Lapsing into a hushed brogue, Michael John Roarty told of the telephone call he received one day from the president of Stonehill College, a small Catholic school south of Boston.”He had a very thick brogue,and he was asking that I help out the school with its fundraiser,” said Roarty, who is a magical story teller. “I was flabbergasted. I had to tell him, ‘Father, I don’t know where Stonehill is, I’ve never heard of the place.’” Nor had he heard of Father McPhaidin.
The Rev. Bartley McPhaidin, a Holy Cross priest of Donegal extraction, the man on the telephone, was undaunted by Roarty’s reaction.
“The next thing I know,” says Roarty, “he’s telling me he knows my Aunt Biddie and Uncle Mike, who lived in Meenamara and Loughenure in Country Donegal. And that they told him that I would do it.”
Roarty knew the priest had him. That indeed, his family not only extends to the scores of real cousins and aunts and uncles who live in the old country, but the thousands of Irish citizens who have come to know him through his involvement with the Budweiser Irish Derby and other programs promoted by the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch, Inc.
Mike Roarty, a major brewery executive, knew that his deep ties to Ireland would make it all but impossible to turn down Father McPhaidin. So thanks to his Irish relatives, the late Brigid Sweeney and Michael Coyne, Roarty would aid Stonehill College.
At the Plaza Hotel in New York, with Roarty in attendance, Stonehill College raised $250,000 for the Irish Studies Program at the North Easton, Massachusetts school. Mike Roarty would pick up another honor, Stonehill’s President’s Award for Excellence.
Tributes and accolades are nothing new to Roarty, who this year adds another honor-Irish America magazine’s Irish-American of the Year Award.
Roarty is the executive vice president, corporate marketing and communications, for the brewery’s parent firm, Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc., a firm listed in the Top 50 of the Fortune 500 list.
On a wall in Roarty’s stately office, there is a large oil painting of his father’s thatched-roof cottage in Donegal, with the Arigal Mountains in the background. It hangs directly behind his desk, near large windows overlooking the Mississippi River, as it winds past St. Louis. The view includes the huge brewery complex that dominates the South Side of St. Louis.
It is a setting that says that Michael J. Roarty has made it big in his parents’ adopted country. He smiled.
“You know, the Irish were told that the streets of America were paved with gold,” he said. “When they got here, they found out that not only were the streets not paved with gold, they weren’t paved at all. And they were the ones who were going to pave them.”
His parents, John and Brigid (Derrig) Roarty, immigrated to Detroit, Michigan in the 1920’s. His father, who worked for the Uniroyal Tire Company in Detroit, was from Meenamara, Donegal; his mother is from Tourmakeady, County Mayo.
Michael was their second son, a young man blessed with glibness and salesman-ship. In fact, when the mood strikes him, Michael J. Roarty can be a one-man show-a song-and-dance man, comedian and storyteller, and a very astute marketing man.
On a visit to his office some while back, I found Roarty, dressed in a green wool Donegal sport coat and a dark blue tie with a leprechaun pattern, was standing before the stereo in his office, waiting until the needle scratches gave way to Robert Preston’s voice.
“My Heart Leaps Up,” from the musical “Mack and Mabel,” began to play, as Roarty did a slow, looping turn, hands pressed against his chest, and he sang along with Preston’s voice. “Every time I see my loving cup, my cup fills up,” and on and on it went. A surprisingly good tenor, he was swaying now in the manner of Tony Bennett, arms extended, “My-y-y-y cup fills up-p-p-p-p.” Stopping, abruptly he turned down the volume.
“This could be a great beer commercial,” he said. Don’t for one minute think this is idle talk. Roarty is as entertaining as he is shrewd. For an interviewer, he can be entertaining to the point of distraction.
There is an almost hypnotic charm about him.
Time for a Roarty story. Once on a visit to Ireland – his first time there was as a very young child in 1936— Roarty as usual was serving as master of ceremonies at a tourism function. He was introducing the minister of tourism, a man “who took himself very seriously,” said Roarty.
“I was telling this story about hurrying to catch a train to Ireland. The train was beginning to pull away from the station. And I asked a man on the platform: ‘If I run, can I catch the train?’ ‘’If you run, you can pass it,’ he said. Well, when the minister gets to the microphone, he says, ‘I didn’t appreciate that characterization of our railroads.'” Roarty is quick to add, however, that the Irish know that “when I go over there, I am at home. And I have long since lost count of the number of times I have visited.” For business reasons, Roarty and his wife, Leigh, are frequent visitors. In 1986, Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser sponsored the Irish Derby at Curragh racecourse, 30 miles outside Dublin, the company also entered into a license-brewing agreement with Guinness Ireland, Ltd., to brew and sell Budweiser in the Republic of Ireland.
The Budweiser Irish Derby, considered among the top four derbies in the world, is a two-day festival, which features thirteen other races, including one that honors Roarty’s father, “The John Roarty Memorial Railway Stakes.”
It is quite a tribute to a man who left Ireland on the run. John Roarty was a member of Sinn Féin, and he fled Ireland after the Irish Free State forces agreed to British control of the six northern counties. Roarty believes his father was right in his insistence that all thirty-two Irish counties be under Irish rule.
Last year, the Derby had one million Irish pounds in prize money available, a Curragh record.
Throughout all this, Budweiser is brewing in Kilkenny. Guinness, the market leader in Ireland and the world’s largest brewer of stout, brews Budweiser in its Kilkenny brewery, making it the only American beer made and sold in Ireland.
Roarty said the Budweiser is the No. 1 selling lager beer in Ireland. “Our success in Ireland is nothing short of sensational,” he added.
Roarty’s 31-year career at Anheuser-Busch, and his rise to the top of the marketing department, is remarkable. He literally began with the brewery at street level, and tough streets they were.
Growing up on Detroit’s East Side, an area that has its challenges-survival among them-may be the reason that Roarty has a certain engaging street moxie, and a fine car for an unusual proposition.
Roarty began as a point-of-sale merchandiser and beer hustler on the East Side, on John R. Street and Burma Road, an area populated by Blacks, Hispanics and southern whites.
It was 1953, and Roarty was still attending graduate school at the University of Detroit, where he was majoring in communication arts, and taking courses in advertising, marketing and speech. His undergraduate major at the Jesuit-run university was journalism. He wanted to be a sportswriter, and still greatly admires the likes of Jim Murray.
If his mother Brigid had had her way, Mike Roarty would today be working for the Detroit News, to her the only acceptable publication. Despite his considerable accomplishments with Anheuser-Busch, Brigid Roarty, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe and will soon be 83, has an almost legendary reputation for avoiding discussions about her youngest son’s occupation.
At the age of seven in County Mayo, Mrs. Roarty took the pledge. So the fact that her son is a super beer salesman is not something she brags about, at least not so you can hear it.
Recently, Roarty and a group of other major business executives met with President George Bush. When his mother heard about it, she said: “You didn’t tell him you worked for that brewery, did you?”
On other occasions friends would ask her, “How’s Michael?” And she would reply: “Do you know Charlie is building a bridge,” speaking of her oldest son, a contractor. “Yes, but how’s Michael?” “Oh, don’t worry about Michael,” she’d say.
“He’s some kind of salesman in St. Louis.”
Indeed he is.
When Roarty started with Anheuser-Busch back in the early 1950s, the brewery made only two beers, Budweiser and draft Michelob. It produced thirty-five million barrels a year and had a twenty-one percent share of the American beer market.
Today, due in no small part to the efforts of Mike Roarty and his boss, chairman and chief executive August A. Busch IIl, the Anheuser-Busch market share is an incredible 43.7 percent, which translates to 86 million barrels of beer a year. The company, which started in St. Louis in 1852 as the Bavarian Brewery, currently has thirteen breweries, situated from coast to coast.
Anheuser-Busch now produces eleven beer brands, one non-alcoholic brew, O’Douls, and imports three Carlsberg beers.
But perhaps its most dramatic sales statistic is that one of every four beers sold in America is a Budweiser.
For Mike Roarty, it’s been a long road from buying beers in the Blue Heaven Bar, a place that featured owl roasts, in a neighborhood where he was known as “Mr. Budweiser.”
“I was given six dollars a day to buy beers, and I would often spend $30 a day,” he recalled. “That job cost me more than I made. But believe me, that’s where you learn the business.”
“Mr. Budweiser” is not a bad nickname for Roarty.
During his tenure as the head of marketing, Anheuser-Busch has established a presence in widely scattered spots across the globe. Besides Ireland, it also has licensing agreements in five other countries, Denmark, England, Canada, Japan and Korea. It is exported to more than forty other countries.
Not only has Roarty and his staff moved “the product,” as folks at the brewery call their beers, but they have also ushered in a number of innovative schemes. One in particular was Roarty’s “baby,” the very successful sports marketing program.
The brewery sponsors a mind-boggling array of sporting events, including partial broadcast sponsorship of all but a few major league baseball franchises. The company owns the St. Louis
Cardinals baseball team, in addition to having an interest in the St. Louis Blues professional hockey team.
Roarty finds all this particularly gratifying.”It was a good run, as they say,” said a smiling Roarty, who as the Irish-American of the Year could not resist adding: “In this business, you have to like people – take your time with people – and have a good sense of humor. It has been my experience that the Irish do this naturally in their every day lives.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the March 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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