Pappyland

by Wright Thompson

  Even in photos he’s intimidating. A six-foot-four former football player at Princeton, Captain Julian P. Van Winkle Jr. led Company A of the Forty-fourth Tank Battalion from island to island through the Pacific. When he had a day free from combat, hunkered in tents and in muddy holes during the fierce rainy season, he read the account reports from Stitzel-Weller his dad sent him. He was thirty years old, ancient to his men. Julian Jr. landed with his unit on the island of Leyte in 1944, near the tip of the spear of Douglas MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. The best account of their terrible, bloody slog comes from the book Bourbon & Bullets, a collection of stories about whiskey men who went to war. The book brings the battle alive: Van Winkle’s company helped lead a frontal assault at a place known as Breakneck Ridge. His personal tank was named Old Fitz, after his most famous bourbon. They fought through a monsoon. By week three, the pace of the advance had slowed. Julian’s dad got out of his tank to direct his men, ignoring withering enemy fire. A sniper shot him, the bullet going through his right hand and his stomach, exiting out his back.

  “Damn, that stings!” a soldier heard him yell.

  He turned down an offer to go home, and fought with doctors in the Dutch New Guinea hospital to be allowed back to his unit. Stuck in bed recovering, he raged against the injustice of it all. Survivor’s guilt ate at him. Nine days after he left the unit, his replacement was killed. As he waited for the hospital administrators to decide, he wrote to Pappy, “I have died a thousand deaths for fear I’ll go to the States. I will go to any length to stay here.”

  He won this battle and rejoined Company A in time to take Manila. There he saw the liberated prisoners of the Bataan Death March and reflected on the brutality and cost of such a war. He wrote to Pappy: “Perhaps it is almost justice, dad, that we should have to go through war every so often to pay for the peace years—so filled with plenty and pleasure as compared with the other people on earth.”

  Sitting at lunch with me in Frankfort before driving out to the old bottling line in Lawrenceburg, Julian described the letters, which revolved around his dad’s two favorite topics for discussion: the Stitzel-Weller distillery and eliminating the enemy. “He’s talking to Pappy about the business,” Julian told me, “because he went to work for Pappy and then he went to the war and then got shot and was really pissed he couldn’t continue killing the Japanese. He talks about that a whole lot for about two months in the hospital. He finally got back out there and got a Purple Heart and a Silver Star and he was a badass.”

  During his recent cancer treatment, Julian and his sisters pored over these letters. His dad’s handwriting was terrible; Pappy didn’t like that his boy was left-handed and made him switch, which Julian’s dad always blamed for his chicken scratch. The man in the letters sometimes felt like a stranger to his son.

  “Some of them were pretty intimate,” he said.

  “Did he ever tell war stories?” I asked.

  “I never really asked him,” Julian said. “Probably scared to, probably wasn’t ever close enough to him to sit down and ask him. I know I really cared, but it just never came up to me because he was always going to be around. And all of a sudden he was gone. I wish I’d asked him about what it was really like, and how many people did you kill and what was it like. It had to be just really ugly. I just never did that, unfortunately.”

  10

  BEING WITH JULIAN MADE ME THINK about craft in America. About how our work ethic combines with the secular myths of bootstrap success to make people predisposed to respect craftsmanship. Something to occupy our hyper American ambition and our desire to make something—to find God in our labor and in the fruits of it. Spending so much time talking to him about his family’s craft made me consider my own.

  I lived my early life on a blissfully unaware autopilot until one night in high school, when I read a book called North Toward Home by the native Mississippian and legendary Harper’s magazine editor Willie Morris. In the book, he talked about how magazines and journalism and the desire to tell hard truths about new places—and about familiar places we knew too well—gave him his life, and his purpose—his avenue of escape. When I started that book, I figured I’d go to law school and come home and take over my dad’s small-town firm. When I finished, I had a goal and a purpose. I’d be a journalist—a career that aligned with my deepest wants and protective urges, both in how it would let me roam and in how it would let me avoid myself by diving into the lives of others. I’ve always been happiest when dreaming of escape. From my earliest memories, my greatest solace and focus came while in movement, from small actions like pacing while answering flash cards to planning elaborate road trips I knew I’d never take. When I look back at my early life, everything I read and watched and loved and hoped and even feared came from this desire to fly far away.

  I had the desire but not the mechanism. Then I read Willie Morris’s book. The next morning—I’d read through the night, locked in and aggressively turning pages—I announced to my parents that his words had given me focus. Turned out, they both knew Morris. He grew up in Yazoo City, the closest real town to the tiny farming community where my dad was born and raised. A few days later, a signed copy of North Toward Home arrived, with a note from Willie that said how glad he was that this book had struck such a chord with me. Willie is the one who suggested the University of Missouri for journalism school, where I went to college. During spring break of my junior year, in 2000, I went to New York with my best friend, Seth Wickersham, to try to make those dreams into something real. We both wanted to be magazine writers, like Dan Jenkins, like Gary Smith, like Willie Morris. Seth had interviews all over town, at ESPN The Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times. I was more of a tagalong. His meeting at ESPN Mag went pretty well. Mine did not. The editors at the magazine forgot about me, so I sat out there for an hour or two, on a bench by the security guard until someone noticed. There was a sign above my head that read VISITORS. In front of me, through a big glass wall, was the world I wanted to enter. The metaphor was unmistakable.

  I survived the magazine editors who had me waiting outside the ESPN visitors sign. When that office closed, a friend got the sign and mailed it to me, as a kind of scalp. It’s hanging in my house. Below it, in a box, I keep letters from my dad. He wrote me a lot. Not long ago, Mama found a file folder in which he’d stored a copy of every letter he ever sent me. She sent me a photo of one of them, written after I’d been rejected by nearly every newspaper in America for an internship.

  Dear Wright,

  Momma told me you did not get the responses you wanted to hear about summer 2000’s internships. Don’t worry or fret too much. The main thing is that one day, they will have wished they could have gotten to know you personally—to witness your talents, your drive, your personality. Hang in there. God has been good to you.

  Love, Daddy

  11

  JULIAN STARTED TO SHARE LETTERS his dad had sent home from the war, some transcribed by him and his sisters, Sally and Kitty, and others just scanned and emailed.

  October 17, 1944

  Dear Dad,

  I have a very tall stack of mail from you and I am ashamed not to have answered before now. Never have I found it so difficult to write letters yet the last day or two I have ground out many a one. Since we can’t take any letters or envelopes addressed to us as they might inform the enemy of our organization, I am answering every last one before we get off. Unfortunately I shall have to answer all of yours in one letter. Everything else seems rather trivial as compared with the job at hand and that’s the reason I don’t seem to be able to think of much to say. This is real adventure Dad, an A-1 high-class fiction material and I only wish I could tell you all the things I know about the projected plan. It is fascinating of course and an undertaking of the greatest magnitude has undoubtedly been in the works for months although I understand the schedule has been stepped up considerably.

>   We are all totally sure that it will be another MacArthur success. Mainly hitting the Jap where he ain’t. The guys in GHQ are mighty clever at this game. There’s no army on earth that could stop the force of this attack. I have been tremendously interested in all the info you all have given me about the plant—the new well, the cooling tower, the holiday whiskey and prices etc.

  I received the nicest letter from Mr. Willett. I certainly did enjoy it. Please thank him for me.

  I haven’t heard anything more from Bud. I was awfully glad to hear of the outcome of Grigg’s-Cooper deal. I admire your brass to have put it to them like you did. Apparently you all feel not the slightest concern over the obtaining of plenty customers postwar. I was immensely interested in the Omaha news clipping showing the corn outlooks. Lord, with a 3 billion bushel crop, they should let us make bourbon from now on.

  I read with great pleasure Dad your letter about giving us the bonds. I can only say thanks again to you for that as well as for the many other wonderful things you have done for me all my life. I hope I justify the faith and trust you have placed in me. Best of all was the money you gave mother. I know that made her very happy. I hope this finds all of you well and happy, Dad. Don’t let my gals worry and have faith in yourself. I’ll be writing you in a week or 10 days. Again thank you and mother for making Katie and Sally’s lives so happy while I’m on [this] little “business” trip.

  Affectionately always,

  Brud

  The letters paint a portrait of a man far from home. Often he’d ask about Julian’s mother, Katie, and about the world that was continuing even as he was engaged in a cosmic struggle a half planet away. He liked hearing about what laws were being passed that concerned their business and how the relationship with the all-important cooperage was going. You can see a man traveling in his mind back down Limestone Lane, past the stone posts at the entrance, walking in the cool shade of the rickhouses or carrying a shotgun in the crook of his arm, scanning the sky for birds. Writing letters seemed to take him back home even more than receiving them. He just wanted to be part of his old life. In one letter from 1945 he wrote: The company party sounded like lots of fun. I know everyone had lots of fun. Wish I could have been there—especially for the ball game and to get a cold glass of beer. The beer we get has been all right but there is never enough ice to cool it, I just can’t go for hot beer.

  12

  ONE AFTERNOON, sitting with Sissy Van Winkle, I asked what Julian’s dad was like.

  “Overbearing, powerful, strong, sort of tender,” she said. “Tender to me, tender to the children, but not tender to Julian. Busy, busy, busy always socially busy, working. Adored Katie Van Winkle, his wife, but did not know how to slow down to give her the attention that she wanted.”

  He never stopped writing letters. In 1977, he learned that his son, Julian, had quit his job as a salesman at a Louisville clothing store named Rodes-Rapier. He asked Sissy if Julian might consider working for him. It was like junior high school a bit, check yes or no, a window into how much of their love for one another often got lost in translation.

  “Ask him,” she said finally.

  So on May 31, his dad dictated a letter to his secretary, Lois Devlin. Julian doesn’t remember ever getting the letter. He found the notes years later.

  Dear Jule,

  I have always hoped that someday we would be in business together. You have impressed me with your persistence in your job—your ability to make friends and your total personality which is mild and pleasant and agreeable. I am also pleased with your attitude as a husband and your success in marriage—and in your judgment to pick a first-class woman for a wife and in your tendency to be thrifty and a good man around the house.

  You have apparently decided that you don’t want to make a career of working for somebody else. I like this independent attitude although I would rather you had observed some other companies—or jobs or industries more closely.

  Every father wants his son to do well and I had the chance to work for my dad. His industrious attitude and his other qualities fascinated me—and he had a going business.

  We don’t have that much here. They consist of two parts; first the ceramics and their collectors. Number two, the tiny business just started and not doing very well on old Rip Van Winkle. 1843 is another possibility if we could set it up properly with Mac and Chenault and if OFD would bottle it for us. There is some future there if it were worked properly and if we were lucky.

  But this would give you a chance to learn how business is conducted. Learn office routine—learn details from Lois and see if it appealed and if there was a real future.

  You have some habits that are not bad but I don’t admire and I would feel free to admonish you about those if I felt they were mitigating your effectiveness. I have always done the same with anyone who worked for me and have not been the worse off for it. I am not sure if you’d find enough to do here but if you are ambitious to build the business and if I only give some direction but never have to tell you the importance of work and learning the business, then there is a possibility of developing this into a business really worthwhile.

  You will have to make the effort but if you are enterprising and off and running—a go-getter—then there won’t be enough hours in the day to read, and accomplish all there is. There never has been for me.

  Julian’s dad has been dead now for thirty-eight years. We went one day to visit his grave, in the same Louisville cemetery as Colonel Sanders and Muhammad Ali, buried right next to Pappy. That’s where the two men would want to be, side by side, like they were for much of their lives. Julian is old now. He’s got the same white hair and bald head as Pappy. He’s got his grandfather’s gift for selling a story—for living that story, without pretense or affectation, so that the promise each bottle holds is a piece of his authentic self and therefore yours. It’s a real magic trick. But he’s also the tank commander, too, which is what kept him afloat in those decades after his father died but before the bourbon industry boomed. If he is channeling the spirit of Pappy in this third act, then it was the spirit of his father he took with him on those daily drives to his dilapidated bottling line. Julian lived both their lives to finally fully inhabit his own.

  13

  WE’D BEEN TALKING A LOT about Lawrenceburg. Julian told me stories about the low beams on which he often cracked his skull, and the rats and the flooding, and how the bottling line broke all the time. Our plan was to leave lunch and drive twenty-two miles south, away from the soft rolling green of wealthy horse country, closer to the winding mountain hollers of moonshine country. Bourbon lives on the edge of both worlds. It’s easy to forget the renegade past in the shiny Buffalo Trace distillery but much harder out where Julian bottled all those years. He painted a picture of a building that looked less like a place to make fine bourbon and more like a place where you’d successfully hide a body.

  Our plan for the day was clear, and yet when we got into the car, Julian started driving toward Louisville, not his old bottling plant. I didn’t notice because I didn’t really have a fucking clue where I was. We listened to Howard Stern—whom he loves—and talked about our families and Preston’s coming divorce, and about our mutual love of fast German cars. Then it hit him.

  “Oh shit!” he said. “I forgot to go to Lawrenceburg.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” I said.

  14

  THERE ARE A FEW COOL HOTELS IN LOUISVILLE, so I always have a good place to set up shop. There’s the Brown Hotel and the Galt House. My old favorite, a dive motel out near Churchill Downs called the Executive Inn West—with the weirdest, wildest hotel bar in America, where rodeo cowboys swung one night from the chandeliers—has been torn down and replaced with something normal, square, and boring. On this particular trip, I stayed at a combo hotel–art gallery in a bizarre ground-floor suite. The plan was to meet Julian and his son-in-law, Ed, at the bar
there and then have dinner.

  I love being with Julian or his son, Preston, in a bar that fetishizes bourbon. Sadly, I wasn’t there for the best bourbon-fetish bar moment. Once, in New York, Preston leaned against a bar and ordered a Van Winkle how he drinks it, as Julian drinks it, as Julian Jr. and Pappy drank it: on the rocks with a twist. The bartender snootily told him he didn’t feel right serving such fine bourbon like that. Preston grinned. He paused, for dramatic effect, and then delivered the kill shot: Well, sir, that sure is disappointing, given that’s how my grandfather and father taught me to drink it, and my family made the stuff after all. Hi, I’m Preston Van Winkle. . . . When I heard that story, I laughed at a hipster getting a lesson that bourbon is supposed to be a vehicle and not a destination. When a bourbon-nerd friend heard it, though, he got angry at Preston for disrespecting someone’s passion, which I do not understand at all but trust him enough to take seriously.

  When Julian and Ed arrived at the hotel bar and we all got settled and watered—Julian drinks wheated bourbon, as you might imagine, and if the place doesn’t have one of about six or seven brands, he’ll go with a vodka tonic. I started asking him more about the Lawrenceburg plant. After his dad died, he’d floated around to bottlers to get his whiskey on the shelves but realized he needed his own base of operations. He went far from the lush distillery grounds of his youth.