Photograph by J.R. Elke
In Germany, old wives say placing roses in the dining room will prevent the escape of secrets spoken out loud (maybe the roses swallow them as they float by?). August Busch built Bevo Mill in 1915, using stones handpicked from Grant’s Farm, hand-carved gnomes from the Paris Exposition and a pair of storks on the roof for good luck. It opened to the public two years later, just as the U.S. had gone to war with Germany; that was the year the symphony refused to play Bach or Brahms or Mozart and the Postmaster General changed Berlin Avenue to Pershing, VanVerson to Enright. Look closely and you’ll see, among the wicker vases of white Honor roses and the white napkins folded into neat little tents to mimic the waitresses’ caps, a small but vigilant-looking American flag on a dinner table. Maybe the waitress on the right was born out of wedlock—that is, she’s a secret spoken out loud, and the roses are sipping her right out of the air—but more likely, she was born in Baden-Württemberg, and she’s wishing herself off to that rosy sugar cake of a city where VanVerson now intersects Berlin.
Photograph courtesy of The Thomas Kempland Collection
