And this growth doesn't show any signs of abating.
There aren't many photos of Booker at the plant, no statues or plaques to speak of. All of those are over at the flagship Clermont plant, six miles away in Bullitt County. The Boston distillery does bear his name, though: it's called the Booker Noe Plant, and that would have been good enough for Booker.
It's more than fitting that this place in north-central Kentucky was where Booker Noe – master distiller, grandson of Jim Beam, scientist, artist, raconteur, American Original, and Big Man of Bourbon – spent most of his career. Because, like this distillery, Booker was no frills, straightforward. You get what you see. All Booker Noe ever really wanted to do was make bourbon, and that's all this plant does.
CHAPTER 1
BOYHOOD
Springfield, Kentucky, is a fine small town. Picturesque. Clean. A quaint and familiar air of Mayberry-Americana covers the place like a comfortable patchwork quilt. It's about five or six blocks long, with a solid downtown offering sturdy brick buildings, including an opera house, the Washington County municipal building, and a handful of churches. It has some history too: Abraham Lincoln's father and mother were born nearby, a fact duly noted by well-placed historical markers. A cluster of unassuming frame houses presses hard along Main Street a few feet from the road. It was in one of these houses that Frederick Booker Noe II spent his childhood.
Born to Margaret and Frederick Booker Noe in 1929 on December 7 (a day that would later be infamous), Booker was the second of four children. The fact that his mother was the daughter of Jim Beam, the prominent bourbon distiller, didn't mean all that much to the people of Springfield. Even though Jim had made a name for himself in the whiskey business and was known and respected throughout the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the Noes were like every other family in Springfield: a tight-knit clan trying to get through the hard times brought on by the Great Depression. Besides, Prohibition was in force – Granddaddy Jim owned a rock quarry now, not a distillery – and the Beam name didn't have quite the cachet that it used to. Booker's father, known as Pinkie to his friends, was a vice president at the local First People's Bank, and his wife, Margaret, stayed at home to raise the kids and run things.
Being a Beam and the oldest grandson of America's best-known whiskey maker didn't seem to matter much to young Booker either. He was happy being a kid in Kentucky, embracing everything his surroundings could offer. Springfield was primarily a farming town, surrounded by rolling fields of wheat, corn, and tobacco, and Booker and his friends spent their free time fishing the ponds and streams and playing with slingshot guns up at the cemetery that overlooked the town. On Sunday afternoons, after mass at St. Dominic's, where he was an altar boy, Booker would head over to the 100-seat local movie theater with his best friend and cousin Bob Noe Hayden to watch the latest Western. Gene Autry was up there singing and shooting and the boys ate it up. As they saw it, their lives weren't that all much different from those of the cowboys. In their eyes Springfield was a frontier town surrounded by the wild and teeming with adventure – and maybe even danger.
Like most of the country, Kentucky was struggling during the thirties. The Depression hit farmers and the coal industry hard, but the Noes weathered the storm. Pinkie managed to keep his job at the bank, and the family – unlike others in the area – stayed afloat, neither rich nor poor. There were cheese sandwiches for lunch, baloney sandwiches after school, and Margaret's famous fried chicken and mashed potatoes on Sunday. Pinkie's weekend trips to Lexington for University of Kentucky games were also a ritual, as were short family excursions to visit friends and family in Old Green, a green Pontiac that ate up miles like Booker ate chicken legs.
There was also Booker's hunting. When he was 13 he graduated from slingshots to his father's shotgun, and the boy mastered it quickly, taking deadly aim at whatever he could. “When you went hunting with him, you never let him shoot first,” his younger brother Jerry recalled. “Because if you did, you wouldn't have anything to shoot at. Whatever he shot at went down and you'd be standing there with your gun in your hand and nothing left to do.”
Weekends were spent tramping over fields in search of rabbits, pigeons, and ducks. The boys usually ate what they shot, taking home their kills and cleaning them at the kitchen table. One Sunday morning Booker and a schoolmate trespassed on a horse farm that bordered the Noes' land. Booker had been warned to stay off the farmer's land many times – warnings that had gone unheeded. When the farmer saw Booker standing on top of a hill on this particular day, he had had enough. Grabbing his rifle, he took a shot at the young teen and grazed his pant leg. Booker stayed clear of the farm from then on. There were plenty of other places to shoot ducks.
While life seemed relatively bucolic for the Noes, 25 miles away in Bardstown, Jim Beam was scrambling, confronted by an unprecedented double whammy – Prohibition and the Depression. His distillery in Clermont, which he had bought in 1922, had remained dormant for years, a dilapidated and fading relic. While some of its rack houses still contained barrels of his family's whiskey, federal law prohibited him from selling any, a fact that irked, frustrated, and saddened him. He was a distiller, and distillers make and sell whiskey.
Prohibition had decimated not only the booming Beam enterprise, but the entire bourbon industry as well. At its onset, there had been 17 distilleries operating in the Bardstown area alone. Most of them were successful family-run enterprises, turning out whiskey for a growing and appreciative audience. Almost overnight those plants closed, the doors to their rack houses padlocked forever. A fair amount of the remaining whiskey was bootlegged out, the dwindling supply more precious than ever. The Bardstown area, because its location was central to the various distilleries, became a hub of whiskey contraband. Bootleggers used it as a base of operations, loading and dividing up the liquid, then gunning the engines of their tricked-out cars and trucks before racing out of town on dark back roads to points unknown.
The pockets of a lot of local distillers – and of some local sheriffs – got fat during those times. Envelopes full of cash were offered in return for looking the other way when the whiskey was being loaded up. Some bootleggers didn't bother with cash. They showed up at a warehouse late at night, flashed a shotgun at the watchman, then took what they wanted.
Moonshining became common in the foothills and hollers, with the ‘shiners making what they could with whatever ingredients they had. The result was whiskey of dubious quality. Still, it was a living and families had to get by. So Mason jars were filled.
Jim Beam had chances to sell off his remaining stock, but he opted not to. While he did take a few barrels back to Bardstown, the rest stayed under lock and key back at the plant. Old Jim was a prudent man, and he thought running whiskey wasn't worth the risk. As he told his wife, Mary, “Bourbon ain't worth going to jail for – and besides, Prohibition is going to end soon and before we know it we'll be back in business and all will be right in the world.”
So while his whiskey quietly evaporated, floating out through the cracks and holes in the white oak barrels, and while other distillers shut down and walked away, Jim tried his hand at a number of businesses, all of which failed. One of his final enterprises was a rock quarry that backed up to a shuttered distillery in Clermont, about 25 miles south of Louisville. Believing that Prohibition wouldn't or couldn't last long, Jim bought the closed distillery and bided his time while operating the quarry. Even with the help of his brother Park and his nephew Carl, that too struggled. Jim Beam, the fourth-generation distiller and part of a bourbon-making family dynasty, couldn't buy a break – and as a result almost went broke waiting for the blessed repeal.
To be sure, Jim felt the weight of the family dynasty on his shoulders. He was fourth in a family line whose name was synonymous with bourbon. Some 130 years before, his great grandfather Jacob Beam, a pioneer of German descent, had come from Maryland with his young wife, Mary, in tow and passed through the Cumberland Gap. He was looking for a fresh start and new horizons, and he found both at a place called Hardin's Creek in Washington County, near what would one day be Springfield. It was there
