FAYETTEVILLE — For a man who made his living selling beer, a surprising number of stories about Bob McBride include him buying a round for the whole bar.
McBride, 72, inherited the distributorship for Anheuser-Busch in 1964. For almost four decades, he was the face of Budweiser in Fayetteville. He died Thursday after a long illness.
“People would see his car parked out front and just come on in, because they knew Bob was going to set everybody up,” said Robert “Swifty” Reynolds, former owner of Rogers Rec. “Bob was always respectful, always a businessman, but he knew how to talk to folks, how to make friends.”
McBride, once the youngest distributor for Anheuser-Busch, was known in his younger years as the “hippie distributor,” and later for his flashy clothes and red luxury cars.
“He always had his-and-hers sets, in red and white, mostly Caddys and Continentals,” said Bill Lazenby, a longtime friend and former barber. “I don’t know if it was Razorback red or Budweiser red, but either one fit him.”
McBride stopped into Lazenby’s barbershop each morning in the 1970s to have his hair styled. “I’d spray it until it was harder than a brick. That was the popular thing back then,” Lazenby said. “Bob’s hair never went gray, and he claims he never dyed it. At least back then, it was the truth as far as I could see.”
McBride got his start in business washing dishes at his father’s restaurant, Mac’s Steak House, before the family bought Jack Holt Distributing in 1949. Bob’s new job: sticking tax stamps to beer cases.
He freely admitted in a 2004 interview he spent several semesters in college learning mostly about the consumption side of the beer business, and eventually dropped out of the University of Arkansas to work in the family business.
McBride Distributing was on Dickson Street until the early 1990s, when they sold the company’s land to make way for the Walton Arts Center. The business moved to the south side of town, just off the appropriately named Clydesdale Drive.
“If Bob ever needed a nickname, it would be something like ‘the Duke of Dickson,’” said Bobby Ferrell, a former City Council member and friend of McBride’s. “Thing about Bob, though, was that he never needed a nickname.”
McBride also liked to gamble, favoring baccarat over poker or blackjack. His experience in Las Vegas turned out lucky for Lazenby and some friends late one night.
“We were in Vegas, and we wanted to get in to see Elvis, which was pretty much impossible,” Lazenby said. “We called Bob at like 1 or 2 in the morning. His wife wasn’t happy about it, but Bob just said, ‘Hey, go find this one pit boss and tell him I said to get you in there.’ He handed us some sort of golden ticket, and we ended up right in the front row.”
McBride’s generosity wasn’t just about drumming up business, Reynolds said.
“He bought the bar whatever they were drinking,” Reynolds said. “He could care less if it was a Budweiser or not.”
Lazenby recalled one evening when McBride insisted the tap was closed, at least for the night.
“I might have had a bit too much of the golden nectar, and he just kept forcing me to drink one glass of water after another,” Lazenby said. “The whole time, he’s growling, ‘Boy, you’ve got to learn to pace yourself.’”