Don't assume the white-haired but youthful looking man operating a fork lift at D.G. Yuengling & Son Inc. in Pottsville is an employee. It's just as likely he's Richard L. Yuengling Jr., the owner and unconventional, but highly effective, CEO of the plant, the nation's oldest brewery.
Dick, that's what almost everyone calls him, saved the family business from bankruptcy and made it into a major force in the brewing industry.
The fifth-generation brewer definitely isn't your typical buttoned-down, 9-to-5 corporate leader. Far from it. He arrives at the brewery around dawn for the start of the morning shift and, if it's snowing, has been known to begin his day by plowing. After going home for an afternoon nap and early dinner, he usually returns to the plant so that he can catch up on paper work without interruption. His idea of business attire consists of jeans paired with a flannel shirt or tee and a pair of heavy work boots for sloshing around the brewery's wet production floor.
Although he contributes generously to nonprofit causes through the charitable foundation that bears his name, he runs the brewery in a cautious way that industry experts say can only be called frugal. An emphasis on thrift carries over to other areas of his life. The car he drives to work is a 2002 Ford Taurus, deeply dented on one side from a brewery truck running into him (he hasn't had the dents repaired because the vehicle is driveable as is). Friends complain that, even when the temperature soars above 100 when they're visiting him at his Florida home, he has to be pressured to turn on the air conditioning. They also say he has been observed rinsing out Styrofoam coffee cups for reuse.
An early instance of his marching to the beat of a different drummer goes back to autumn 1961, when he was a postgraduate student at Admiral Farragut Academy, Pine Brook, N.J., a school specializing in Naval training. At Pottsville High School, Dick, whose nickname according to the 1961 yearbook, was "Party Boy," had enjoyed all the perks of being a stellar baseball and basketball player. Farragut, described by one alumnus as "a tough, unforgiving place," enforced a much stricter lifestyle than he had ever experienced.
Weekdays at the New Jersey school began at 6:15 a.m. with pre-breakfast inspection on the parade field. The students, in naval-style uniforms, marched to meals, and followed a long list of rules, including saluting superiors. Several hours of homework preceded bedtime at 10 p.m. Full dress parades took up a hefty chunk of every weekend.
When I asked Dick about Farragut, he said, "After I'd been there a month, my father and mother, bringing with them my girlfriend at the time, Darryl Shellhammer, came for Parents' Weekend. I told them how much I hated it and begged them to let me go home with them, but they told me I had to stay."
The 18-year-old, setting a pattern that continues to this day, handled the problem in his own, albeit out-of-the-ordinary, way. Perhaps he had in mind the motto of David Farragut, the Civil War admiral for whom the school was named: "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead." In the morning, he persuaded maintenance men to get his civilian clothes from a locked basement. After jumping over the wall that enclosed much of the 40-acre campus, he hopped a bus to Philadelphia.
His destination was St. Joseph's College. A Pottsville friend, Jack Hohman, was a student there, but he couldn't find him. Lacking enough money for public transportation, he walked 7 miles to Villanova, the university on Philadelphia's Main Line that another Pottsville friend, Johnny Grazis, was attending.
"Johnny hid me in his room, but in the meantime Farragut sent out an alert for me," Dick said. "Villanova is a Catholic college. I was crouched behind the door when a priest came to ask if anybody had seen me. All the guys in the room said they hadn't and he left. Can you believe it? They actually lied to a priest."
Grazis and his friends offered to hide Dick until Thanksgiving. Instead, he made his way to the nearest turnpike entrance to try to hitch a ride home. There, in one of those incredible coincidences that sometimes occur in life, the driver who stopped for him turned out to be Dan Morris, president of the Schuylkill Trust Company (now Wachovia Bank) in Pottsville. The banker offered to take him all the way to the Yuengling home at 1318 Howard Ave. but dropped him off in downtown Pottsville after Dick told him, "You don't want to be anywhere in the vicinity when my parents see me."
Surprisingly, the senior Yuenglings' reaction was relatively mild. They made him work at the brewery, which he had wanted to do anyway. They also hired Pottsville High English teacher Joan Foley, to help him prepare for enrolling at Lycoming College, Williamsport. In 1991, unorthodox as always, he acknowledged her assistance by inviting her to his 30th PHS class reunion, the only alumnus who brought a faculty member to the event.
Years after Dick made his early exit from the military academy, his mother complained to me that the school had never refunded his tuition and dorm fees and that he had stayed there for such a short time that he hadn't gotten to wear all of his expensive uniforms. When I mentioned the conversation to Dick, he said the uniforms were still in a back closet of his mother's house when she died in 1996. He doesn't know what happened to them since then, but the only two Farragut mementoes he has are a uniform cap and a wastebasket with the school's emblem.
Lycoming, where Dick stayed for only a year, lists him as one of its distinguished alumni. When the college invited him back in 2005 to address a business class, his speech was typically unconventional. It included his recollection of Lycoming's president ordering him to take down the neon Yuengling sign in his room before a Preachers' Aid Society delegation arrived on campus. He also told the students he spent most of his time at Lycoming trying to persuade local bar owners to carry Yuengling draft beer, which was why he "racked up more tap credits than academic credits."
He admits he wasn't a motivated student. Like many successful CEOs, including Apple's Steve Job, fashion mogul Ralph Lauren and Microsoft's Bill Gates, his reason for ditching a college degree was to get an early start in the real world.
After a stint in the Army and returning to Pottsville to work in the brewery, he struck out on his own by taking over a beverage distributorship in Pottsville. When doctors diagnosed his father with severe medical problems in 1985, he bought Yuengling from him at full market value (a family tradition) rather than having it given to him.
His restructuring of the company, updating of worn-out equipment and recreation of a decades-old lager helped make Yuengling beer so popular it was difficult to keep up with demand. Dick's solution, a rarity in the brewing world, was to shut down out-of-state distribution of his products until he built a plant on the outskirts of Port Carbon and bought a former Stroh's Brewery in Tampa, Fla.
The gutsy gamble that could have been catastrophic, according to a New York Times Magazine article about Dick, paid off handsomely. Of the top 50 breweries located in the United States, the latest available Brewers' Association report lists only Annheuser-Busch, Miller Coors and Pabst (all mega-corporations and foreign-owned) as exceeding Yuengling in sales volume.
Yuengling's owner seems genuinely surprised that what he has accomplished at the brewery is considered anything special. In spite of attention from national media, including The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Business Week and CNBC, he remains without pretensions. Ask people in Pottsville what they think about Dick and their responses are that he's "friendly," "real," "down-to-earth," "a regular guy."
One of the most unusual tributes to his product took place several years ago. A young Ohio man who had the Yuengling logo, an eagle, tattooed on his back after becoming a fan of the company's beer at a relative's home in Pennsylvania, went a step further. Erik Yingling is now Erik Yuengling. He legally changed the spelling of his last name to match that of his favorite brew.
It was an off-beat but fitting way to honor beer produced by someone who does things his own unique way.