You hear “Schlafly,” and you think beer. Or maybe politics, and fights at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But dig down to the roots of the Schlafly family tree and you’ll find Julia Chouteau, who married a Maffitt; her daughter Nancy, who married a Bates, and her daughter Nancy, who dated Black Jack Bouvier, Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ father, for a time, then married a Kimball. Nancy’s brother William married a Desloge. Two of Nancy’s daughters married Schlafly boys. And one of their kids’ Schlafly cousins is Tom (now we’re at the beer part).
At the trunk of Tom’s maternal family tree stands William Cullen McBride, namesake of McBride High School. McBride made his fortune in oil, and he “must have been one of those excellent Catholics whom prosperity cannot spoil,” wrote a Catholic newspaper when he died. His daughter Dorothy married an Orthwein, and her daughter married a Bates. Dorothy’s sister Laura, Tom’s maternal grandmother, married Birch Oliver Mahaffey, who was kicked out of West Point in a scandal later corrected by an Act of Congress, and who helped build a railroad in Ecuador.
On the paternal side, Tom’s great-grandfather, August Schlaefli, was 4 years old when his family sailed to the U.S. from Switzerland. His baby brother died on the journey, and his father died soon after they landed, leaving August’s mother with six children to raise alone. August grew up self-reliant, a serial entrepreneur who opened a general store in Carlyle, Ill., loaned money to farmers until their crops came in, became a banker, bought Mineral Valley Water Company. He moved to St. Louis just before the 1904 World’s Fair.
One of his grandsons married Phyllis, who almost singlehandedly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, and who tried to stop her nephew Tom from trademarking the Schlafly name for his craft beer. Another grandson, Hubert, invented the teleprompter.
Inventiveness runs through the family—as does hospitality. Tom’s aunt, Julia Kimball Schlafly, raised six children, helped establish St. Martha’s Hall for Abused Women, taught inner-city kids to read, delivered casseroles to St. Patrick’s Center—but she also rode with the Bridle Spur Hunt Club and threw a heck of a party. “She was a bon vivant,” says her granddaughter, Cabanne Schlafly Howard. “She loved life.”
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