My high school (Priory) adopted The Rebels as the name of its sports teams in 1961. It was an era when teenage rebels featured prominently in American culture. The 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause had made James Dean an icon of adolescent alienation, a status that was cemented by his untimely death in his speeding Porsche the same year....

As most alert readers (ARs) know, July 14th, aka Bastille Day, is a national holiday in France. This was the day in 1789 when a mob launched the French Revolution by storming the now famous prison in Paris and freeing a grand total of seven prisoners.  The most famous-- or infamous-- of these was the Marquis de Sade, who, if...

Most alert readers (ARs) will immediately recognize this opening signature line of one of the most famous songs by The Rolling Stones.  Some of you, like me, were probably looking forward to hearing it performed live at The Stones’ concert in St. Louis on June 27.  As we all now know, this concert was canceled because of COVID-19, along with...

As most alert readers (ARs) know, one of my favorite quotations from Yogi Berra is “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”  This was certainly true for pioneers who took the Boone’s Lick Trail from where Schlafly Bankside is today to the Santa Fe and Oregon trails; and...

John D. Rockefeller famously said, “A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.”  My friendship with Charles Kopman began with a business connection.  It continued after our original business connection ended and led to starting a new business ten years later.  This new business association, like our friendship, continued until Charles died on April 1,...

Two hundred and fifty-one years ago, in April of 1769, a French-Canadian fur trader named Louis Blanchette established a settlement called Les Petites Cotes (The Little Hills) on the Missouri River about 30 miles upstream from the confluence with the Mississippi.  The territory was ruled by Spain at the time and the settlement was later named San Carlos, the Spanish...

There were a lot of reasons to celebrate on January 25th. As most alert readers (ARs) probably know, it was the 261st birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, an annual celebration at The Schlafly Tap Room since 1992. It was the day of the NHL All-Star Game in St. Louis. It was also Chinese New Year, the first day...

An ignominious centennial is upon us.  January 17th will be the 100th anniversary of the effective date of Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution is the only amendment whose purpose was to limit freedom rather than expand it. 

When I incorporated The Saint Louis Brewery, Inc. in 1989, Dan Kopman and I didn’t give much thought to what name to give our beer. Our main focus was on getting the business up and running. As we got closer to actually brewing and selling beer (as opposed to things like site selection, licensing, equipment purchase etc.) we knew we...

Several alert readers (ARs), including Carrie Odum and David Stratmann, have brought it to my attention that The Testaments by Margaret Atwood imagines a venue called The Schlafly Café in Cambridge, in the dystopia known as Gilead. It’s a place where evil women, collectively known as Aunts, meet to hatch their sinister plots.