How Beer Came to Utah

 On Friday afternoon as Ginger finished her week of on-site work in Salt Lake City, she texted me "where are you taking me out for dinner?"

I suggested the Beerhive Pub, which looked like a lively place with outdoor seating a few blocks up Main Street. The name was obviously a play on "Beehive." I'd passed in several times and saw folks drinking the outdoor seating area. I had noted it was next to Edinburgh Castle, a whimsical boutique that sells only Scottish imports and looks like a time machine from the 1970s when it was founded. Only in a place like Salt Lake City would you find a Scottish import store in downtown. (Side note: in 1985 I was scolded by a tour guide at the actual Edinburgh Castle because I tried to kibbutz on a paid tour while porting my backpack. It felt like a very Scottish moment).

The Beerhive pub was lively place, a nice tavern with the front open to the outdoor seating. It was early after work, so we easily found a high top near the front windows. Ginger is not at all a beer drinker, but it seemed to be the thing to drink there, so we ordered rounds for ourselves, choosing from among the list of local drafts. I also am not a beer drinker, but I can drink as much stout as I want, and so I ordered the only local stout on the menu. 

The number of local beers and ales available ran to almost twenty. As we drank our rounds, and waited for our meals, we enjoyed the ambiance of the pub and its Eighties music, songs we both recognized. 

Our waitress was a friendly woman in with many tattoos on her arms, a feature that is about the most unattractive thing possible on a woman in my opinion. She asked if we were locals and we said we were from Phoenix. She joked about the oppressiveness of the Mormon culture.

It still seems strange to drink beer in Utah. Until about twenty years ago when they changed the laws for the Olympics, it was difficult to get a drink with a meal, because of the Mormon cultural influence. Even today, the alcohol and pub scene here seems like a counter-culture, a niche culture within the larger society.

"I actually don't mind that," I said. "It seems healthier to have the society run by teetotalers who allow alcohol, than having it the other way around." 

I compared it to Portland. "It seems easy to relax the rules," I said. "But then it runs amuck."

Comparing things in Phoenix, or anywhere else we go, to our former home in Portland is always a good way to appreciate where we are at the time. Neither of us would ever want to move back to that place. We both think that we rode it out until the last possible livable movement in Stumptown.  Every couple days I show Ginger a Youtube video of riots there. "They smashed the downtown Apple Store....again," I told her last week. "Right after it re-opened." Now the mayor is trying to dial back the protests, but the genie is out of the bottle, as they say. 

Across the street we could see the civic theater auditorium named after George Eccles and his wife. I remarked that I knew the last name from Mariner Eccles, who had been a famous chairman of the Federal Reserve from Utah. Presumably they were from the same family, a fact we soon verified by bringing up Wikipedia on our iPhones. Within ten minutes I knew the whole history of the Eccles family as Utah royalty. Then Ginger pivoted to reading about J.Willard Marriott, another famous Utahan, who had founded the Marriott hotel chain.

It was a fascinating story. He had been inspired to start a restaurant business in the 1920s after visiting Washington, D.C. and seeing the undersupply of lemonade and other refreshments to tourists in the sweltering sun. He had then acquired the rights to A&W root beer franchise in Washington, D.C, and later started his first hotel as a motel lodge in Arlington, Virginia.

That last part I found ironic, as I remember the high rise Marriott in Arlington that sat across the Potomac from the Georgetown campus, almost in the line of sight of my old dorm in Xavier Hall. My dormmates Pat D. and Dan F, the helicopter pilot, both of them children of privilege, had checked into that hotel during finals of our first semester, just to get some study time in peace. Also our food service at Georgetown had been Marriott, as it was at many campuses, but and to add the surrealism, my freshman economics professor was named Mary Ott. Of course she was a specialist in agricultural economics. I just found this article about her.

I didn't mention any of this to Ginger. It just flashed in my memory quickly as I listened to Ginger narrate the story of J. Willard Marriott. Most of the ironies of life are unexplainable that way.

As she finished reading the article on Wikipedia about Marriott, she added one last comment that she read, namely that Mitt Romney's real first name is Willard, as he was named after the illustrious founder of that hospitality empire. Not surprisingly, given the famous clubiness of powerful Mormon families, Mitt's father had been a business associate of Marriott.

As it happens, the company Ginger works for is owned partially by Mormons and Mormon money, including a famous NFL quarterback who played for BYU and who was MVP of the Super Bowl a couple decades back. It feels very tight-knit.

We both voiced our low opinion of him as a man and a politician. He seems to be one of those people who invariably takes a stance which seems weak and cowardly.

As it happened, he was about to have a particular bad day. The next afternoon, I loafed in our hotel room on Main Street for one last day while Ginger attended a medical education conference at the nearby Hilton, and with the towering sculpture of the 2002 Olympics in view out the window, I saw a post on one of my Telegram groups about how Mitt, who had been instrumental in bringing those Olympics to Utah, had been roundly booed the Utah State Republican Convention just a few miles away.

Poor Mitt. No one much likes him, and many hate him, even though he was partly responsible for alcohol laws being liberalized here (because of the Olympics). 

I remember how in October 2012, visiting my super-Lefty friends David and Elizabeth in Oakland, my only comment about the election was "I have nothing against Romney not being President." I didn't even bother to vote in that election, as I was on the road in California. I didn't care. How things change. My how they change indeed.