Excerpt from Chapter 8, “Maytag Repair Man.”

        When Fred passed away in 1962, Fritz was still out in California. Growing up, he was not expected, nor expecting, to take over the appliance company. He explained that though his family held a fair amount, Maytag Corp. was publicly owned. “I’m extremely

grateful nobody ever pressured me into feeling as though I had a heritage that I had to accept. When I was a boy, I never even thought of that. The dairy farm’s a little different, I guess. Our family had this magical little business in that it interested me: bacteria, yeast, and mold, and all kinds of good stuff in there.”

        So even from his boyhood, the  blue- cheese factory exposed Fritz to the chemistry of fermentation. Sitting with him, a man just entering his seventies, I could see him traveling back in time revisiting his youth. Suddenly, in front of me sat momentarily young Fritz, recounting experiments in his basement lab with the Bausch & Lomb compound  oil- immersion microscope that his dad’s friend had given him. As he grew up, through high school and Stanford, the microscope accompanied him wherever he

went. “Even today,” he said, as if warping through time back to the present, “I just get a thrilling feeling looking through a catalog of chemical apparatus.”

        Reminding myself he had attended university before the movie Animal  House,I  couldn’t exactly ask about toga parties, but I still believed that college kids in the fifties partied, even ones who toted around microscopes.

        Fritz unexpectedly stated, “I  wasn’t a great beer lover.” Then he recounted a parable as jolting as if you heard your grandfather tell you that one should listen to pop u lar music for the messages in the lyrics, or that sex is solely for procreation, and you wonder if it’s merely his  wholesome naïveté, or if the good old days could really have been that simple. “I drank beer like almost every young person does. Because I didn’t want to get drunk in social situations. Y’know, college students don’t sit around drinking

whiskey because you  can’t talk philosophy and drink a lot of whiskey. You can talk all night and drink beer if you don’t drink the  whole lot.”

        I was at a loss.

        Then he proffered a delightful understatement, or admonishment, depending on the audience. “Beer is an ideal  social-interchange beverage.”