to the railroad was key. Trains, now equipped with steam engines, gave the Beams a fast way to ship their whiskey. The telegraph helped business, too; when barkeeps ran low on liquor, they finally had a way to reach distillers and order more. Also adding to the growth of the industry was a change in the distillery process. David M. and other distillers began getting away from the pot still and using something called a column still. These new stills increased production so that more bourbon could be made.
Thanks to trains and new production methods, bourbon became firmly established in the Ohio River Valley and beyond. It soon emerged as the drink of choice in the Old West. When cowboys bellied up to bars in Dodge City and Austin and other frontier towns and asked for a whiskey, chances are that they got bourbon. It was the drink of cowboys.
During the Civil War, troops on both the Union and Confederate sides had their share of bourbon. In addition to helping to ease pain and fortify a soldier's spirits, it served as an anesthetic to help the wounded. Kentucky was a border state. It stayed in the Union – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of the president, was from Kentucky – but you could still own slaves, so it was essentially neutral. Legend has it that when the Union troops came to the Beam distillery, David M. flew the American flag; when the Confederates marched in, up went the rebel colors. Both were good customers.
After the war, David M. launched a new product called Old Tub, which proved quite popular for years. He also increased production. The Beam enterprise was on solid footing when Jim Beam, David M.'s son, joined the business at age 16. Young Jim proved a fast learner, and aided his father on both the distilling and business end. By the time he was 30 he was in charge, and he moved things forward as fast as he could. He built more rack houses to store more whiskey and he hired more people to do more work.
This went on for years. Then Prohibition hit – and it hit hard. Even though Jim had seen it coming (the temperance movement had been growing for a long time), he didn't have much of a plan B. When the law was finally repealed, Jim and his family dusted themselves off and got the old distillery in Clermont operational as fast as they could. But making whiskey takes time – years – so while Jim's whiskey was sitting in barrels aging, trying to get old fast, thirsty Americans turned to Scotch and Canadian spirits, which were already available and ready for immediate consumption. While Jim's ancestors had, no doubt, faced their own share of problems, they had never faced the challenges that confronted him, and consequently he feared that he might be the last of a line of bourbon makers, a dynasty stopped dead in its tracks.
Booker and his family were somewhat impervious to the problems of Granddaddy Jim. They were one step removed from the whiskey industry. Booker's father never joined the family business, opting instead for the steady paycheck the First People's Bank offered. Still, they remained close to the bourbon-making side of the family, frequently piling into Old Green and heading over to Bardstown to pay Jim a visit. Despite circumstances, Jim and Mary Beam still lived in a house that, while not palatial, was certainly substantive. With its wide front porch and white column pillars it was a fixture on what was called Distiller's Row on North Third Street. The house was across the street from Jack Beam's house (Jim's uncle, who ran the Early Times distillery), and right next door to the home of the Samuels, another renowned bourbon family. There were big Sunday dinners, with bridge games in the parlor and sips of bourbon and water for the menfolk in the backyard on summer evenings. Jim wore a coat and tie most everywhere, and while his collar might have been a little frayed, he kept up appearances just fine.
He also kept a keen eye on his oldest grandson as he watched him run about the yard tossing a football, amazed at his dexterity as well as his burgeoning size. Booker was growing faster than a weed – tall and wide – fueled by an appetite that could only be described as prodigious. Ham, baloney, cheese, bread, pies, cakes, chicken, and fish: no one could eat like Booker. No one.
Booker's weight become more than a curiosity, however, when after a routine check of the boy's tonsils a doctor informed Margaret that Booker was simply growing too big, too fast.
“That boy eats like the man he'll never grow up to be,” he told Margaret. “He needs to slow down or he'll never make it to 20.”
Try as she might, Margaret couldn't get Booker to ease up at the table. The result was a man-child, a giant who kept eating and growing, his appetite for all things insatiable.
Booker's largeness defined him. Years later he would say, “I'm big, so I've always stood out.” He was the largest child in grammar school and later in high school, and because of his sheer size he was literally and figuratively looked up to as a leader, someone to follow. Over time, his personality caught up to his size. He knew people were looking at him and knew he intimidated folks and, while never soliciting that attention, he gradually accepted it and the responsibility that went with it. He became outgoing and popular, generous to a fault, and a fixture at parties and community events. Even as a youth, nothing ever happened until Booker Noe got there.
Despite his build, he wasn't a lumbering giant. Far from it. He was quick on his feet, moving about with an athlete's grace and stamina. He didn't get winded. Rather, even as a boy he could outwork grown men. Consequently he was in demand as a field hand around Springfield, cutting tobacco, beating the seeds out of hemp, bailing hay. Farmers were willing to pay top dollar for the strong Noe boy, who could work 10 hours without breaking a sweat as long as you fed him.
When Booker reached adolescence he went to the local school, Springfield High, but that didn't work out as planned. It seems he couldn't contain his rambunctiousness: His appetite for fun had become as large as his appetite for country ham. He loved parties, especially family parties, where he was known to sneak out and retrieve empty bottles of 100-proof Old Tub from behind the shed and, according to an Esquire magazine interview he gave many years later, drink the little drops left in the corners of the bottle. He didn't like what he tasted (hot and nasty), but that would soon change.
Things came to head one day when Booker got ahold of some dead chickens from a local brood house (a brood house is where young chickens that are ready to be sold are kept) and stuffed them in his pocket. The next day he and his friend Bubba pelted his fellow classmates with the chickens while they were on their way to recess. Soon after the dead chicken incident, seeing where things were headed, Pinkie and Margaret decided to ship Booker off to St. Joe's Prep, a boarding school in Bardstown a stone's throw from Granddaddy Jim's house.
It was at St. Joe's that Booker developed a sense of discipline. The school was full of rules, and Booker – the chicken-throwing, corner-drinking cowboy from Springfield – was forced to comply. He was up at 6 AM for mass, which was followed by a quick (and, as far as Booker was concerned, unsatisfactory) breakfast, then six hours of classes, then sports. Students could only leave the campus on Sunday afternoons, and even then just for a short while, to maybe catch a Western at the local theater. After that it was back to the dorm for homework and chores.
Despite the fact that he attended the school with a number of his friends from Springfield, and despite being less than an hour from his parents, Booker was homesick. He missed the freedom of home, the unlimited hunting and fishing, the open fields and rolling hills, and, of course, his mother's cooking. As far as he was concerned St. Joe's was something to tolerate, something to get through until the next thing.
Fortunately, he did have sports. Most of the other boys were from the Bardstown area, but a fair number were from around the country: a handful even hailing from faraway New York City. Almost all were good athletes. As a result, St. Joe's fielded powerhouse teams, especially in football. Booker, because of his size and quickness, excelled and played both as a punishing defensive end and as an impenetrable guard on offense. No one in Central Kentucky wanted to line up against Hard Times, a nickname given to Booker because of his birth date of December 7, by then a day of infamy, and the fact that he was born in 1929, on the cusp of the Depression.
On holidays or when school was not in session Booker would spend time at his granddaddy's house on North Third Street, a few minutes from school. In addition to enjoying home-cooked meals (a needed respite from the dreary food at St. Joe's), Booker would occasionally join Jim on trips to the distillery. They traveled down the two-lane highway in Jim's Cadillac: Granddaddy talking bourbon and Booker listening. Booker wasn't particularly interested in the mechanics of the bourbon-making process – he was only a teenager and