Party time at Anheuser-Busch

On a platform set up outside the Anheuser-Busch packaging plant, one of A-B’s top marketing executives faced a crowd of thousands of employees. He held high a bottle of Budweiser.

“This is a sound that’s near and dear to our hearts,” said Dave Peacock, lifting the bottle to a microphone hooked up to a bank of bass-thumping speakers. He gave the cap a twist. “Spleeersh!”

Crowd goes wild.

It was party time at Anheuser-Busch today, as the brewer celebrated 75 years of legal beer after the end of beer Prohibition on April 7, 1933.

Under a clear blue sky, thousands of workers milled around the campus drinking Budweiser bottled today — before A-B shut down the bottling lines for a day of festivities. A big screen played a montage of August A. “Gussie” Busch Jr. addressing the nation via live radio on this day 75 years ago, marking his company’s return to beer-making.

At 2:00, a hitch of eight Clydesdale horses pulling a beer wagon and a Dalmatian swung down Pestalozzi Street, serenaded by a brass band playing “Here Comes the King.”

A-B staff had been planning the event since the Super Bowl in February. The idea was to celebrate the “euphoria at the end of Prohibition,” Tom Shipley, Budweiser brand director, said last week.

There was plenty of merrymaking. A Budweiser-red Harley-Davidson motorcyle gleamed in the sun, awaiting the winner of an employee drawing. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay touted A-B’s contributions to the local economy and creativity in keeping the doors open during Prohibition.

Contributing the day’s best anecdote, Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder recalled his first race for the Missouri Senate 16 years ago. Visiting a parish picnic about 100 miles south of St. Louis, Kinder shook hands with an older gentlemen and asked for his support.

“Well, young man, I think I’ll support you,” Kinder remembered the man saying. But the voter added a proviso: ”We don’t want to elect somebody who won’t come back and drink a Budweiser with us.”

“To that, I replied: I’m your man!” said Kinder.

The preliminaries done, Chief Executive August A. Busch IV took the stage.

“I love you guys, you ladies!” he said to a big applause. “What an honor. An emotional day.” Staffers pulled the cordons closer to the stage, and the crowd surged forward, throwing off Busch’s rhythm. He started again, and got drowned out by applause.

“You guys are embarrasing the heck out of me!” he said. “We gotta get this toast going here.”

He held up his own bottle of Bud. “Here’s to our future…and another 75 fantastic years. Let’s go get ‘em!”