TheBanyanTree: Beer and Drive-in Movies: On Being Nineteen

[Mike Pingleton]

I was chatting with some friends online and the subject of the moment
was beer.  What we liked, what tasted like horse-piss, and so on.  A 
friend from Oz confessed to liking Budweiser over the local Australian
brews.  I like Bud too, but with a bit of history attached.

Growing up four miles downwind of the famous brewery on Pestalozzi Street,
everyone I knew drank Anheuser-Busch products.  That brewery put food on
the table for lots of folks on the south side of St. Louis, either directly
or indirectly.  Warm summer nights, the sour, yeasty smell of beermaking
would be carried to us on the breeze.  "Old Gussie's working overtime
tonight," folks might say.

Bud, Busch, Michelob, we drank 'em all.  I used to drink Michelob Dark when
the only place you could get it was at the tavern on Lynch Street, just
northwest of the brewery.  The old boys there, the Lynch Street Irregulars,
kept their own personal beer mugs hanging from hooks on one wall.

I grew up in a time and place where nearly street on the south side had a
tavern on the corner every few blocks.  You couldn't get Coors and you'd
get funny looks asking for a Miller of a Schlitz in those places - the 
same funny looks if you'd confessed to owning a foreign car.  Go to Busch
Stadium to catch a Cardinals game and you'd drink AB products - old Gussie
Busch owned the stadium and the ball team and the brewery.  There wouldn't
be other beers sold in -his- ball park.

Back then you could buy beer in Illinois if you were nineteen, and so every
Friday night there would be a long glittering line of headlights heading
east across the Jefferson Barracks bridge, heading for Rouse's in Dupo or
the DewDrop Inn near Valmeyer, or maybe all the way up to My Old School in
Glen Carbon.  Rouse's sold package liquor to go and you could get the cheap
stuff, like Heileman's Big Jug Beer, a half-gallon of nastiness for a buck
eighty nine.  Pabst seven-ounce 'ponies' were popular if a concert was
coming up - six of them could be taped around each ankle, and remain hidden
under bell-bottomed blue jeans.  The little town taverns in Columbia and
Valmeyer and Milstadt carried German import beers for the local Kraut farmers,
opportunities for us to try something new. 

Whereever we'd end up, after having a couple or three smoothies to go we
would get a case of beer to go, because Saturday night was drive-in night
back home across the Mississippi, and the South Twin ws a great place to
party without getting hassled very much by the local cops.  We'd park the
old pickup truck backwards into a space, about halfway between the screen
and the snack bar, drop the speaker box into the bed, and sit on the 
lowered tailgate, surreptitiously sipping a Bud or a Busch while the warm
summer sun finished sliding down the sky.  The movie never mattered - it
could be Jaws or Orca or Rocky or The Sting, for the first time or the tenth
time.

Night would slowly come on the wings of the nighthawks catching mosquitoes
overhead, and the night's cinema would kick off with a Woody Woodpecker
cartoon, followed by advertisements for the snack bar which contained poorly
edited subliminal messages like POPCORN and DRINK COKE.  There were two
movies on Saturday nights, the first for families, the second for the teenage
crowd.  Beer followed beer in slow succession and when the light was finally
gone, the sweet smell of marijuana would come wafting on the night breeze.
And we'd sit there on the tailgate, kicking back with our friends and maybe
a girlfriend, as time slowed down to a crawl, and you felt that the summer
of nineteen would stretch on forever and ever...