Heaven Hill and Joe Beam's Great Granddaughter

[Guest **DONOTDELETE**]

Hi Boone! I'm sorry I haven't been writing here for awhile. I've been using any free time I happened to get trying to get new web pages and updates out and they're finally done. I'm really sorry I couldn't do justice to the great visit we had with you and Regina when we were there. You showed us so much, and I didn't get any photos that were usable. When I tried to lay out a web page it just didn't tell the story at all. This would have been the text...

After a quick breakfast at McDonald’s, we met Bettye Jo Boone at Heaven Hill and she took us on a special, custom tour of the bottling facility. We know Bettye Jo through the StraightBourbon.com discussion forum, and from seeing her at the Kentucky Bourbon Festival, where she operates the Heaven Hill display booth. Bettye Jo works at the Heaven Hill bottling plant in Bardstown. She worked on the bottling lines until this year, when she won a highly coveted position as the first woman line mechanic in the company's history. In addition, she and her sister Connie operate a professional embroidery service that handles, among other clients, all of Heaven Hill's design and embroidery needs on company logos and promotional apparel. In her spare time, she is a strikingly beautiful woman in a state known for its beautiful women and a friendly, warm, and extremely enthusiastic hostess. Our actual "tourguide" was Regina, who appears every bit as elegant and regal as her name would suggest.

This is not the first time we've been here, but our other visit was as part of the regular tour. This time it was more like having a friend show you around her clubhouse. In fact, it IS a lot like Bettye Jo's clubhouse. Besides the fact that Bettye Jo has worked there for years (well, they couldn't be THAT many years, unless she started when she was about three) her family has been involved with Heaven Hill since it began. In fact, Bettye Jo's family has been involved in Kentucky bourbon practically as long as there has BEEN Kentucky bourbon. Of course Boone, as in DANIEL BOONE, is a very important name in Kentucky history. But it's Bettye Jo's husband, Pat, who is of the Boone family (no, he's not THAT Pat Boone; he could probably be his grandson). Bettye Jo's family are the Beams. She is the great-granddaughter of Joseph L. Beam, whose descendents include seven sons who were all involved in the Kentucky bourbon industry. She has a scrapbook stuffed to bursting with newspaper articles, obituaries, family tree charts, copies of legal documents, and hundreds of items concerning her branch of the Beam family, which has not been as well documented as the "Jim Beam" branch. It is Bettye Jo's lifelong quest to bring to this branch the recognition it deserves.

As she showed us through the plant, we got to meet many of the people Bettye Jo works with, including Max Shapira, the president and CEO of Heaven Hill. We’ve been honored to meet him before, at the bourbon festivals, but this was a chance to visit him in his own office. It says something that Max practices the sort of leadership that allows Bettye Jo to walk right into the president's office and ask if he'd like to meet a couple of her personal friends. Then again, knowing Bettye Jo, poor Max probably couldn't have stopped her if he'd tried!

We also got to meet the mechanic’s crew, who are training Bettye Jo for her new position, and many of the bottling line workers that she used to work with. Well, actually she still does work with them, it just as a mechanic now. Everyone is like a big family, and most have worked for Heaven Hill for many years. For those who have never worked on a bottling line, a line mechanic is not quite the same as an automotive or assembly mechanic. The machinery of a bottling line is a long chain of parts acting on other parts and everything is very precisely set up for the conditions of whatever is being bottled at the moment. Adjustments to this precision are constant, so the mechanic isn't just someone to call if something goes wrong; he (or she, in Bettye Jo's case) has to be there attending at all times. Of course, if things do go wrong, they have to fix them; that can often mean machining (or even inventing) new parts on the fly. Then, when that particular bottling job is finished, the entire line has to be torn down and set up for the next job. Every second that the line isn't operating is a second that costs money, so there is a lot of pressure to get the adjustments set perfectly very quickly. Line mechanics are sharp; they are among the best of the best. We had a chance to meet everyone in the shop.

We spent a lot of time in the label warehouse. It is an immense room, because Heaven Hill owns, and uses, a lot of labels. Both women were amazed at our interest in all the different labels, and both had fun pulling out sample after sample for us to take with us. We’ll make a nice display of them for the collection.

After we left Heaven Hill, we stopped for hamburgers at Rio’s Steakhouse, where they take the request for "rare" very, very seriously.

=John=

http://w3.one.net/~jeffelle/whiskey