At the end of summer, we headed back to Grant’s Farm and to school. Unlike most kids who piled onto buses, our chauffeurs drove us every day and picked us up each afternoon. Over the years, I became incredibly close to one chauffeur in particular: Nathan Mayes, a tough guy from the city. After I got out of school, we would have to wait until my sisters got out from their all-girls school. While we waited, we would play and throw the ball around, or we’d just get out of the car and hang out. He’d chase me around, always making sure I was having fun. We became really good friends over the years. In many ways, my best friends and mentors were my chauffeurs. I now realize this made me a bit of an oddball at school.
As I got older, I became more aware that I was different. And my peers let me know it. I faced my fair share of bullies in my day and not just at school—also on the farm and even at camp. For a long time, I just thought that was how it was for a kid like me. For example, when I went to the Colorado River Ranch camp with Peter, we were assigned a cabin with about six other boys and a counselor. When I arrived, I laid my bag on a bed. I didn’t put much thought into it. Then some kid came in and said, “That’s my bed.”
I simply said, “Okay, well, there are other beds over there.”
The kid wasn’t having any of what he perceived as my entitled attitude. “No, that’s my bed,” he said.
I was confused. I didn’t understand what was happening, and he just hauled off and punched me square in the mouth.
I didn’t fight back, probably because I was so stunned. But, in some ways, I was kind of used to it. Peter, my very competitive brother, fought with me all the time. It was typical brother rivalry. Not only was he bigger, but he was also intimidating because he was three years old than me. I was no match for him. Even before that incident at camp, I’d had some other run-ins with bullies. When I was at Grant’s Farm on a field trip with my class (many schools took their classes to Grant’s Farm), I took all my buddies up to the concessions to give out free candy and popcorn.
A kid from another school on his own field trip came up to me and said, “Give me some candy!”
He wasn’t my friend, so I said, “No, I don’t know you, and I’ve given all I can to my friends.”
Again, he told me he wanted some candy, and without warning, he punched me.
By the fall of seventh grade, I guess you could say I was sick of being punched. I was also sick of being taunted in school. Because I spent the majority of my days with farmhands, I had developed a country accent. I was often called a redneck hoosier. But that kind of name-calling wasn’t what bothered me. There were other names that cut deep. One day when Nathan came and picked me up from school, he could tell something wrong.
He looked at me when I got in the car and said, “Billy, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Not a big deal,” I said, trying to shrug it off.
He wouldn’t let it go and looked me square in the eye and said, “Listen, you’d better tell me right now. What’s the matter with you?”
“Well, there’s this guy in school, and he’s always, you know, calling me a rich pussy. I don’t know what to do.” Even though I could handle being called a redneck, this kind of insult bothered me the most.
I could tell Nathan was upset by this. “This is what you do, Billy,” he said. “The next time he walks by you and calls you that, don’t ask any questions. You hit him in the face as hard as you can. You’ve got to do it really quick. You hit!”
“I can’t do that!” I said.
“You listen to me,” Nathan said gravely, “this is how you’re going to take care of things. You hit him as hard as you can.”
He wanted me to learn how to stand up for myself and stop being bullied. I trusted him implicitly and knew he had to be right. Nathan cared a lot about me and wanted the best for me. I promised him I would try.
Sure enough, the next day I went to school, and as I was walking through the hallway, the same kid walked by me and said, “You rich pussy.” I looked around because I was about to do what Nathan told me to do. But I stopped myself when I saw a teacher and some of the Benedictine monks who ran our all-boys school nearby. I knew I would be in serious trouble if I punched a kid in the hall. I knew how this worked: no one would care that the kid called me names. I would be in trouble for throwing the first punch.
Knowing this, I leaned over and said, “How about you and I step outside?”
He looked at me quizzically. He wasn’t expecting a response from me. “What?” he asked.
I repeated my question because I had every intention of walking out that door and doing exactly what Nathan had told me to do.
Seeing how serious I was, the kid got really nervous and said, “What’s the matter?”
I kept calm. “Nothing. Just come on outside.”
We both started heading for the door, but when we got there, the boy put his hands up and started walking backward, saying, “Bill, Bill, what’s the problem?” Of course, he knew what I was going to do. I realized right then, I didn’t even have to hit the guy to stand up for myself.
When I got in the car that afternoon, I told Nathan what had happened. “Nathan, I’ve got that taken care of. I don’t think that guy is ever going to call me names again.” He had a big smile on his face and was so proud of me. He was the first person who ever taught me how to stand up for myself, and I loved him for it. It came in handy too, because there was no shortage of people who underestimated me or felt like because of my name they could make fun of me.
That kid never called me a rich pussy again, and it didn’t take long for him to become one of my friends. Nathan had gotten it right.
Another, older kid on the playground said basically the same thing. He was the biggest kid and in the grade above me. But this time no teachers were around, so I did exactly what Nathan said to do in those situations. I hit the guy. I hit him so hard that we both went down. He was so shocked; the fight didn’t last too long. But all my friends were around us and saw it. They were cheering me on because he was an incredible bully to everyone. I took care of that. Before Nathan’s advice, I wasn’t really a fighter at all.
Nathan always had my back, and he didn’t just protect me from the bullies at school. It was quite common for the household staff to beat the hell out of us kids too. For the most part, my parents allowed it; they didn’t seem to be bothered by it. Joseph, our German butler, had a really bad temper. It didn’t take much to make him angry. He would get extremely violent when he got mad and would sometimes beat us up. I would never let anyone who worked for me ever lay a hand on my kids. But in those days, that was acceptable. The staff had free rein to discipline us physically, and in Joseph’s case, this was whenever he was in a bad mood or had too much to drink. One day I must have said or done something that upset him (though I have no recollection of what), and Joseph came at me and started beating me up. Even Yolanda, who herself was known to hit us from time to time, felt it was too much and tried to come between us. She was yelling and screaming at Joseph to stop, and she tried to pull him off me. She kept screaming, “Stop! Stop it, Joseph!” I am sure she thought he would kill me.
This all took place on a Saturday, Nathan’s day off. When Nathan came back to work on Monday, Yolanda told him what Joseph had done and how violent he had been with me. When I got in the car that morning, Nathan asked me about it. I said, “It’s okay. It’s no big deal. He just got pissed off. That’s just how he is.”
Nathan looked at me again and said, “No way, man. In no way should anyone touch you like that. That should have never happened.” I could tell he was really pissed off. I didn’t say anything else.
When I got home after school, Frank, my dad’s valet, told me that Nathan had grabbed Joseph and pinned him up against a wall. He had him by the neck and said, “If you ever touch that boy again, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”
It scared the hell out of Joseph. Later Nathan said to me, “Billy, if that man ever does that to you again, you come get me. If I’m not here, you go into the chauffeur’s room where we store the sports equipment and you grab a baseball bat. And you hit that motherfucker as hard as you can. You got it?”
My father had never said or done anything like that for me. No one had. As I said, my parents had no problem with us getting the shit kicked out of us by employees. In many ways, we were like lambs being led to the slaughter, completely unprepared for the real world. Nathan gave me the real-world training and backup none of the other adults in my life could. That’s why all of us kids were so close to a lot of the people that worked for us. They were our mentors in a lot of ways.
That all being said, even though Joseph had his moments, he wasn’t so bad. There were a lot of times he was the greatest guy, and we had a lot of fun with him. He would come down to Florida with us, and he took Andy and me to the carnival. He took us on the bumper cars, and we had the best time with him. He always told hilarious jokes. Everyone knew that his really bad temper came out when he drank too much. We all knew to prepare for it because when he got drunk, he had a tell: he would start walking on his tiptoes. If we saw him serving us dinner on his tiptoes, we knew he had been, as he used to say, “sampling the beer on tap to make sure it’s cold.”
Even he and my dad would get into it with each other once in a while. Dad fired him once, but he hired him back because he couldn’t find someone to replace him. Joseph worked so hard. He was there six days a week and worked eighteen-hour days. And that was nothing for someone like him. He’d serve us breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He’d clean the entire house, the dishes, and polish the silver. He knew the inner workings of our house better than anyone. He even counted all the lightbulbs on the first floor—some ten thousand. He loved telling people how many lightbulbs he had to check, shine, and clean. He could get away with beating us here and there because he really was irreplaceable. My dad valued work ethic above all else—and I mean all else. Luckily for me, I had Nathan looking out for my well-being and safety.
It wasn’t only the staff that looked out for me—even the elephants came to my defense on occasion. When I was eight or nine, a couple of my buddies from the farm and I were hanging out and running around by the creek. Even though I went to a private school, it was about twenty-five miles from the farm. Back then, all the kids that lived around Grant’s Farm went to public schools. So I spent my days with them. My friends recognized a few bullies from their school also hanging around the creek, and they started exchanging words. The bullies were shouting at us from the bottom of the hill, and the next thing I knew, they started running after us. There were probably six of them and three of us. As we took off running, my two friends headed one way. I was so scared, I didn’t know where I was going. When I looked back, all six of the kids were chasing me. Like Forrest Gump, I just kept running! My only thought was, I’m going to run over to Tessie. Tessie, my favorite elephant, and I had a great connection, and she always showed incredible affection toward me. She was staked out on a chain under some trees. I was breathing like a son of a gun by the time I reached her.
Tessie looked at me, and I could tell she was completely alarmed and worried. Immediately, she took her trunk and pulled me close to her. Then she saw these boys coming after me, and it dawned on her that they were chasing me. She gently let me go, moved me out of the way, and started to trumpet and make growling, roaring noises. She kept trumpeting and shaking her head, all the while flapping her ears. She was kicking up her legs, and dust was flying everywhere. As soon as the kids saw Tessie standing between them and me, it took them half a second to realize they weren’t going to be able to mess with me. They just turned around and took off the other way. Tessie came back, put her trunk around me, and pulled me close again. She started making these wonderful whistling sounds that are the sounds of affection a mother elephant might make to her calf. Long before Nathan taught me to stand up to bullies, Tessie protected me and fought my battles for me.
But all the bullying came to halt when I decided that I needed to get strong and start working out. I had become really sick of being picked on and having to defend myself constantly. Like I said, I wasn’t only picked on by the people who worked for us and by my peers, but by my older siblings as well, especially Peter. It was nothing too terrible, just normal sibling rivalry. But he definitely targeted me if he got pissed off, especially if we were competing and I happened to win. One day I was flipping through a magazine, and I saw a picture of this kid on the beach getting sand kicked in his face by some bigger kid. Next to it was another picture of the same kid transformed. He had become big and strong because he lifted weights. It was an advertisement for a weight set at Sears. I told myself right then and there, “I’m going to get that. And no one is going to pick on me ever again.”
The only problem was the set cost eighty bucks. I was about twelve or thirteen at the time, and I didn’t get an allowance and didn’t have a job yet. So I went to my dad and asked for the money, but he would never just hand money over to us. He said, “If you want the money, you will need to pull the weeds out of the pasture.” It was a six-acre pasture.
So every day when he came home from work, he’d inspect my attempts at weeding. It took me about three days to do it perfectly. When he was satisfied, he gave me the eighty dollars, and I gave it to one of the guys who worked for us. I showed him the picture in the magazine and asked, “Would you go down to Sears and get this weight set for me?”
As soon as I got it, I took that weight set down to the basement. I read how to work out in the instruction pamphlet that came with the set, and it said to work out three days a week, never more than that. So I worked out religiously and eventually got bigger and stronger. The first one to realize that I was gaining more confidence and getting stronger was Frank. One morning when we were getting ready for church, I was putting on my tie and Peter was there with me. The next thing I knew he started to get rough and tried to beat me up. I grabbed him, put him in a headlock, and punched him in the face. I couldn’t believe it. But no one was more surprised than Peter. After that, Frank came up to me and said, “Pete ain’t going to be messing with you anymore. You’ve been down there working out. I’ve been watching.” And he was right. Peter never touched me again.
By the time I was thirteen, I was pretty strong for a kid my age. It became clear I would be able to make the football team. Nathan was always throwing me the ball, but now I also had the body of an athlete. I went out for the football team, and I learned quickly that I was pretty good. Nathan and Frank loved football, so they took me under their wing and supported me. They followed my progress and watched as many games as possible. I often asked them how I was doing, and they’d tell me and help me.
In the seven years I played football, including college ball, my father only made one game. Frank told me that he was going to get my dad to come to a game whether he liked it or not. Our football field sat in a valley, with a parking lot on top of the hill. It was off-limits to drive down from the parking lot to the field. But, in the second quarter of this particular Saturday afternoon game, I looked up from the field of play and saw my father’s Mercedes slowly making its way down the hill. It was great knowing Dad finally made it to a game. I, however, wasn’t proud of the score. We were down twenty points. A few minutes later, I saw the Mercedes heading back up the hill. When I got home after the game, Frank was sitting at the kitchen table.
“Thanks for bringing Dad out, but why did you leave so soon?”
Frank replied, “Your daddy asked me what the score was and I told him you were losing twenty to nothing. And he told me, ‘Come on, Frankie, let’s get the hell out of here.’”
I had to laugh, even though I was disappointed that the one and only time my dad came to my football game we were getting our butts kicked. And that was the extent of my dad watching me play football. Meanwhile, Nathan would watch every practice and even give me pointers.
When I think of the fall, I can’t help but think of Nathan, Frank, and football. And, of course, the farm. I loved Grant’s Farm this time of year. Throughout my entire childhood, it was the one constant. The farm would anchor me and remind me of all the traditions and what was good and beautiful about life. No matter what was going on at school or with my friends, siblings, or my parents, I could count on the farm staying the same. I guess you could say it supported me like Tessie, Yolanda, Nathan, and Frank did. I could always count on it to be the same, season after season.
In the fall, we would start shutting it down for the season, and the public would stop coming. It was the time of year when the farm was just for us—the family and the workers who ran it. The sad part always was saying goodbye to Tessie and the elephants, who would head back to Busch Gardens in Tampa to avoid the harsh Missouri winters. The days became shorter; we could no longer spend hours every night out on the terrace. If it was still light when we came home, we kids would head out and pick up all the buckeyes that fell from the trees that were turning shades of bright gold, orange, and red. The air was crisp and cool. But as the weeks went on, the days got shorter still. Often by the time Dad arrived home from work, it would be dark. As night descended, we could hear the sounds of the elk bugling from the Deer Park. Since it was too dark to go coaching with the horses and there was no public to entertain, my dad would come home, take a hot bath, and come down for dinner in his pajamas. He would always have on a robe and beautiful slippers. Most evenings, he and Mom would sit in the gun room in front of the big fireplace and have a cocktail and appetizers.
At dinner, we would have a three-course meal in the beautiful dining room, sitting in front of a roaring fireplace. Christina always sat to the right of Dad. It was so clear to all of us that she was indeed the apple of his eye, his “Honey Bee.” She could do no wrong in his eyes. One night she very casually looked up at him and asked him to open his mouth. When he did so, she reached in with her fingers and pulled out his false teeth. If anyone else had done that, they would have been in trouble, but Christina had a way with Dad. He just laughed and laughed. Christina melted something inside him no one else could. This was true even on the coldest of nights, when the chill that lingered between Mom and Dad was palpable, both of them now merely tolerating each other as my dad was growing older and my mother was enjoying the prime of her life.
Like the drafty, cold, and old castle we lived in, the atmosphere was made icier by the stony silence between my parents. But the air was warmed with the help of the roaring and popping fireplace and the youthful laughter and chatter of us kids. Somehow those nights seemed to thaw even the hardest of hearts, and for a brief moment, I felt that I could hold on to what once was and what could be; that somehow things in the family could be like the farm: go through their cycles but remain the same; that, like all the times before, we would come out of this icy winter together.
Occasionally in the fall, my mother would host dinner parties, especially when it helped the company. When the head hop buyer from Germany or one of the heirs of the Anheuser family, who owned a lot of Anheuser-Busch stock, came, my parents would put on quite a show for them. They would be dressed in their finest and be on their best behavior, and all of us kids would be asked to do the same.
Halloween was a great time of year too. I loved how our house was always decorated. Giant pumpkins were brought in and adorned the front of the Big House. My parents would arrange to have a haunted house built (also called the Spook House), made of straw bales, where we crawled through the tunnels. Some years, we were allowed to have Halloween parties and invite our classes from school. And all the kids got to go through the Spook House. Then we would all hop on the train and go through the Deer Park.
My mother would always go to New York and buy us all wonderful costumes. On Halloween day, Frank would drive our whole family to Uncle Jack and Aunt Marie’s house nearby. We would go trick-or-treating and then have dinner. Usually, Harry Caray, the famous sports announcer, and other guests would be at the party. After the party, Frank would drive us directly to the shooting lodge, Belleau Farm, as the duck season opened on November 1.
Instead of being twenty-five miles from school, we were now forty-five miles away. That meant longer drives with Nathan in the morning and afternoon, which I never minded. By the time I started high school, my days at the Benedictine school were much longer. We weren’t dismissed until five o’clock in the afternoon. By the time we got back to the shooting lodge, it would be six. Even if it was dark, we kids would head out on our bikes. We loved to hang out with Dick, the son of the shooting lodge manager, Clarence, and his wife, Kate, who also worked for us. They raised six children on our farm. And all their sons worked on the farm at one time or another.
The shooting lodge was on the migration flyway for ducks and geese heading south for the winter. They stopped on the farm’s lakes to rest on their way to warmer climates. Every evening we watched and listened in amazement as thousands upon thousands of geese took flight from the rest lake and flew right over our house to spend the night on the river, honking a cacophonic chorus. They looked like giant arrows traversing the moonlit night sky. Early in the morning, their honking was like an alarm clock, waking us for our long drive back to school. This was nature at its finest, and why I love the Midwest so much to this day.
Dad loved the migration too. I never saw him so mad as the time when my brothers Adolphus and Peter took their rifles one evening and shot into the flock of geese as they flew back to the river. Shooting geese with rifles and after sunset were against the law. Dad, first and foremost, very much respected hunting regulations and strictly made sure we all followed the rules. He also knew that shooting at them in this way would mean there was a good chance they would not return and he would no longer be able to watch the migration. Dad would only allow hunting geese at the end of the season, which was just before we headed back to Grant’s Farm. Needless to say, when Dad found out, he humiliated them in front of everyone—the entire family and all the workers on the farm. He had this booming voice that was so intimidating and loud. Everyone knew that he was pissed. The public shaming was so harsh, it never happened again.
I shot my first duck with Dad on those lakes. I was about twelve years old. He took me out one day even though I had the flu and a terrible headache. But Dad loved a tradition. He took each of us kids out in the marsh at Belleau to shoot our first duck, and afterward he would mount it. Today was my day, sick or not. Out in front of us, a duck landed on the water.
My dad shouted at me, “Shoot it!”
“Dad, I can’t shoot it,” I said. “It’s sitting on the water.” I didn’t tell him what I thought, which was that it’s not very sportsmanlike to shoot a duck just sitting on the water.
He screamed back at me, “I don’t give a goddamn! Shoot!”
So I did. It was a spoony.
He sent our retriever dog, Jigs, out to get it, and when the dog brought me back the duck, Dad said, “I’m proud of you. See there, pal, you got your first duck.”
Not long after that, a mallard came flying in, and with my newfound confidence, I shot that one too. A mallard was a much nicer shot than the first, and I said, “Hey, Dad, let’s call this one my first duck instead.” If I was going to have a mounted duck, I wanted it to be a mallard that had not been sitting on the water. And sure enough, he did that for me. I still have it to this day.
We spent the whole month out at the lodge, but my favorite event was always the giant Schlachtfest, which was the German word for the ceremonial slaughter of pigs and the subsequent feast. It was a tradition in Germany for private households or inns to celebrate the end of the harvest with such a festival. In Germany it was common for the family of the slaughtered pig to invite neighbors and friends to partake in the feast. Never ones for subtlety, my parents went all out for this event. It was massive. The last year we all celebrated the Schlachtfest together, I was fifteen. My parents invited nearly five hundred people out to the lodge. They hired a German band and built a giant bonfire that everyone could dance around. Oxen were brought in from Grant’s Farm to pull a giant oxcart fully decorated with giant Bavarian pretzels and all kinds of German sausages hanging from hooks to be delivered to the guests. The pigs were slaughtered and hung the day before. Then the sausage makers would arrive at the lodge at four in the morning to get the fire going and the water boiling. The meat was ground through a giant meat grinder, and the pig’s intestines, which were used as sausage casings, would be strung out to be stuffed. Sausages of all kinds were boiled in giant cauldrons that hung over wood-burning fires, just as they would have been in ancient times.
In the evening, when the guests arrived, they were greeted with giant German steins filled with the famous Munich dunkel beer, which my father had made at the brewery specifically for the Schlachtfest. Everyone would drink their weight in beer. There were also little gin stands all around so people could drink a German gin called Steinhäger, which was meant to keep you warm. There was singing and dancing around the bonfire while the German band played the oompah music. “Ein Prosit” was always my favorite song. Later in the evening, after dinner, a rock-blues band would come in and play, and everyone would dance until early in the morning.
I can’t believe how much we all drank. I learned young and in a hurry not to drink too much of the Steinhäger, because it would get you. I knew I didn’t want to pass out or sleep through the party like my brother Andy and a couple of my friends did. The party would last all weekend, and the fire would stay lit for days. After the party, many of us would stay behind and keep stoking the fire. There was a sense that we wanted the party to last forever.
But things couldn’t last forever. The Schlachtfest signaled the end of a season, and 1974 would be the last time all of my father’s children would be together, and the last time we would celebrate this event. I was a freshman in high school. My father, at age seventy-five, was still the king of the court, though his reign was about to come to a startling end. My mother, nearing forty-seven and at the height of her beauty, was holding fast to her queendom, as vivacious and spirited as ever. She was well into her second affair. But for a brief moment, we were all together, laughing and celebrating. For one magical weekend, we were transported back into the wonderous snow globe. I can still see little Christina laughing and being her sassy self, enjoying the limelight as the youngest child. I can see my cousins and friends wrestling each other off the dock and trying to throw each other into the frozen lake. All of us kids were having the time of our lives.
Before we headed back to Grant’s Farm, all the guests would leave, and we as a family would prepare for Thanksgiving. My half siblings and all my nieces and nephews would come back to Belleau. Rollins would cook us a delicious Thanksgiving feast. Frank, Joseph, Yolanda, Nathan, and Warren would all help out. Most of my older half siblings would give toasts and speeches. August III, one of the most incredible speakers I’ve ever heard, always focused his speech on business. On that last Thanksgiving together, he announced how Anheuser-Busch was meeting and exceeding all its expectations—selling twenty-five million barrels, a record. My father beamed with pride for the brewery’s success, as well as all that his oldest son had accomplished under his watch. Whenever Anheuser-Busch reached a goal like this, he would give us each little pins or medallions that marked the milestone: 10 Million Barrels, 15 Million Barrels, and 25 Million Barrels. We all collected them and shared in my father and August III’s pride.
On that day, I thought we were going to make it as a family. Everyone seemed to be getting along. The season seemed to remind us all of what really mattered—our traditions and each other. I had never felt better. I was getting bigger. I wasn’t being bullied anymore. I was on the football team. Life was looking up.
I couldn’t wait to get back to all my friends. Before we left for Belleau, my friends and I had converted a goat house into a party house. We called it the Goat Shit House because when we found it, it was covered in goat shit. We cleaned it out, painted it, even ran electricity to it, and made it our clubhouse. We had incredible parties on the weekends there. Hundreds of public school kids would come to them. For the first time in my life, I had more friends than I could count. I couldn’t wait to get back. And the first week of December was always my favorite because with it came the Feast of St. Nicholas—one of my favorite days of the year.
That Thanksgiving I had no idea that in a few days, my entire life would fall apart. That it was the end of the Busch family as we knew it.