
I grew up in such a surreal existence, I now realize. Of course, at five, eight, ten years old, I had no idea that my childhood was different from most. I also realize that being a Busch child was very different from being a Busch adult. Back then I didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes or what had gone on long before I arrived to make all of this “magic” happen.
It wasn’t until I was in my forties—with children of my own—that it began to hit me how little I knew about the true and whole history of the Busch family—the improbability of the inception of it, and the struggles to survive over nearly two centuries and several generations, from my great-grandfather Adolphus to my grandfather August Sr. and then to his heirs who led the company after his death: my uncle Adolphus III and then, of course, my father, August Jr., “Gussie.”
As an adult Busch, I worked on the grounds of Grant’s Farm, then in the distributorships, and even played polo for the Bud Light team. My life was so thoroughly “Busch” I never saw the need to stop and think about how it all started or that it ever might end—that the reins that held us together were loosening and might break away altogether. I had no idea how fragile it had been in so many ways. On paper we Busch heirs are listed as being worth more than $13 billion combined. According to Forbes, we’re one of the twenty richest families in America. We’ve been an American staple since 1876—and I’m not just talking about our beer. Our family, our advertising—especially our iconic Clydesdales—and our style of business have all become synonymous with America. We’re the poster children of the American dream—that not-so-outdated belief that hard work, entrepreneurship, grit, and a positive can-do attitude can make anything possible. From the company’s inception, Adolphus was committed to passing that belief onto his son and was hell-bent on keeping it within the family forever. This tradition reigned supreme. It was a family business. End of story. Back then everyone chipped in, and everyone did their part to help the company. As much as I was born into a family, I was also born into a business. There was never supposed to be a separation—ever. This we knew. This was our legacy. My father wasn’t just my father. He was my boss. He told us what to do, and we did it. We were all there to help out. I didn’t know where my family ended and the business started. They were so closely entangled that it lives that way in my memories too.
One of the biggest regrets of my life, and why I have so thoroughly dedicated my life to my children, is that I never truly got to know my father—as my father. Sure, I spent time with him. I sat beside him while he took the reins and inspected the park. When I was very young, we traveled with him, as he did with his father and grandfather, by private railcar. As I got older, we cut the travel time down to our home in St. Petersburg, Florida, from two days to four hours when we traveled via the private two-propeller Gulfstream. By the time I was in my early teens, it only took us a couple of hours to get to Florida in the private jet. Although, that’s not the only way we got around—I recall traveling aboard my father’s 120-foot-long yacht—the famous A & Eagle. We usually boarded it from our compound on the bay of St. Petersburg, where we docked our yachts and fishing and recreational boats. Here we also owned several houses where our housekeepers, chef, butlers, chauffeurs, and some company employees stayed.
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The family lived on the beachside of St. Petersburg in a spacious house with seven bedrooms that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. It was where, over the years, my father entertained the Cardinals baseball team, baseball Hall of Famers, and many sports greats such as Jack Buck, Lou Brock, Stan Musial, Mike Shannon, Bob Gibson, Harry Caray, Ozzie Smith, Pete Rose, and Marge Schott. He also hosted many dignitaries and celebrities at home and on the yacht, such as Ed McMahon and Ulysses S. Grant III, the president’s grandson.
In 1975 we took the A & Eagle up the coast of Florida to Williamsburg, Virginia. We sailed right up the James River and pulled into the newly acquired land my father had bought from Colonial Williamsburg and turned into a brewery and family-attraction theme park. He had hoped it would help bring tourism and more jobs to the area. I don’t know many kids who can say they arrived to spend a day at a theme park that their father owned by way of a yacht. It was memorable even for me, who, in so many ways, took for granted the ease with which we traveled back then. And yet, we had lots of routine outings too—like attending Cardinals baseball games in Busch Stadium.
My father lived for the company—and all that it entailed. It was all he thought about, talked about, and gave his energy to. I sat with him at the dinner table each night and listened (we spoke only when spoken to) as he and my mother discussed that day’s work in the brewery. He didn’t have much time for us kids. And there were a lot of us—seven from his marriage with my mother, Trudy, (Adolphus IV, Beatrice, Peter, Gertrude, Andrew, Christina, and of course, me) and four from his two previous marriages (Lilly and Lotsie from his first marriage, and Elizabeth and August III from his second). Of course, by the time I came along, most of the older children were either long gone or so much older than me, they were practically strangers—or at the very least like cousins or aunts or uncles. In fact, because of the age difference, though we knew they were our half siblings, my father and mother requested we call Lotsie, Lilly, Elizabeth, and August III, as well as all adults, by the formal Aunt or Uncle. Though kids of the current generation may not be familiar with this notion, it was a form of endearment and respect, and my parents expected us to treat our elders with the utmost respect.
My father left the rearing of us seven children to my mother, who in turn left it to the cadre of servants, housekeepers, gardeners, chauffeurs, nannies, farmhands, and cooks as she readied herself for my father each day with her own team: a hairdresser and manicurist. Now, I know he loved us—there is no doubt or question about that—but my father wasn’t a man who spoke the words specifically or regularly. He wasn’t a man who knew each one of his kids, at least not in the way I know my own. I certainly couldn’t imagine speaking to my father the way my wife, Christi, talks to her parents or my children talk to me—so freely and openly.
While many people have come to know Christi and my children through our MTV reality show, The Busch Family Brewed, there are so many more stories that people don’t know, conversations they don’t see when the cameras aren’t rolling. My wife and I take parenting very seriously. It’s the most important job we’ll ever have. There is something so amazing about parenting and fatherhood. I never take it for granted. When I held my firstborn, Billy Jr., in my arms, I promised him I would get to know him—all of my children—in a way my father never knew me. I also wanted to be able to share with them parts of my life and growing up, because I never had that kind of relationship with my own dad. Through the years I have passed on some of these stories, but in so many ways this book is for them so that they will know the history too. So that they will know the legacy they have inherited the way I know it, respect it, and revere it. I want them to know their father in a way I never got to know my own.
That being said, for all that talk of not “knowing” or “getting deep” with my dad, I was there. I saw him in action. What I knew about growing up an heir to the Busch family I learned from the front row—sitting at the dinner table beside my father, living in his home. My siblings and I are the few people in the world who saw firsthand what being a Busch meant to him. Just as my father grew up in the brewery and personally watched his father, August Sr., run the company during some of the most tumultuous times for this country and the brewery. Though I was not privy to what was happening behind closed doors at the brewery—only what he said about the day’s events after the fact. I witnessed how the work energized him, gave him purpose, joy, and something to fight and live for. I also saw how tightly he held onto it, how he reacted and spiraled when it slipped from his grasp, and how strongly he railed against the injustice of it all being taken away from him so cruelly in the end.
He made me pick a side when things started to sour. The ultimatum from him was clear: It’s them or me. In the end, I chose my father. I chose him not because I knew what was right for the company or what was going on, but out of loyalty and love. He was my hero. My shining beacon in the darkest night. But like a beacon, he stood alone, far from me—from so many people. We could see his light, but we could not penetrate the fortress beneath. We could not know the depth of his personal hell or the pain he was going through. In truth, I never tried. We didn’t have that type of relationship. It was a relationship of smart quips, jabs to the shoulder, bonding over sports and company talk, and short sayings. It was common for my siblings and me to hear him ask rhetorically: “What would Adolphus do?” There was no need to reply. The answer resided in the history, the myth, the legacy that was our family lore. It was shorthand for a laundry list of values and behaviors that drove the Busch family to success.
In 2006 my kids were getting older, I knew my time playing polo competitively was running out, and I was thinking about going back into running a distributorship myself. So I finally sat down and read Making Friends Is Our Business: 100 Years of Anheuser-Busch, the definitive history written in 1953 by Roland Krebs and Percy J. Orthwein. I was just in awe of the incredible effort that it took my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father to build the family business. This led me to explore all the photo albums, notes, and memorabilia my father had collected over the years.
Christi and I would get lost for hours poring over letters he wrote. I had known my father as an older man, but the letters that he wrote as a young man to his wife showed a romantic and sentimental side to him I rarely, if ever, saw. Through piles and piles of letters, notes, even cocktail napkins and matchboxes he collected from events over the years, Christi and I were able to piece together the story of his childhood; his relationships with his parents, his grandfather Adolphus, his wives, and his children; and ultimately what really mattered to him. We got to know the man in a way we couldn’t while he was alive. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know any of this when I was a boy—that my father didn’t share these stories with me. I suppose it was because we were too busy at the time making our own.
Sure, I had heard the family legends. The most poignant is the one where my great-grandfather Adolphus and his brewmaster, Carl Conrad, traveled to Germany, trying to come up with the idea for the perfect beer. They went everywhere trying different beers. Then one evening they had trouble finding a place to sleep. They were exhausted after a night of riding horses through town after town when they ended up in a small bohemian town called Budweis. As if this story wasn’t biblical enough, there was “no room at the inn” for the poor fellows, but they found a light shining outside the door of a Benedictine monastery. The porter who met them said that they could come in but would need to wait to sleep. The monks were just gathering for dinner, and they invited the men to join them. The two exhausted travelers sat down to a meal, which was, of course, served with the monks’ homemade brew. Adolphus and Carl took their first sip and fell instantly in love. They asked the monks to show them how they made it. That recipe became the legendary King of Beers, Budweiser. The rest is history.
These were the types of stories I heard as a boy—part magic, part legend. And it’s a great story. Whether it was 100 percent true or not didn’t matter to me back then. I don’t even remember the moment I heard it for the first time. Memories are fleeting, like dreams to me now. It was passed around so much—and of course, over time liberties were taken with a detail here and there, as stories and memories are wont to do.
The boy who grew up into a man and then became a father became more interested in true stories. The fairy-tale version had been smashed long before that, and I wasn’t interested in legends anymore. I’d had my fill of those. I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to understand my father and what made him the man he was, what made my siblings the way they were, and what ultimately tore us all apart. I also wanted to know how to start a business of my own and carry on the family legacy my ancestors and father fought so mightily for and which this current generation lost.
I never met my great-grandfather Adolphus Busch, yet his memory loomed large because he so deeply lived in my father. Most of us who grew up with living grandparents know what a strong and lifelong impression they can leave on a grandchild’s heart and mind. My father was a teenager when Adolphus died. He was there when his grandfather, beloved in St. Louis, arrived back from his vacation home in Germany in a casket and was paraded through the streets of St. Louis like the war hero he was (Civil War, that is).
I wanted to know Adolphus myself. I figured that if I could understand him better, I could see things more clearly and perhaps be in a better position to change some of the outcomes for my own children. We are very much a result of our pasts and our legacies, but I also believe that we can learn from past mistakes and create a better future for ourselves and future generations.
Through reading Making Friends Is Our Business and the memorabilia my father left behind, I found out that my great-grandfather arrived in America in 1857 at just eighteen years old—along with a million German immigrants in that decade. Adolphus’s ship arrived at the port of New Orleans. He wasn’t poor—by any stretch. He was the second-to-last of twenty-two children born to a wealthy wine merchant and, like many Germans, was seeking to build even more fortune in the free market of the great idea that was the United States of America. With more than a quarter of St. Louis’s inhabitants being German, Adolphus knew that St. Louis would be the best spot for him to get his start. He had already heard that he would have no problem securing work there. The place was teeming with breweries, cultural venues, German places of worship, and even German newspapers.
He traveled up the mighty Mississippi and hopped off the riverboat wide-eyed, his heart filled with possibility. I can only imagine the sights he must have seen. There was no iconic arch back then or steel bridges crossing the river’s mighty expanse. There were no skyscrapers or casinos along the shoreline. Yet St. Louis was still a bustling industrious city for its time and brimming with promise. Adolphus wasted no time getting started.
As a son of a wealthy businessman involved in numerous undertakings, Adolphus had a businessman’s mind. He knew where to seek out opportunities by identifying what customers needed. There were already many breweries in St. Louis. What the area needed was a supply company. It just made sense. He worked for two years as a riverboat clerk, making friends and getting connected while planning and saving for the right move. When his father passed away in 1859, he used his inheritance to buy into an already established supply company, which he renamed the Wattenberg, Busch & Company—and quickly began expanding his business. It became one of the most successful wholesale houses in St. Louis.
One of his repeat customers was Eberhard Anheuser, another wealthy businessman who was trying to turn around a failing brewery and make it profitable. At some point in their growing business relationship and friendship, no doubt at one of the many social events and parties, Eberhard introduced his daughter Lilly to Adolphus. The two married on March 7, 1861.
Not long after they married, the South seceded from the Union and America was at war. Though my great-grandfather had only been in the country for eight years, he felt the desire to support the Union, and so he joined the fight.
When he returned from the war, he found out that his father-in-law’s brewery had racked up a large amount of debt. The crux of the issue was that he brewed terrible beer and the discerning St. Louis patrons had their pick of fine-tasting beers throughout the city.
Adolphus offered to help his father-in-law and began working for him. He split his time working at the brewery and the supply company until 1869 when he sold his interest in Wattenberg, Busch & Company to devote all his time to brewery operations. Despite the less-than-stellar recipe, Adolphus somehow managed to turn the company around, and in 1873, Lilly’s father made Adolphus a partner. Adolphus owned a minority stake, but when Eberhard died in 1880, Lilly’s inherited shares were added to Adolphus’s and that gave him the majority stake in the company, which was renamed the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. He was now the first Busch to be president of Anheuser-Busch.
Adolphus’s first move was to change that awful recipe. He knew it wouldn’t be difficult to sell a great-tasting beer. He traveled through Europe in search of the perfect recipe (which he found in the town of Budweis), then partnered with his friend Carl Conrad to establish the Budweiser brand. There’s always a bit of truth in every legend, isn’t there?
Now that he had a great sales strategy (he made friends with everyone) and the greatest, smoothest-tasting pale lager in town, he could begin to grow his budding business.
My great-grandfather was not a contented man. Contented men rarely seek out innovative ideas. In contrast, he was always on the vanguard of what was new and groundbreaking and was always trying to find ways to edge out the competition. He was the first brewer to pasteurize beer. This allowed him to bottle and store the beer, without fear of it spoiling. As his production sped up and they were capable of making large quantities that lasted for longer periods, he thought it would be advantageous to set up a system of railside icehouses so that his beer could go anywhere trains went. He became the first brewer to set up national distribution.
Looking for ways to improve icehouses, he was also the first brewer to use artificial (non-ice) refrigeration. He first used it in his plant and then began to outfit train cars with it so beer could be transported as far away as New York and California. He bought interest in the rail company, the bottling company, and coal mines to fuel his railcars. Everything the company needed to operate he owned and controlled. As a result of this, he could minimize costs and pass on the savings to his customers. No one was doing this at the time. Certainly not in the beer world. Before there was Jeff Bezos, there was Adolphus Busch, buying up every vendor he could think of to get his customers their products as fast and as inexpensively as possible.
He was also a sales and marketing genius, a true visionary. Adolphus was a man who believed in brand recognition and awareness long before it was “a thing.” He wanted people to think of Budweiser when they thought of beer. He provided bars with promotional light fixtures—proudly displaying the Budweiser name, of course—and even glassware etched with Budweiser, as long as they agreed to complete exclusivity in exchange. He made sure to have a controlling interest in bars too. In some cases, he paid bar owners’ rents. In return, the bars and taverns could only sell Budweiser beer. Since all customers loved the taste and price, none objected.
He used influencers to spread his brand long before there was TikTok or Instagram, making sure taverns and bars did the work of selling for him. If he could get people to connect personally and viscerally to the product, he knew they’d be customers—friends, that is—for life. That’s why he always said, “Making friends is our business.” And what do friends do? They tell other friends.
But my great-grandfather could be merciless. Every time he went into a bar that served his beer, he made sure that it was up to his standards. If the beer tasted bad or was served sloppily, there would be hell to pay. He had unbelievably high standards, just like my own father. My father could walk into a seemingly perfect room, and if there were two hundred lights and one was out, he would see it and let everyone know. It would have to be fixed on the spot. Adolphus, like my father, was always pushing the envelope and wanting more out of his company and his people. He always had his sights set on the next big thing. In so many ways, I knew this man. I can hear him, see him, and even smell him—that mixture of beer and cologne, something akin to my father. No, I never met him, but he looms so large in my imagination because I know he lived on in his son, and then in my father.
Adolphus was a man determined to see his company reach the far ends of the earth. He wasn’t going to be satisfied just with it hitting every city in America. (My father was like that too.) He was a man who was always thinking generations ahead. He began grooming his firstborn son to take over, but Edward died of cancer too early to succeed him, leaving my grandfather, August Sr., to take over the reins. August Sr. would, in turn, train both my father and his oldest son, Adolphus. And my father continued the tradition, starting to groom his firstborn son—August III, my oldest (half) brother—at a young age, pouring all his time and attention into him, because he felt so strongly about keeping the business in the family.
Adolphus and Lilly had thirteen children, nine of which made it to adulthood. He had homes—mansions—in St. Louis, Missouri; Pasadena, California; Cooperstown, New York; and even a villa on the banks of the Rhine in Bad Schwalbach, Germany, which he named after his wife: the Villa Lilly. He opened his home in Pasadena, Ivy Wall, to the public, and it became the first of several Busch Gardens—a beautiful place where the public could gather and bring their families and take in the gorgeous gardens. He counted as his neighbors Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and many other influential Americans who were envious of his beautiful home and gardens and who used his mansion as the standard for their own massive homes.
Unlike many of his contemporaries—most notably the infamous and supposed “robber barons” of the Gilded Age, who were ruthless about making money—my great-grandfather believed strongly in making the American dream possible for as many people as were willing to do the work. He worked tirelessly to create jobs so others could afford homes, have a place to work, and live with a sense of pride in their accomplishments. He was a huge philanthropist, gave money to schools like Harvard, and paid and treated his employees well. Money was never his endgame, another part of his legacy. In all the years I grew up with my father, the topic of “making more money” or being “ruthless”—laying off employees, cutting wages, etc.—never was something he discussed. Quite the opposite. For my father, it was always about finding ways to make more jobs, give back to the community, and create parks and areas where families could enjoy themselves—while enjoying Budweiser, of course. Although we were surrounded by wealth, I never got the sense we were better than anyone else. My father, and I am sure his father and his father before that, made sure we all knew the value of a hard day’s work and being kind to others—after all, making “friends” (not just money) was the family business.
Ironically enough, making friends paid off in the end. The boy from Germany who arrived in St. Louis with nothing but blind ambition, a dream, and a friendly personality had risen to the highest echelons of society in the American Gilded Age. His dream that his beer would become world renowned had become a reality. And thanks in no small part to him and his brewery in St. Louis, by 1911 the United States surpassed Germany in beer production.
Adolphus had hoped the company would remain in the family forever. He fought mightily in his lifetime to do just that. Though Prohibition was looming, he did his best to lobby and fight hard against it. He took his argument straight to President McKinley and argued that beer was the drink of moderation and temperance. In fact, he believed it had health benefits. He, like my own father, was adamantly against the use of heavy narcotics, straight alcohol, and the state of inebriation. I know my father never believed in drinking until one was drunk. He learned that from his father and grandfather. Adolphus even warned McKinley and many leaders pushing for Prohibition that making it illegal would open up a Pandora’s box of crime and dangerous substances that would fill the vacuum left by the moderate beverage he served. (Talk about being a visionary!)
Adolphus didn’t live to see Prohibition. He passed away in 1913 after falling ill while hunting with his old friend Carl Conrad, who had helped Adolphus make his dream become a reality. The two were at the Villa Lilly, vacationing in Germany at the time. When he died, his net worth was an estimated $60 million, an astounding figure for that day. His body returned to America aboard his favorite steamer, the Kronprinz Wilhelm, and was carried from New York to St. Louis aboard his railcar, the Adolphus, which had been bedecked and styled for a prince. He had designed the railcar himself because he enjoyed arriving everywhere in the utmost style. (It was said that anything considered to be tacky or flashy was called “Buschy” back then!)
My great-grandfather Adolphus was nothing if not extravagant. He spared no expense—even in death. As he was paraded through St. Louis, people stopped working and stepped out in the streets and bowed their heads, as if the King himself had died. And for them, he was the king, the King of Beers, that is. He was so beloved and admired throughout the city that people mourned him as they would family. Tens of thousands of visitors came to his home to pay their respects personally; many of them were factory workers. And it was reported that as many as one hundred thousand people lined the route to the cemetery on the day of his burial.
People had come to love his boisterous and friendly personality. He was a familiar fixture in St. Louis households. He greeted everyone he met with a handshake and even handed out silver coins to children. Wherever he went, children flocked to him. I don’t have to imagine the scene. I witnessed his grandson have the same effect on people. I can still see the people swarming around my father in his coach as he snapped the reins and headed out to survey the property. So much of Adolphus lived on in my father. I am sure my father learned a few of Adolphus’s tricks when he was a boy, watching the man work the crowds wherever he went. It’s impossible not to see how much Adolphus influenced my dad, right down to his flashy clothing, his wavy, coiffed hair, and his booming voice when he yelled. And there was the darker side as well: the side that demanded excellence and perfection and saw anything less as unacceptable. But it worked for them; they got the job done that they set out to do, and people revered and respected them all the same.
When Adolphus died, he had no idea when he handed over the reins to his son August Sr., my grandfather, that it was so close to all being lost, that within a year America would be at war with Germany and the Busch family would have to prove their “American affections.” And his worst nightmare would come true seven years after his passing: Prohibition would become law, threatening everything—his legacy, his fortune, his name, his children’s birthright, and his company, the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association.
From the day my grandfather, August Busch Sr., took the reins, he had to fight like hell to save the legacy his father bequeathed to him. And that fight would cost him his life and, in so many ways, would portend the fate of the company just two generations later.