LUIS BENITEZ LEARNED TO MIX A HIGHBALL WHEN HE WAS A YOUNG BOY.
Not for himself, of course. From a tender age, Benitez was in close proximity to power brokers—and, in this case, he was mixing drinks for men with last names like Ashcroft and Busch and Danforth.
It was the late 1970s and early ’80s, and after school was over, Benitez would head to his maternal grandfather’s suburban St. Louis store, Kelly’s Sporting Goods. Bill Kelly hadn’t always been the proprietor of a retail business. He’d first made his name as a hunting and fishing guide who helped his clients achieve their goals on rivers or in duck blinds, from Missouri’s Ozarks to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and most everywhere in between. Some of those clients were men of considerable power and influence, and one day a few of them encouraged Kelly to open a sporting goods store. “The way my grandfather tells the story is that they were fly-fishing,” Benitez says. “They were all standing by the river, and they were like, ‘Bill, we have to order our shotguns from Scotland and our fly reels from England, and we pay a lot of import duties. We think you should open a shop.’”
Kelly thought it was a grand idea, except he didn’t have the capital to establish a business of his own. So these men of considerable power and influence—Missouri Attorney General John Ashcroft, U.S. Senator John C. Danforth, and Augie Busch, as in Anheuser-Busch—told their friend they’d write him checks. He’d never have to pay them back, they said, but in return for their largesse, when the business became solvent, these men could walk in and grab, say, a hunting jacket off the rack and keep it. Maybe a fly rod and a reel and a pair of boots, too. If they wanted Kelly to guide them, he’d have to get the store’s manager to run the shop while they were off gallivanting in the wilds.
And so it came to be that, before long, little Luis was hanging out at Kelly’s Sporting Goods after school, stocking shotgun shells and fishing rods and making highballs for these prominent men and running interference when their respective wives called the shop to ask where they were. “My grade school was a quarter-mile away from my grandfather’s shop,” Benitez says. “From the time I got out at 3 to 6 p.m. when my mom came to pick me up after work, this was my education.”
It was an education in both how power works and in the ability of outdoor pursuits to bring people together—the store’s slogan was “Where Sportsmen Meet”—that would serve Benitez well as he embarked upon a life full of ambitious undertakings. Some
