Lucas Hendrickson: Character counts, in both people and whiskey. The character derived from Jack Daniels' age-old process has become famous worldwide, but the characters charged with telling Mr. Jack's story to fans and friends across the globe are an equal part of the whiskey success. On this episode, we talk to Goose Baxter, a man defined by many things: Lynchburg, Tennessee native, Jack Daniel Distillery employee, bib overall enthusiast, and rock star in the United Kingdom. He lets us in on a few secrets of the Tennessee Squire's Association, that group of rabid and devoted friends of Mr. Jack, and how that cast of characters help celebrate all things that begin in and Around the Barrel.
Welcome back to Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel's. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson. One of the long time, if unspoken, goals of the Jack Daniel Distillery is to ensure the brand's authenticity. When you visit Lynchburg, Tennessee and talk to the folks who live and work there, you still get the down-home feeling, but without artifice backing it up. Sure, they produce one of the most iconic products in the world, but they haven't lost their identity while doing it, because let's face it, you couldn't make up a character like Goose Baxter if you tried. Goose is the friendly face and voice behind the Tennessee Squire's Association, the long time affinity program for the most dedicated of Mr. Jack's fans and friends. Goose brings 40 plus years of experience with the brand to his current role and you can find him most days sitting in the front parlor of the Motlow house, greeting guests, spinning tales, and helping folks start their celebration of all things Old Number 7.
Goose: My name is Goose. You know, that's my nickname. My real name is Randy, you know if you should come in and ask for Randy they'd say "Who in the world are you talking about?" I've been working for the distillery 42 years now.
Lucas: Goose, thanks for joining us Around the Barrel, sir.
Goose Baxter: Well, I'm proud to be here.
Lucas: We're incredibly happy to have you, and because you are an institution around this place obviously. So first off, just tell us how the nickname Goose came about.
Goose: You know, I got that nickname when I was a very young child, only about six, seven years old, and we had some geese here on the place that we lived on, and being a boy, I got to throwing rocks at them, and my daddy told me, he said "You better leave them alone or they'll get you." and you know, what happened, they got me. You know a goose will pinch you, you know, today I'm afraid of a chicken. You know, anything that's got feathers on it, I don't want no part of that now.
Lucas: Just put it on a grill and then take care of whatever. So, tell us what your current role is right now with the distillery and specifically with the Squire's Association, and then we can talk about the kind of the history of that organization.
Goose: You know, for thirty five years I was a tour guide here at the distillery and I've been working with the Tennessee Squire's Association for the last five, six years now. What I do, I meet and greet the Tennessee Squire's storytellers. And also I do a bunch of tastings to you know, when consumers comes in, buys a whole barrel of Single Barrel select, I sit down with them and fill me a brand tasting sign and it's real neat job, you know, I love telling stories, you know, here about a month ago I got invited to a storytelling, it was a contest, for the first time they had storytelling down on the Town Square here in Lynchburg, and I don't know how my name got put in to it, but you know, I went down and told stories but the rest of the folks that was telling stories they was professional storytellers, and I said "Whoo," but it was a great turnout, now we had about a hundred fifty people down there, and that's the first one they ever had, you know, and they probably would do it every year now.
Lucas: Well, I mean you were tour guide here for a long time, so clearly you are a professional storyteller sir. I mean, you know, you got a paycheck for that.
Goose: Well you know, tour guides are storytellers, entertainers, and salesmen. That's your, that's your talent.
Lucas: How did you get started in doing that, was that one of your first roles here?
Goose: It was not my first role here. I have worked in the marketing part the whole time I've been here, but the first four to five years I worked in the POS Department which you know, shipping merchandise and stuff, and in 1980 I became a tour guide, and was scared to death, you know, the first few months but you know the more you done it, you know, you got used to it and I really enjoyed it and always made a point to my fellow workers, you know. We're inviting these people into our home and when they're in our home, you know, we want to show them a good time. I always believe in taking time with folks, telling the stories promoting the brand and making friends all over the world.
Lucas: Do you have a rough number of the number of tours that you gave over the years?
Goose: They figured it up, I have walked about 35,000 tours and took about 700,000 people through here. So, I have met a bunch of people.
Lucas: How has that tour process changed from when you started doing it to where it is? It's, you know, it's a well-oiled machine out here right now.
Goose: It's a well-oiled machine now because you know, we're having so many tours and you know, you got to kind of keep it on a timescale, schedule, you know back in the old days, we might stay out for an hour and a half with a tour, I mean and you know late in the evening, when they have a late tour where you might only have, you know, four or five people on your tour, you'll think "Well, I'll knock this one out in about 30 minutes" before its over with, you've done been out about an hour and fifteen minutes with them, having a good time.
Lucas: Yeah, especially if you're able to do more conversational stuff with those folks and the questions get better and you get to know those folks a little better.
Goose: Yeah, you know what, you always want to tell the stories, but too you know, we might talk about anything, you know football, just what's going on right now.
Lucas: Now we are sitting inside the Motlow house, the restored home of the second...? What's the lineage?
Goose: Lem Motlow was Jack's nephew, and that's who Jack left it to, you know, when he passed away, and this house we're in is a brand new built home and it houses the Tennessee Squire's Association and also in this house is where we do all of the By the Barrel tastings, and we have meetings and events and stuff, I guess.
Lucas: Sure. So you are seeing people from all over the world come in through these doors, you know, three hundred and sixty some odd days a year and what has what has this building now allowed? obviously again with the Single Barrel operations can come through here and dedicate a stop and then there's just this amazing collection of memorabilia here from Squires who donated into this place. So, what has this added to the abilities of the distillery?
Goose: What it has added? You know, we can see more Squires, because the old Squire's office was just a small dark room, you know, we got three rooms downstairs that we can see people in, so we can see a bigger number at one time, you can come in and we'll see you. You know, in the old Squire Room you had to take a seat outside like you were going to the doctor because the room was so small we just couldn't get everybody in, about ten people it could handle at one time. And when you get talking, talking you know, really get into a story, people might have to wait like 30 minutes outside for you get them in. So it made it bigger, you know, it's better for the whole Association.
Lucas: Tell us about the origins of the Tennessee Squire's Association.
Goose: You know, the Tennessee Squire's Association was started on Valentine's Day of 1956, and reason why we started it was back in the, this is a hard thing to believe, but back in the early 50's, you know it was in the Motlow family, 60% of the whiskey in these barrel houses was ready to be bottled and we didn't have no market for it. No market, and actually that's hard to believe nowadays. So, you know, the family said, we never had a marketing director, or a national sales manager so they went out and hired Winton Smith as the national sales manager and Art Hancock as the marketing manager. And Winton was in the airport out in Texas and he saw this sign, "Buy a small portion of Texas, buy a square foot." And you know it was a dude ranch. So he came back and told Art about it, and they got kind of working on it, and so Brown-Forman bought the distillery in '56, and by 1957-'58, they had put Jack Daniel's on allocation, you know, these two guys done a great job, so what we told all bartenders and all store owners, if somebody should come in and ask for Jack and they didn't have it, tell them to write the distillery. So people started writing us, and we started writing them back through the Tennessee Squire's Association. You know, "Have the faith," you know, maybe one day, you know, we'll have enough to go around. So what we did, we stayed in contact with the consumer, hoping you know, when we did have enough back out on the market they would come back being a Jack Daniel's consumer. And it worked, and we stayed on that allocation probably into the mid-seventies, and the reason why we stayed on the allocation so long is, you know, we didn't have no idea how good export would be, and so it kept us in allocation. So it's just the way we go about thinking, our Jack Daniel's consumers, and back, you know, when we first started it, it was a square foot, and about 1982, they cut it back to a square inch of property.
Lucas: That's a hundred forty-four more people you can put on that.
Goose: We had a guy come in here a couple of years ago and you know, it's an unrecorded deed, but he came in, he said "I'm very upset with y'all." You know, we said "Why?" He said "Y'all are using my property way too much, you aren't calling to get permission to go fishing on it, and hunting on it, and picking berries off of it." And I'll show you here when we go downstairs. You know, he brought us a fence to put on his property, so it's a pretty neat thing. Right, you know, like I say people bring us stuff from all over the world.
Lucas: It's amazing to think about, you know, 50 plus years ago now, that kind of foresight to put together what's a pretty sophisticated direct-to-consumer marketing kind of thing as I imagine, that's fairly unheard of in those days and and not even, you know, all that available now.
Goose: You know, like I had a guy yesterday. He said "What a marketing account this is," you know, from a consumer, and he dealt in marketing himself, and he said it was a great idea.
Lucas: So how many current Squires are there?
Goose: You know, we have no idea, you know the program was started in '56 and you know, you have had them to decease, you have had them to move, we have lost contact with them, so you know, really we have no idea.
Lucas: Do you have an idea of kind of the farthest away from Lynchburg that someone is a Squire?
Goose: All over the world, you know, and we're wanting more and more people international to become Squires because they promote the brand for you.
Lucas: Absolutely. What are the things that, except well in addition to which I finally took advantage of for the first time today, fantastic parking next to the Visitor's Center over there, what other kind of things do Squires get?
Goose: Well, they've got their own parking, you know, when they're not full, when they come and visit us we always got them a gift for stopping by, and every year we do stuff with the Squires, we have a hunt the last Friday night of April, we just got finished with an event here about two weeks ago. We took a small number of the Squires into the Motlow Cave here. Its the first time we ever done that, it went over very good and we're probably going to do it a second time here, you know, maybe a third time because it went over so good, and here in a couple weeks we're going to have the big barbecue here and I don't know if you notice outside the Motlow house we've got a tent set up and we'll probably have about 1,800 to 2,000 Squires to come in that Saturday.
Lucas: Is that kind of the single biggest kind of gathering?
Goose: That is the biggest, that is the biggest and we'll have a gift for them, we'll feed them some barbecue and stuff like that, we'll have some music. And last year the neatest thing in the tent we had, we had a barbershop. Sure did, and we gave free haircuts. And it was a very neat thing, I'm kind of waiting on that this year. You know, I need one now so I'm gonna kind of wait it out and see if I can't get a free haircut.
Lucas: So that's got to be an interesting part of this job as well, just trying to keep those ideas flowing about what else can we give to those folks who have been such a great supporters of the brand over the years? And I'm sure there's quite a collector's community out there for Squires
Goose: It is huge, and I'm talking about folks that has got big numbers of bottles, they are very proud of it because they always want to show you a picture of it, but it's worldwide.
Lucas: Talk about some of the things that are I mean, we're in, which room is this?
Goose: I think it's the Robert room, yeah... Connor room, one of the two.
Lucas: How are each of these rooms, are they themed differently as far as the different memorabilia displayed?
Goose: You know when we moved over here from the old Squire's room, you know, we had shelves in it, and you know and what we did we just put the stuff on the shelves and we just every time we got another piece, we would put it on the shelf and just keep pushing stuff to the back, and you know, when we moved we had no idea we had that much stuff, and you know, it took us probably about a year over here to finally get it all in the cabinets, you know and some pieces there was two pieces to it, and they were separated. So we finally got it all put together, like, you know, you got your Gentleman Jack, your Single Barrel bottles and stuff in here, you know and merchandise and stuff that people sent us all over the world.
Lucas: I know in one of the downstairs rooms there's a fantastic set of bottles from you said around 1918?
Goose: 1915. The Bell Lincoln bottles.
Lucas: Okay, they came in a corrugated paper wrapper around that to protect it?
Goose: That was the box. and it was shipped in a wooden box, and it was bottled up in St. Louis, that's where it was bottled at now, you know funny thing about it, the State of Tennessee was one of the first States in the Union to go dry in 1909, you know they went state by state by state. So, Tennessee went dry and they moved it to Birmingham then Alabama went dry and they moved it to St. Louis, then national prohibition came into effect all across the U.S., so if you was not already dry, you had to go dry, and after it was repealed they moved it right back here, and Mr. Motlow kept up the paperwork on it and stuff like that, he knew that he was going to start back making whiskey when it was repealed.
Lucas: But to think about that now hundred and three year old whiskey sitting, you know in the original packaging is just, that it's survived...
Goose: Like I tell folks I said, you see that package in the cabinet, and that is the only cabinet has that is locked, I said you can buy the best pickup General Motors makes with what's in that cabinet, and you can, I'm speaking about $15,000 a bottle.
Lucas: That's crazy. Yes, but again a testament to the brand of people hanging on to that and and recognizing the value of that to the company as well and kind of bringing it back here to its origin point.
Goose: And Mr. Hancock, you know Art the marketing manager, he was the one that had them and you know, he wanted us to have them so they worked out a deal and we got them
Lucas: Sure. How many people kind of cycle through on a regular basis? I mean, that you see over and over and over again?
Goose: I got one guy that comes every Wednesday. Every Wednesday, his name is Richard and he lives outside of Huntsville. He's a retired military guy and he comes up every Wednesday morning. He's waiting on me out here in the parking lot and I put him into the Goose Mobile out here and me and him ride through the parking lot, come up and park, he comes in and we will have a cup of coffee and we'll talk for about one hour. Richard will get up and shake my hand, get his gift, and he'll leave. He's got two puppies that travels with him, cute puppies, and he'll go downtown to the hardware store, walk around with his puppies, then he'll go over to the candy shop and he'll buy some candy, then he'll go to Miss Mary Bobo's, every Wednesday, he'll go to Miss Bobo's and he'll sit down at his table and he'll give candy away to the table. Everybody gets a piece of candy, but he's such a nice guy, you know, like I said down at Miss Bobo's, he can give the history of Miss Bobo's because he's been so many times, but he really enjoys going down there and you know, first thing he asks me when he gets here Wednesday morning, "What's for dinner?" because he knows I got the menu and you know, he's going to be very happy this week cause you know, what they're having? Fried Catfish. And you know, they don't get that every week, so he'll say "Oh that's good" You know, he'll be proud of that.
Lucas: That's awesome. So Goose, you again as one of the most visible faces of the Tennessee Squire's Association, you've developed a little bit of a fan base yourself from what I understand across the pond over in the UK?
Goose: In the UK you know here, I don't know about seven years ago. I got the opportunity to go to the UK and what we did we built a barrel Christmas Tree in the UK, like we build here every year, and I got an opportunity to go over and do the marketing work on that and you know, they said I'm a rockstar over there, I mean, but you know, they took me, we had to get on the subway because they wanted to show me my picture in the subway on the adverts, so they showed that to me and so, you know, we built the barrel tree you know, and I gave up gave an eight or ten minute speech and I had the opportunity to turn it on, so the guy standing beside me, he said "You hit the red ball and the lights are gonna pop on." I said, "Well I want to ask you something, is the red ball hooked to the lights?" He said "No, I got the switch in my hand, when you hit the ball. I'm going to turn it on." I said, "OK," I said "Now if they don't come on, what?" he said, "Well, I'm running and it's your problem." But I hit the ball and it came on. So it was all good, but you know in the Tennessee Squire's Association, you know, they like to send you a piece of mail through the mail about three times a year, and you know, everyone of these letters has got some proof to it. You know what I mean. Now we might yank your leg a little bit you know, it's still a bit of truth into it. But the people that signs them is the people that works here, and my wife, you know, Debbie, she signs some, and she signed one that went out it was about Debbie and Goose, was up on the property checking on it, making sure everything was okay, and Goose got sprayed by a polecat. And you know it wrote on in the letter you know, she gave me some baths, you know in tomato juice trying to get it the smell off of me, and she wanted people to send her ideas how to get the smell off of me.. So here starts this mail coming in. Oh, no, and she answered the phone down at Miss Bobo's one day. You know, "This is Debbie Baxter, Miss Bobo's." This man said, "Is this the Debbie Baxter that sent the polecat letter out?" She said "Yes, it is." He said, "I want to thank you for checking on my property. I really do appreciate it. But I sure do I feel bad about your dog getting sprayed by the polecat." She said "Sir, that's not my dog, that's my husband." So that was a pretty good night. And also, you know, they sent one out about, she washed my bib overalls. you know hung them out on the clothesline, and a couple pairs came up missing. We don't know what happened to them, you know wrote in, I said, you know, if you think you found Goose's overalls - you know, send them back to him, so here came these overalls through the mail, you know, getting them from everywhere, but they didn't know how big I was so they were sending size 34's so here's a funny thing the people in California don't know the difference between overalls and coveralls, so I've got a pair of coveralls from California that was orange and had a number on the back. You know, so that was not too good. But it's a funny, you know, it's just all in fun and you know, every year the Tennessee Squires, we do send out a calendar every year and you know and it should be starting to mail about the second week of December. We have already shot the pictures and you know, they have wrote the calendar to the pictures, so it is waiting to be printed as so they really want the calendar. We have already had people calling here, "Have you mailed the calendars yet?" We just shot the pictures of it, but it'll be about the second week of December.
Lucas: So if somebody is interested in becoming a Tennessee Squire, what is the best way for them to go about doing that?
Goose: The only way you can do it, you got to know one to become one. You got to be nominated, and you know in the nomination form, you know, it's a little thing at the bottom that whoever done the nominating has to write two or three sentences. You know why they should be a Tennessee Squire, and you better make something that Jack is brought up in there.
Lucas: What else would you like to see, you know happen as far as the evolution of the of the Tennessee Squire's Association?
Goose: Just keep on growing it, you know and having the right ones, you know does, you know, when you nominate one, you know, make sure it's Jack Daniel's whiskey, we don't want some other brand, You know what I mean, you know, if they're using Jack Daniel's and enjoying Jack Daniel's and respecting it, they would make a good Squire.
Lucas: So if you see Goose out, you know roaming around during the barbecue or in you know, London, walk up and you know, talk him into nominating you if that's the case.
Goose: And if you see my overalls, send them back to me.
Lucas: That's perfect. That's perfect. Well Goose we thank you for your time. We thank you for your service to the Tennessee Squire's and look forward to talking to you again real soon.
Goose: All right. Thank y'all. Enjoy your day.
Lucas: Around the Barrel is the official podcast of the Jack Daniel Distillery. Follow the podcast on the web at Jack Daniels.com/podcast, if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you gather your on-demand audio. Always remember, with great podcast and great whiskey, please enjoy responsibly. Join us next time for more conversations Around the Barrel. Your friends at Jack Daniel's remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel's and Old Number 7 are registered trademarks, copyright 2019, Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof, distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.
