“You’re probably right,” I told my mother. I didn’t have the heart to challenge her; the truth would be too much to bear.
“I know I am,” she said.
DETROIT, CIRCA 1972
(by Eric Stroh)
At eight thirty the next morning, the family assembled in a meeting room in our office building at Stroh River Place to await the presentations. Forty of us—cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and parents, whether related by blood or by marriage—sat united in our morbid curiosity about the fate of the failing business, as well as our current or future financial interests.
The room hushed when Charlie entered, and you couldn’t blame anyone. In the glaring light of day, he looked like a homeless man as he ambled through the room, his skin leathery and blotched, eyes gazing vacantly ahead, making eye contact with no one—a homeless man dressed up for church by community do-gooders. His large nose appeared to have taken over his face, a face cut into an apple and left to dry. The blue oxford shirt from Whitney’s closet seemed to constrain his gestures, while the gray flannels and loafers he’d also taken from the house no longer fit his diminishing frame. He pulled out the chair next to mine with difficulty, catching the white tablecloth and disturbing the glasses of water at each place. The acidic fumes of stale alcohol rose off his skin and breath.
I felt at once shame and compassion. This was my brother, even if many of the people in this room could hardly recognize him. Yet I was ashamed of what he’d become, as if his state somehow reflected on me. And recognizing my own wish to escape implication made me feel only worse. Waiting for the meeting to begin, Charlie crossed his legs and fixed his eyes on the overhead projector.
I wasn’t sure how much he would be able to take in. Surely, he’d been absent for so long that the perils of the Detroit real estate market, the pension fund, and our biotechnology interest would mean little to him.
My cousin John, smart in a blue blazer and perfectly tailored gray flannel trousers, walked to the front of the room. Having replaced Peter as the board’s interim head in 1997, he still acted as our CEO and chairman. He welcomed the group and, smiling, began his opening presentation.
“Allow me to state the obvious: the fact that we continue to meet in this building—in a city that is literally falling apart all around us—is not exactly good news.”
Everyone laughed grimly. At dinner the night before, Bobby had characterized the situation with brilliant shorthand, “Replacing Peter with John was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Bobby had nailed it, though his metaphor left out any hint of responsibility. The fact was the Stroh Companies, Inc., board, as well as the family members who’d elected them, were responsible for this shipwreck. They had placed that fatal iceberg right in their own path.
“If we could pick this building up and put it down somewhere else, anywhere else,” John continued, “we’d be okay. But for better or worse, our real estate holdings are in Detroit.”
“We can thank the United Auto Workers for bringing Michigan to its knees,” one of my cousins piped in.
“The unions certainly haven’t helped us,” John agreed. “If U.S. manufacturing had remained affordable for the Big Three, this wouldn’t be the ghost town that it is.”
Passing the buck, it seemed, had reached epidemic proportions in this family, and I wanted some accountability. “John, did we ever consider moving our headquarters elsewhere?” I asked. “After the Detroit brewery was closed in the mideighties, for example, and we had breweries all over the country?”
“No one had a crystal ball, Franny,” John responded smoothly. “And uprooting management was not exactly an attractive option.”
He went on to deliver the complexities of the bad news with a confident sort of complacency that seemed to belie the dire circumstances in which we found ourselves. The business—now a holding company called Stroh Companies, Inc. (SCI), with a basket of declining assets—would cease to exist within a certain number of years, and no one knew the exact number. Dividends would cease even sooner.
As the automotive industry had declined and businesses had moved out of the city, so our real estate holdings had plummeted. Stroh River Place had been our most disastrous investment, representing a loss of close to $300 million, some of which had been bank loans, triggering foreclosures on the hotel and the apartment building. As for the office building we sat in, at 50 percent occupancy it was now worth but a tiny fraction of what the family had invested in it.