The Big Man of Jim Beam

Chapter 1Boyhood

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, ...