San Juan Mission—a bid of faded bric-a-brac outside of San Antonio
The active force of this particular Los Angeles brewery consisted of but one man, the old German who carried his recipe with him in the top of his head, and who had carefully kept it there throughout the years. In the cellar of the little brewery he made the beer, upstairs and in the garden he served it. In the mornings he worked at his cellar kettles, in the late afternoon and the early evening he stood behind his bar awaiting his patrons. If they wished to sit out in the shady garden they must serve themselves. There were no waiters in the place. If a man could not walk straight up to the bar and get his beer he was in no condition for it. The old German was as proud of the respectability of his place as he was of the secret recipe for the beer, which had been handed down in his family from generation to generation.
Only once was that secret given—and then after much tribulation and in great confidence to an agent of the government. But he had his reward. For the government at Washington in its turn pronounced his the purest beer in all the land. Men then came to him with proposals that he place it upon the market. They talked to him in a tempting way about the profits in the business, but he shook his head. His beer was never to be taken from the brewery. It was a rule from which San Antonians and tourists alike had tried to swerve him, to no purpose. Of course, every rule has its exceptions but there was only a single exception to this. Each Saturday night Mr. Degen used to send a small keg over with his compliments to a boyhood friend—he believed that friendship of a certain sort can break all rules and precedents.
All the way down through dry Texas we smacked our lips at the thought of Degen's beer. Before we had been in San Antonio a dozen hours we found our way to the brewery; in a quiet side street down back of the historic Alamo. But we had no beer.
The brewer was dead. In a neighboring street his friends were quietly gathering for his funeral, and rumor was rife as to whether or no he had confided his recipe to his sons. It was a great funeral, according to the local newspapers, the greatest in the recent history of San Antonio. It was a tribute from the chief citizens of a town to a simple man who had lived his life simply and honestly—who in his quiet way had builded up one of the most distinctive institutions of the place.
Rumor was soon satisfied. The secret of the recipe of the beer had not died. In a few days the brisk little brewery in the side street was in action once again. The stout Germans in their shirt-sleeves were again tramping with their paddles round and round the great vat while their foaming product was being handed to patrons in the adjoining room. But, alas, the traditions of the founder are gone. The beer is now bottled and sold on the market—in a little while is will be emblazoned in electric lights along the main streets of New York and Chicago. We are in a commercial and a material age. Even in San Antonio they are threatening to widen Commerce street—that narrow but immensely distinctive thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the town—threatening, also, to tear down the old convent walls next the Alamo and there erect a modern park and monument. By the time these things are done and San Antonio is thoroughly "modernized" she will be ready for an awakening—she is apt to find with her naïve charm gone the golden flood of tourists has ceased to stop within her walls. Truly she will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
*****
You will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone you will revert to these—gay open places, filled with palms and other tropical growths, and flanked by the crumbling architecture of yesterday elbowing the newer constructions of today. You will like to think of those squares in the sunny daytime with the deep shadows running aslant across the faces, there is delight in the memory of them at eventide, when the cluster lights burn brightly and the narrow sidewalks are filled with gaily dressed crowds, typical Mexicans, tall Texans down from the ranches for a really good time in "old San Antone," natives of the cosmopolitan town, tourists of every sort and description. Then comes the hour when the crowds are gone, the town asleep, its noisy clocks speaking midnight hours to mere emptiness—San Antonio breathes heavily, dreams of the days when she was a Spanish town of no slight importance, and then looks forward to the morrow. She believes that her golden age is not yet come. Her plans for the future are ambitious, her opportunity is yet to come. In so far as those dreams involve the passing of the old in San Antonio and the coming of the new, God grant that they will never come true.