Dad's bottle of Scotch

Some of my favorite politicians are celebrating this evening, so I've poured a drink to celebrate along with them. Cheers!

I picked up a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch Whiskey for the occasion, because that's what my Dad drank in 1972 to celebrate Richard Nixon's defeat of George McGovern, in the most lopsided Presidential election in US history.

And therein lies a story ...

A whiskey-curious teenager

When I was 14 years old and growing curious about alcohol (among many things), Dad brought home from work a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch whiskey. He poured himself a drink that evening, and then put the bottle up high in a kitchen cabinet, on a shelf above the drinking glasses. We so rarely had liquor in the house that there wasn't a designated place to put it, and he probably thought it was safe up there.

It was not.

A few days later, on an afternoon when Mom and Dad were both away from the house, I decided to try it out. To cover my tracks, I carefully noted the level of Scotch in the bottle before pouring some into a cup, and then I poured just enough tap water into the bottle to return it to its previous level.

I was intrigued by the buzz I got from the Scotch, but I was also worried that Dad might somehow notice what I had done. As a PhD in chemical engineering, he had extensive experience in observing and assessing the purity of liquids and how they behaved when mixed together. Would he pick up on the fact that his bottle of Scotch was no longer precisely 80 proof?

I watched with great trepidation when he poured himself another Scotch a few days later. To my relief, he seemed to enjoy it as much as the first one. It was clear that he hadn't noticed anything amiss.

Emboldened by my success, I did a Scotch-for-water swap again at the next opportunity. I think I may have also done it a third time – the details, like the increasingly watered-down bottle of Scotch, are murky in my memory.

The next time Dad decided to have a drink, the Scotch was getting pretty diluted and no longer had the dark rich sheen of pure Scotch whiskey. When I saw him take the bottle out of the cupboard and hold it up to the light for a closer look, I knew I was busted.

I remember the tongue-lashing about being too young to drink, and the angry lecture about ruining a good bottle of Scotch, and I think I may have gotten grounded for a while. Again, the details are murky. I got in trouble so many times during my junior-high years, for so many different things, that it's hard to keep the incidents all straight.

Learning the back story

When Dad passed away 23 years later in 1995, Mom reached out to a few of his former coworkers to tell them about his funeral. One of those was the manager who had originally hired Dad at Boeing, a man named Don Melchior. He was retired and living out of state by then, and wasn't able to attend the funeral.

Mom, my brothers, and I spoke at Dad's funeral, and afterward Mom mailed Don a printed copy of our eulogies. Don replied to her with a typed letter in which he shared some nice memories of Dad's work and the positive impact he had on his team, and in that letter he also told the story of how that the bottle of Scotch I remember so well had been payment from him for a bet he and Dad had on the 1972 Presidential Election.

It pleased me to learn that Dad had been able to laugh about this incident later. And in hindsight, I'm impressed by Don's idealism! Imagine deciding to bet on George McGovern during the leadup to the 1972 election, when the outcome seemed all but certain, and some pollsters were predicting that Nixon might win all 50 states.

And now, I'm going to get back to enjoying a full-strength not-watered-down Johnny Walker Red on the rocks, just like Dad did after the election in 1972.