”Isn’t it a little past his bedtime?” Garth called after them.
The man stopped and turned. His look was open and friendly. “Brother, I’ve been waiting thirteen years for the chance to wet my whistle legally. This is a historic moment and I want my boy to remember it.”
The man and the boy moved on.
There was an electrical current running through the crowd. A brass band was assembling near the front entrance to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. Word was that they’d begin playing right at the stroke of midnight.
The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, planned to keep his campaign promise to repeal Prohibition. In the meantime he’d gotten Congress to amend the Volstead Act, thus allowing 3.2 percent beer in localities that were happy to have it. St. Louis, home of both Anheuser-Busch and the Falstaff Brewing Company, would most certainly have it. Ralph and Garth were among the hundreds who had gathered to be the first to taste Busch’s “near beer.” Nobody was getting drunk that night, but it was a welcome taste of what was to come. In just four days, Michigan would take the first step toward getting rid of the bane of Prohibition forever. Its state convention would ratify the 21st Amendment (proposed by Congress only six weeks earlier) by a walloping three-to-one margin.
America wanted desperately to be wet again.
Ralph and Garth had claimed their spot a couple of blocks from the brewery about an hour earlier. They had invited their wives to join them, but both women preferred to stay home. Ralph’s wife Vivian didn’t like crowds; she had a delicate and retiring nature. Garth’s wife Caddy didn’t like Ralph. She found him arrogant and overbearing.
The two men had become friends at a young age. Garth was poor. Ralph’s family was in the ice business. When he reached his majority Ralph inherited Morris Ice. Ralph brought Garth on as a deliveryman, then later promoted him to the job of icehouse foreman. The friendship remained intact, but Caddy had always seen the cracks in the ice. It’s hard for one friend to be Gebieter (in the parlance of Garth’s German heritage) over another. Sometimes Ralph had to make decisions that didn’t benefit his employee Garth. Garth tried to be understanding. Caddy didn’t try quite so hard.
Over the previous hour, the men, both football fans, had discussed the sordid details of the recent death of Dr. Fonsa Lambert, who had won fame for formalizing the rules of the game. He had been shot by his seventeen-year-old son Samuel, after the boy had walked in on Lambert trying to choke his wife (Samuel’s mother) to death.
The song had said that “happy days” were here again, but there was too much evidence to the contrary. At a time of national economic troubles, the U.S. Navy had come under fire for putting thousands of precious tax dollars into the construction of helium-filled airships. Despite improved building methods, the aircraft were difficult to fly and often perilous to land. Earlier that day there had been a somber press conference held for the national news services. The only three survivors of the crash of the USS Akron, a steel-framed “flying aircraft carrier,” were brought out to give their account of the tragedy. The dirigible had gone down in rough winds off the coast of New Jersey two days earlier. Investigators would later conclude that the crash couldn’t have been helped, although having life jackets on board for use by its seventy-six passengers and crew — most of whom perished by drowning — might have somewhat mitigated the tragic outcome.
The whole country was talking about the accident, along with the pending legalization of three-two beer, and FDR’s recently declared bank holiday. The Akron disaster was front and center, though. It represented, for Ralph, just another star-crossed attempt by the government of the United States to try to turn the impossible into the possible at great cost. “You take Prohibition, Garth. This idea that you can lead a man to abstinence through constitutional fiat — it was asinine from the very start, and look at all the havoc it’s wrought. And you can’t put balloons up in the air and pretend like they’re gonna do anything but bounce around like balloons. Every one of these dirigibles has been trouble. The Akron’s had one deadly mishap after another. Why, they killed two men just trying to land the Goddamned thing last year.”
Garth nodded. People had started to form themselves into a line.
“Should we be lining up, too?”
“No need. There’s plenty of beer in there for everybody. Besides, I’m tired of watching this country lining itself up: bread lines, unemployment lines. As a nation we’re always queuing ourselves up for one sorry reason or another.”
Garth licked his lips and winked. “But this is a good reason.”
“Now you take that accident last year,” said Ralph, who never had much regard for clean conversational transitions, “when the Akron tried to land in San Diego.”
“They said the sun heated up the helium too much — made the ship too buoyant.”
Ralph nodded. “You see the newsreel footage? They got this landing crew of inexperienced Navy men trying to hold the thing down with trail ropes. Then all of a sudden she starts to rise up into a nose stand, and they’ve got to free the mooring cable from the mast. In all the confusion most of those boys let go of their lines. But four sorry saps hang on.”
“One let go pretty quick, though, right?”
“Yeah. Maybe fifteen feet off the ground — the kid breaks his arm, I think. But the other three — they don’t let go. I mean, Garth, the Akron’s drifting higher and higher and those three boys — they’re still dangling from the ends of their ropes like maybe they’re hoping that ship’s gonna miraculously come right back down again. Jesus!”
Garth was well versed in the details of the story but pretended not to know too much about it. He knew that Ralph preferred it this way.
“So at about one hundred, two hundred feet, two of the kids just can’t hold on any longer and guess what happened to them.”
Garth shook his head, dutifully feigning ignorance.
“Splat, splat!” Ralph slapped the palm of his hand twice upon the roof of his car. “But the other kid — he ties himself in, and two hours later they’re able to reel him up into the ship. Man was not meant to fly by helium or hydrogen, Garth. Those German zeppelins are powder kegs just waiting for somebody to light a match.”
The crowd was getting boisterous. Both men, who had hardly been out of their teens when the legal spigot got turned off, edged a little closer to their fellow celebrants.
Ralph crushed his cigarette under his shoe. “When I heard that the ‘Queen of the Skies’ had gone down for good on Tuesday, I started thinking again about that kid Cowart — couldn’t have been more than eighteen — the way he hung on, the way it takes either a special person or a mighty dimwitted cluck to stick it out when a situation gets desperate like that. The rest of us — and that’s pretty much all of us, Garth — we reach points in our lives when we have to make those same kinds of fish-or-cut-bait decisions. Do we hang on, keep persevering in a bad situation, or do we cut ourselves loose and take a life lesson from the experience? That first boy did the sensible thing: he let go early. Broken arm, sure, but his whole life still ahead of him. Two sailors are dead because they didn’t bail out when they had the chance. That fourth kid, Cowart, is only alive because he was one lucky son of a bitch.”