51 years after he started, Sam Caruso is still slinging beer on the North Side
I’m with Sam Caruso, a Mexican War Streets beer distributor for the past 51 years, listening to him explain the way the suds business has changed.
“Ijust ordered a beer for thisguy. You’re not going to believethe name of this one. It’s called Dogfish Head, FlamingLips or Dragon Yum Yums.I called my supplier andsaid, ‘Do you have DogfishDragon Yum Yums?’”
Mr. Caruso might have dropped an ampersand in that name somewhere, but who cares? The supplier had the beer, and Caruso’s was satisfying another customer. This former high school band director, who could teach a kid to play any instrument in the orchestra, was making the kind of music he’s made since 1968, when he dropped teaching to make some real money for his growing family.
Mr. Caruso turns 79 this month and opens the place only 17 hours a week. There are a couple of Monday hours when he does his inventory, and 2 to 7 p.m. Thursday to Saturday. I hadn’t been by in a while, but with an old high school buddy in town, I stopped to get a 12-pack from this throwback to a less hurried era.
He was telling me about his credit card machine going out on a recent Friday night. His regulars were coming in “wanting to buy all these good beers’’ from the venerable red-brick bunker at the corner of North Taylor and Sherman avenues. Caruso’s has everything from Abita Purple Haze to Yuengling, almost none of which is sold for folding money anymore.
“Theseare people that I know.So I said, ‘You know, it’sFriday night. Nobody has cash.’I says, ‘Take the beer andpay me tomorrow.’” How’d that turn out? “Whenthey come to pay me,I’d scratch it off. They cameback one at a time. I had about$400 tied up in it.” And hegot back every dollar.
He’scomfortable enough thathe sets his hours to beat therush hours in both directionson his drive in from ButlerCounty. On his off days,he’s golfing in North Parkwith old friends. I heard messageson his voicemail frompeople who want to buy theplace and its two attached apartments,but he says, “I thinkI could go another 10 years if I wanted to. It’s not thatstrenuous anymore.”
Not like the old days. His father, born in Sicily, dropped out of La timer Junior High School( where the School House Apartments are now) to earn money to help his widowed mother run the family grocery storeonMontereyStreet.By the time the elder Caruso, also Sam, was 14, he was driving a truck and running his own grocery
The Carusos got a beer distributorship after Prohibition ended in 1933 and got out of the grocery business once they saw more money in beer. In an echo of that move decades later, his son would see it that way, too.
The younger Sam and his wife, Barbara, already had three children when he went to work full-time with his father in 1968. (He’d been teaching up in East Brady, where everyone was talking about this gradeschool boy named Jim Kelly who could really throw a football.) “We didn’t want a big family,” he explained. “We just had seven.”
His father had bought out his cousin, Joe Lococo, who had a distributorship on Monterey Street, and combined the operation in what had been an auto mechanic’s garage on North Taylor. They had two trucks and three vans in their heyday, but they worked only five days a week because, back in the 1950s, all the beer distributors north of the rivers had a picnic in North Park. They decided between card games that every distributor should be closed Wednesdays, Mr. Caruso explained. He was about 12 years old when that happened, so I’m confident the statute of limitations on collusion is up.
The Monday afternoon I returned to the now truckless Caruso’s, only a handful of customers walked up. I knew all but one. Sam knew them all. One guy had paid for a case earlier in the week, and he was coming by for his second dozen. It’s a lighter walk with a half-case.
Maybe one in five customers buys a full case now, Mr. Caruso said.
Pennsylvania still has taken only baby steps toward sanity regarding beer and liquor laws. The state Liquor Control Board declared only in March 2015 that distributors could sell 12-packs to consumers, rather than just kegs and cases. But the timing has been good for a near-octogenarian who can’t toss around full cases the way he once did.
“It’s still good exercise,” Sam said, moving another tall stack of beer with his dolly.