Crain's Saturday Extra: Bell's sells, whale watch, and the Ambassador Bridge turns 92

Good morning. Today: Larry Bell sells, the latest whale mural news, and the surprising link between the Ambassador Bridge and the forgotten hobby of ... palmistry? Also, birds.    

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Vintage photo of Larry Bell ca. 1990, courtesy of Bell's Brewing Co. 

At an all-staff meeting this week, Larry Bell, founder of Kalamazoo-based Bell's Brewing Inc., told his team he was selling the company to Australian brewing conglomerate Lion Little World Beverages, which also owns Fort Collins, Colo.-based New Belgium Brewing Co. 

The deal came as a shock to many beer-lovers around the state, who for years have heard Bell insist that the company would remain family-owned. Bell told Crain's as much this week, saying that he "used to throw away six pieces of paper a week from private equity firms" making offers. 

There were about 40 craft brewers in the country when Bell founded his brewery in 1985. Now there are about 9,000, and it's become a powerhouse industry for Michigan, which ranks 6th in the nation for number of craft breweries (we have 398 of them) as of 2020, according to the Brewers Association. It's also a maturing industry that has seen consolidations, sales to big beverage conglomerates and the closure of some prominent breweries in recent years. 

But Bell's reasons for finally selling his eponymous empire seem to have been more personal than strategic. "I've had a couple bouts with my old friend cancer and one of them was last year. I've had very successful surgery," Bell said this week. "I have a good prognosis. My age is getting into the 60s. It's a bit of a wake up call that you need to make some mature adult decisions about what you're going to do with things and that's what this is."

Bell did not disclose the terms of the deal, except to tell Crain's that there was "at least one zero in it."
 
We'll miss reporting on the cantankerous king of craft brew from Kalamazoo. Some favorite Bell's memories from the newsroom: Nick Manes told me about the time in 2015 when a "sort of run-of-the-mill" trademark dispute went viral. "This has not been my best day," Bell told MiBiz in 2015, just after the internet learned about the year-old trademark case. "I've never been through anything like this (in my career). I had to call up MLive and tell them, 'You can't have your readers calling me a D-bag online.'"  

And Chad Livengood reminisced about the time he tried to talk shop with Bell during Gretchen Whitmer's 2018 gubernatorial campaign, for which Bell was a surrogate. "Bad idea," Chad said. "I told Bell about a concoction East Lansing attorney Mike Nichols had introduced me to that entailed mixing Bell’s Oberon wheat ale with Two Hearted, that delicious award-winning American IPA ... Nichols coined it 'Oberhearted.' 

"Larry Bell did not sound all that amused when I suggested he put that combination of his best-selling beers into a bottle. … Bell said his brewers were developing something similar to what I was describing, but not that. He made it clear it wouldn’t be called Oberhearted.

About 11 months later, Bell’s Brewery released Official, a hazy IPA made with a wheat malt (just like Oberon). To me, it tasted just like Oberhearted." 

Just because we want COVID to be over doesn't mean it is. A fourth surge (but who's counting?) of COVID-19 in Michigan is once again pushing hospitals to capacity ahead of an expected spike from holiday gatherings. 

As of Friday, 2,852 people across Michigan are hospitalized with COVID-19, according to Michigan Department of Health and Human Services data, with 651 of those people in the intensive care unit and 350 on ventilators. The current surge again is a surge among the unvaccinated, health officials said this week. 

Dr. Nick Gilpin, system director of infection prevention and epidemiology at Beaumont Health, told reporters in a media call on Thursday that the current surge has the potential to last as long as five more months.

"It is shaping up to be a marathon," Gilpin said. "... We're going to be living in this world for the next couple of months and possibly through the winter. There is nothing to stop this in any meaningful way until we change our behaviors." 

Thar she blows. Photo of the Broderick Tower whale mural by Crain's reporter Annalise Frank. 

Occasional status reports on the Broderick Tower whales are a public service of Crain's Detroit Business. The 108-foot mural of humpback whales in tranquil blue waters has been an icon of the downtown Detroit skyline since 1997, but every few years we have this little chat about whether the whales will be obscured, removed, or left to fade away. The latest installment is a temporary mural-on-vinyl by Detroit artist Phillip Simpson, commissioned by Rocket Companies, that will cover up part of the whale mural for a while. A spokesperson for Rocket said the company wants to encourage more downtown building owners to promote local artists on their walls. But consider also this backdrop: a years-simmering controversy over downtown Detroit's sign ordinance. 
 
Supply chain check-in: "It has never been more of a hassle for John Gessert to make trucks at his assembly plants in Michigan and Mississippi — even though each unit has just a handful of parts," Crain's manufacturing reporter Kurt Nagl writes in a beautiful lede to his story about Michigan manufacturers in the eye of the supply chain storm. Carhartt, Whirlpool, Masco and the toy truck maker American Plastic Toys Inc. are all grappling with a spike in demand and unpredictable labor, materials and shipping container shortages. Meanwhile, home builders say they can build a whole house faster than they get the cabinets for it, among other kinks in the new build supply chain that are driving up prices, as residential real estate reporter Arielle Kass wrote earlier this week. Need new air conditioner pads? Good luck to you. 

Trailblazers: Glass ceiling shatterer Kelly Rossman-McKinney died this week at age 67. The co-founder of the Truscott-Rossman public relations firm, Rossman-McKinney's career in Lansing spanned five decades, from Gov. James Blanchard's office to her most recent stint as communications director to Attorney General Dana Nessel. Along the way, she mentored seemingly millions of women whose outpourings of grief and gratitude graced Michigan social media feeds all week. If you haven't yet checked out her "Top 10 Tips to Be a Successful Businesswoman," you should. Another pioneer we lost this week: the 96-year-old architect Nathan Johnson, who was not allowed to lease office space in downtown Detroit when he opened his firm in 1956 because he was Black. Johnson was the futuristic brain behind Stanley Hong's Mannia Café, several Detroit People Mover stations, and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church Tower and Townhouses at St. Antoine and Warren. "Nate was my friend, mentor, a wise counselor and again, a gentlemen always," said architect Rainy Hamilton. "His smile lit every room. He encouraged me to stay the course, and I will."

Workers pose for a picture in front of the Ambassador Bridge in a photograph dated Nov. 5, 1929. Source.

This week marked 92 years since the grand opening of the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest international border crossing in North America by trade volume and still the longest international suspension bridge in the world. It opened on Nov. 11, 1929. 

As we consider eerie reports of container ships anchored for weeks in port during our ongoing Global Supply Chain snafu, it's interesting to revisit the history of the Ambassador, which was built after years of pile-up on the Detroit River. In the mid-19th century, as the railroad became the dominant mode of moving goods across the country, ferries had to move goods from one side of the Detroit River to the other. The river (which was also sometimes clogged with ice floes) became a bottleneck. A bridge would solve the problem, and many merchants, railroad men, farmers and civic leaders began to plan for one in the late 1800s. It took a long time for plans to come to fruition for various reasons, including opposition from the ferry companies, World War I, and a failed scheme known as "the Fowler plan" whose fundraisers failed to raise even $400,000 for the $15 million project.

The bridge ultimately owes its existence to John W. Austin, an officer of the Detroit Graphite Company angling for the painting contract for the bridge, and Joseph A. Bower, the businessman and financier Austin recruited to the project who also, fun fact, practiced palmistry as a hobby. ("Some of the biggest businessmen in Detroit have formed the habit of asking Mr. Bower to take a look at their palms before finally committing themselves to any unusually important undertaking," the Detroit Free Press reported in a 1908 profile of Bower.) Bower was able to raise an initial $12 million in private funding (the total cost of the bridge all-told was $23.5 million) and finally bring the bridge project to life. Bower also gave the Ambassador its name; its working title, the Detroit River Bridge, was a little flat.  

Serendipitously, this week, another mode of border crossing reopened to vaccinated travelers. That'd be the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, which also celebrated an anniversary recently: it opened on Nov. 1, 1930, when President Herbert Hoover turned a "golden key" in Washington that rang bells in both Detroit and Windsor.  

And ICYMI, the Ambassador Bridge had some cute visitors this week — a pair of peregrine falcons, captured by one of the bridge's tower cams and shared on the bridge's Facebook page. Here they are! May they bode well for your weekend. 

1. Introducing the 100 Most Influential Women in Michigan

2. Why Larry Bell, after years of rebuffing offers, decided to sell Bell's Brewery

3. Real Estate Insider: Family real estate business ruptured, apartment portfolio fetching nearly $1 billion

4. Kelly Rossman-McKinney, trailblazing public relations executive, dies at 67
 
5. Home offices get upgrades as workers expect to continue remotely

6. Commercial real estate is full of former athletes. That's not a coincidence.

7. Experts: Employers, staff likely to use exemption rules to sidestep vaccine mandate

8. Former Detroit-owned prison property in Plymouth Township eyed for large new warehouse

9. Sterling Group envisions 24-story apartment tower on Joe Louis Arena site

10. Lake Trust Credit Union, other financial institutions wade into Michigan cannabis banking market