As the 1950s wore into the 1960s, Bob Greene went to a boys’ camp in Wisconsin’s North Woods — Camp Golden Eagle, in Woodruff — and did the usual things: baseball, archery, canoeing, swimming. But the part of camp that most piqued the boys’ wide-eyed interest wasn’t on the campgrounds at all. Through the forest, out on Highway 51, was an A&W root beer stand. Not today’s full-menu restaurant; root beer only, made fresh on the premises. And the older campers passed a secret down to the younger ones every summer, always in the same stretched-out whisper. The root beer had a ‘liiiittle bit of alcohol’ in it.
Forbidden fruit. The boys would sneak through the trees to the highway, buy root beer in quart-size waxy paper containers shaped like traffic cones, gulp it down and sneak back into camp convinced they were tipsy. In retrospect, Greene writes on the Journal’s op-ed page, it was absurd. Yet all summer they believed it — maybe it was the ‘beer’ in ‘root beer’ — and for more than half a century afterward, every time he saw an A&W sign, he heard the phrase.
The phone call
This summer Greene read in the Indianola, Iowa, Independent Advocate that the town’s A&W was celebrating its 70th anniversary. The owner, James McConnell, the fourth McConnell to run the place, didn’t have the answer either. So Greene called A&W Restaurants’ headquarters in Lexington, Ky., reached the chairman, Kevin Bazner, 71, and started blathering on about Camp Golden Eagle and the stand on Highway 51. Bazner laughed and said instantly: ‘Your memory is correct.’
Not the alcohol part. There has never been alcohol in A&W. But the rumor, Bazner said, was absolutely rampant nationwide among young A&W drinkers, himself included, growing up in Michigan in the ’50s and ’60s. ‘Freshly made A&W, in those glass mugs, had a foamy head, like draft beer.’ The company never promoted the story; before social media it simply passed person to person, a whispered and false secret. ‘I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that.’ And the A and the W? ‘A&W was named for our founders, Roy Allen and Frank Wright.’ Sixty years of mystery, one phone call, settled before lunch.
The office has a few of these
Money has foamy heads too. Every workplace carries a set of sure things that everyone knows because someone older said so in the break room: Social Security is going away. You need a number that ends in ‘million.’ The market always comes back within a year. Your pension is safe. You can’t touch the 401(k). Some of those are true. Some are the ‘beer’ in ‘root beer,’ a word doing the work of a fact. Which is which matters less than this: the difference between a rumor and a fact was never going to be settled by another camper. It takes a call to the person who actually knows, and the call is shorter than you think. Bazner needed one sentence.
We watched the grown-up version this week. On Sept. 1 the whole market knew the Fed was hiking in September — the odds sat at 58% after Chairman Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech, and everyone repeated it to everyone. Three sessions later one governor, Christopher Waller, said he would be inclined to hold if the August inflation data cooperate, and the odds were a coin flip by the close. Stocks and bonds rallied together. The thing everyone knew was a foamy head, and the signals suggest the true answer is still two inflation reports away, which is precisely why a plan should not be built on what the break room knows.
Camp Golden Eagle closed in 1985. Last summer a group of old campers went back to Woodruff for a reunion, and Greene found the video: grandfatherly men, several at a picnic table, laughing merrily in the middle of some sort of imbibing competition. They are chugging cans of A&W. Summer is entering its final laps, and this is the stretch of the year when the question you have been carrying around since June is worth fifteen minutes. You don’t wait for the first September rain to find out where the umbrella went. Bring the statement, ask the thing you heard from someone older, and let the person who actually knows laugh and tell you whether your memory is correct.