WITH THE RIGHT KIND OF EYES, Bruce Reed’s life story is fit for a Hollywood screenplay.
There’s mystery and intrigue. There’s exotic locations and lavish experiences. Copious amounts of sex and booze. Guns and money. There’s triumph. There’s tragedy. There’s hot rods and motorcycles, lawlessness and rock and roll. There’s family. And infidelity. And divorce. And re-marriage. And adoption. And a birth father who claims he ran with the mob in 1960s Seattle. There may or may not have been a high-level murder of a local business magnate in the lucrative alcoholic beverage industry of the Nineteen-Nineties-through-the-Twenty-Teens.
The whole thing takes place on the Kitsap Peninsula.
“I feel like I’ve lived a charmed life,” Bruce says. “Like I’ve always had Lady Luck on my shoulder. I’ve had her over here and I’ve had Satan over here…”
He’s pointing at his shoulders. He’s staring into the glow of a bank of pull tabs and TV screens in the back corner of a dark bar on Erland’s Point. He’s got his resume on the bar in front of him. He asks if I can read in this light. We’re having mid-afternoon shift beers on a Monday, the day before a retirement party being thrown in his honor by his company after 38 years in the beverage trade…
:: [ACT ONE] ::
The opening credits roll and the movie opens with a scene of Bruce in his early 20s. He’s painting cars and working at an auto-body shop called Clifford Automotive on 6th and Montgomery in the Callow neighborhood of Bremerton. He’s starting a family at 23. The year is 1986. He’s got a friend that works at the Silverdale IGA grocery store who gives him a tip about a wine distribution company that is looking for people. Bruce puts in his resume but doesn’t hear back for months. He thinks nothing of it. He goes on painting cars and doing body work moving up in the automotive world…
Three months later, he gets the callback.
The wine distribution company wants to sit down with him for lunch. They meet at a nondescript small, private chinese restaurant on Kitsap Way. Three guys in suits, sit him down, ask him a round of questions, then offer him the job. Bruce accepts and puts in his two weeks at the body shop.
Meanwhile, the Washington Wine Industry is poised to hit its stride in becoming globally renowned.
“When I got into the industry, I was the youngest sales rep in the market and the youngest tenured, and now I’m the oldest tenured,” the scene comes back to current day Bruce at the bar, recalling what would turn into almost four decades in the same job, 34 years of that with the same company which has now become Columbia Distributing.
“When I started selling, we had paper route books,” Bruce says. “We kept inventory with paper and pen and wrote orders out that we’d have to call in. We had these credit cards where we would go out and punch in all these numbers on payphone to call the warehouse. We had pagers. And ‘911’ meant call the office immediately. Other times, like, ‘888,’ would mean give us a call when you have a moment. But you’d have to pull off the freeway and find a fucking phone. There’s no cell phones. I’ve been doing this shit long before cell phones were invented. So you’ve got a pager and you’ve got a landline that you’re using. Mostly it was payphone because the bar’s not gonna tie up their landline for you to fuck around for 20 minutes to make an order.”
After four years in sales, working his way from convenience stores to groceries with the wine distributors–G. Raden & Sons–Bruce signs with the local Jennings Corporation which had recently acquired a company with an impressive wine portfolio but had a sales force of, as Bruce calls them, ‘a bunch of yellow, fizzy beer sales guys that didn’t know anything about wine.”
In 1993, he sets a company record of a million dollars worth of wine sold in a year…
After that, he settles into 15 years straight of brokering the seven biggest grocery accounts across the peninsula, focused on wine and the burgeoning craft beer industry, while touching every corner of the beverage industry book.
He spends time at high end wineries in Napa and Sonoma and Oregon, drinking world-renowned wine and eating five star meals. He’s goes to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver year after year. He goes to the official Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany. He brags and crows about sexual escapades.
The proprietor of his neighborhood dive bar nicknames him ‘The Rooster.’
:: [ACT TWO] ::
For his entire career, Bruce’s territory was Kitsap. If you’ve drank an alcoholic beverage in this town over the past four decades, it probably wasn’t far removed from this guy.
Twenty six years into Bruce’s time at the Jennings Corporation–which had by that time merged to become Marine View Beverage–in 2017, one of the company’s owners, Lance Kahn, dies in a what the local paper calls a ‘tragic incident’ followed by ‘shock and disbelief’ from the community. His body is found in Oyster Bay, separated from his canoe. Attempts to revive him are unsuccessful. Kahn is a Bremerton native. Friends and family are in disbelief. Columbia acquires Marine View the following year.
“The guy was an excellent swimmer and he was in top physical condition,” back to current Bruce at the bar, gazing into the glow of the pull tabs and TV screens. He and Lance had worked together and known each other for many, many years. “It seemed kind of weird that he wouldn’t be able to get to shore. I still question that to this day…”
Bruce says he never thought he’d grow up to be a sales guy. “But I’ll tell you this,” he says. “In 5th grade, I sold magazine subscriptions to make extra money all over downtown Poulsbo and in the neighborhood at the top of the hill with all the nice houses and rich people, rode my bike door to door. I made a lot of money doing that. I also had the largest paper route at the Bremerton Sun. It was 280 accounts. And when I quit doing that they broke it into three separate routes… Because I was doing it on a motorcycle… illegally.”
He laughs.
The movie cuts to a flashback scene of 14-year-old Bruce whizzing through the backroads of the Silverdale woods on a Honda 125, delivering newspapers at high speeds throughout Olympic View and Old Frontier roads and down into Myhre Road before the mall was built.
“Chuck Webster, who was the local state patrol guy, he would pull me over and he’d go, ‘Look Bruce, I know you’re working and I admire that, but when you see me, find a dirt road or get out of my sight cause I don’t want to give you a ticket but I can’t just let you ride around freewheeling when you’re 14 years old on a motor vehicle,’” current day Bruce chuckles at the memory and orders another IPA.
He remembers his first beer at 13 years old. Rainier stubbies. He and a friend come across one of the older teenagers’ stash while they’re riding bikes around on Sherman Hill. They take the beer to an undisclosed location, drink two… “and were completely wasted,” he laughs.
Bruce went to school in North Kitsap from kindergarten to eighth grade then moved to Central Kitsap for high school. He graduated in 1980 and traveled around the country for a few years before starting work at the autobody shop and starting his own family with the birth of his son at age 22.
Bruce was adopted when he was five months old. He never knew his biological mom. He’s 28 years old when his sister—who was also adopted from a different family—tells him about a program called the Washington Adoptees Rights Movement and encourages him to try to look for his birth parents. He says he doesn’t have a burning desire since, as far as he’s concerned, his adopted mom and dad were ‘Mom and Dad.’ But he ends up paying the couple hundred bucks just to see. The agency couldn’t connect with his mom but they find his dad living in Spokane and re-connects them. The two kindle a relationship which leads to summers spent hunting and fishing and on the lakes of Eastern Washington and Couer D’alene for Bruce, his two kids and his first wife.
:: [ACT THREE] ::
Back to the dark corner of the bar in the present Monday afternoon, three or four beers later, I’m reading Bruce’s resume and ask if there’s something specific that’s brought him to the point of retirement, asking if it had something to do with Columbia’s takeover of the company and the strange circumstances surrounding it. He says not at all. The company’s been great to him.
After all the jokes and bombastic stories, memories and reverie, the conversation changes tone. Earlier this year, Bruce’s second wife Mendi died suddenly at their home.
“I went through a very challenging year,” Bruce says, shifting his gaze down from the glow of the TV screens, “With losing my wife of 16 years in a weird heart deal, come home to find her passed away. That was in March of this year, and that put a pretty heavy fuck down on me.”
But through that tragedy, he said he learned how loved and cared for he was by his company, his colleagues and co-workers. He said that’s what made the impact of what he’d done in his 38-year-career real to him. Over the course of his career, he learned that sales work isn’t so much about sales. “It’s about listening, it’s about understanding your customers needs. Knowing who they are, showing interest, and being a human-being more than anything else,” he says. “I’m very satisfied with what I’ve been able to accomplish. I don’t have any regrets. I feel happy. I feel a great kinship and love for my customers and friends and acquaintances I’ve made through the years. It’s like I told you, when I say I’ve lived a charmed life, I really have. I haven’t had to go through the rigors of trying to make ends meet or challenges of employment. Somehow I was able to land this job in this industry and the rest is history, as they say…”
He carries that gratitude and love and all the over-the-top stories and memories with him into retirement.
He also serves as caretaker for all the old beer stuff that belonged to the Jennings Corporation. It’s all out in his shop. An invaluable amount of memories and retro cans and bottles and neon signs, posters, promotional materials and ephemera. He’s also got a bank of pinball machines and fully functioning old jukeboxes out there. He hand-selected each option on the jukebox playlist on 7-inch vinyl records. He flips on the power, punches in his selection and cranks up the volume. // BILLMAN
RAINY DAZE BREWING brewed a special beer to celebrate Bruce. It’s called ‘Bruce On The Loose.’ They’ll be tapping the first keg on his first official day of retirement, Dec. 1.
