Free Bitter Brew: The Rise and Fall of Anheuser-Busch and America's Kings of Beer by William Knoedelseder Page B

Louis–based Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, whose Falstaff brand was the No. 1 seller in the city, a fact that galled Gussie no end. He knew the electronic media’s potential for selling beer. In 1950, Anheuser-Busch became the first brewery to sponsor a network TV program, The Ken Murray Budweiser Show . The one-hour Saturday-night variety program ran on fifty-one CBS stations and often showed the host and his guests sipping the sponsor’s product live on the air. Budweiser registered sales increases in those fifty-one markets that were double those in other cities.
    Gussie liked everything he heard. With one move, he could deny the city of Milwaukee, home of Pabst and Schlitz, a professional baseball team, wrest the Cardinals’ broadcasting rights away from Griesedieck Brothers, and turn Sportsman’s Park, where the Cardinals played, into a giant outdoor tavern—thirty thousand Budweiser drinkers held captive for two or three hours at a time in the sweltering St. Louis heat. Better yet, as Al Fleishman explained, the acquisition could be sold to the public as an act of good citizenship on the part of Anheuser-Busch, and Gussie would be celebrated as “the man who saved the Cardinals for St. Louis.”
    Done deal. Gussie agreed to pay Saigh $2.5 million and assume $1.25 million of Saigh’s debt. He bludgeoned the A-B board into going along with the plan, which included naming himself president of the team. The board also acquiesced when, after an inspection tour of Sportsman’s Park, Gussie decided to buy the stadium for $800,000 and spend another $400,000 on badly needed repairs and refurbishing.
    The local newspapers played the story just the way Al Fleishman said they would. “Busch Saves the Cards for St. Louis” blared the banner headline on the front page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat .
    On March 10, 1953, a stockholders meeting at A-B headquarters drew a record one hundred people (only twenty-one had attended the previous meeting) who voted 99 percent of the outstanding shares in favor of the acquisition. In a room with blowups of recent press coverage displayed on the walls, Gussie spoke about the tremendous public relations potential of the team. “Development of the Cardinals will have untold value for the development of our company,” he said. “This is one of the finest moves in the history of Anheuser-Busch.” At a subsequent press conference, however, he played up the benefits to the city and delivered a line that Fleishman obviously scripted to preempt any impertinent questions from reporters about the new owner’s love of the game.
    â€œI’ve been a baseball fan all my life,” Gussie said. “But I’ve been too busy to get out to the park in recent years, unfortunately.”
    In all the excitement surrounding the announcement, Gussie stumbled when he told reporters off-the-cuff that he intended to rename the ballpark Budweiser Stadium. Howls of protest went up immediately, decrying the crass commercialization of the great American pastime. Baseball commissioner Ford Frick called Gussie directly to tell him the organization could not condone naming a ballpark after an alcoholic beverage. Al Fleishman drew the unpleasant task of trying to talk Gussie out of something he wanted to do. Suggesting that there might be a more appropriate name for the ballpark, Fleishman deftly pointed out that when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the Chicago Cubs in the 1920s, he named the ballpark Wrigley Field, not Juicy Fruit Field. Gussie got the point, admitted he made a mistake, and Sportsman’s Park became Busch Stadium, supposedly in honor of his grandfather, father, and brother.
    Gussie wasted no time establishing himself as a hands-on owner. Three days after the stockholders meeting, he pulled into the Cardinals spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, behind the wheel of his motorbus, trailed by a caravan of