BY WHITNEY EULICH
One month before the birth of his first child, Steve Hindy was kidnapped by the Southern Lebanon Army (SLA). He was an Associated Press foreign correspondent covering an Irish battalion of UN Peacekeeping forces. This was the UN’s first mission in the south of Lebanon since a clash between the SLA and UN earlier that year.
Before he left for work that morning, Hindy warned his wife: “You know they frequently abduct people in the south but they always let the journalist go. If you hear I get kidnapped, just don’t worry about it.” Hindy laughs and nods as he remembers the story.
Hindy and his photographer were released that afternoon along with one UN Peacekeeper who was tortured and shot three time, but was still alive. Two UN workers were killed.
“It was a really nasty situation,” Hindy recalled during an interview at his office in Brooklyn, New York, “and it definitely had an impact on me. I realized the story wasn’t worth dying for.” Not that story, nor any other one.
Still, Hindy continued to put himself and his family in life-threatening situations. There was the time a car bomb exploded, shattering nearly every window in a Beirut hotel except the one left slightly ajar in Hindy’s room. His newborn son was tucked in to sleep beneath that window. Or the day in 1981 when Hindy sat just feet away from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat when he was assassinated during a military parade.
After years in the Middle East, Hindy was eager to take a transfer to Manila in 1984. He was surprised when his wife refused.
“Ellen endured this life like a real trooper,” Hindy said, but she had had enough. She told him she was taking their kids back to the US.
Hindy and Ellen Foote had already divorced once. They remarried during Hindy’s first year in Lebanon, and his attitude toward work changed after the birth of his first child. When shooting broke out or bombs went off Hindy, pursued news on his family’s safety first, then chased the story for work.
But, there was no denying his love for the job.
“It was just a thrill getting on an airplane and going someplace where most people are trying to get away from,” Hindy said. “I can still conjure up the feeling of flying into Tehran or taking a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad during the first days of the Iran-Iraq war. It’s an adrenalin rush.”
Few foreign correspondents had both successful careers and family life. He decided no story was worth his marriage either, and moved back to Brooklyn with his wife and two children in 1984, where he took a job editing for Newsday Magazine.
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Back in New York, Hindy stood in his family’s kitchen enveloped by shards of glass. Foote ushered their children to the back of the apartment, but unlike similar scenes in Beirut and Cairo, this mess wasn’t the result of violence.
Hindy was trying out a new hobby, home beer brewing, and broke 30 of the first 48 bottles he tried to cap.
By 1987 Hindy’s love for brewing beer, and his dissatisfaction with his desk job at Newsday, had grown so great he decided to start a microbrewery with his downstairs neighbor Tom Potter. Hindy was inspired by the small breweries popping up on the west coast and knew Brooklyn had a rich history of brewing. He and Potter raised a half million dollars in seed money, and with two small children and no steady income Hindy found his new adrenaline rush.
Hindy likens starting his own company to working in a war zone. “You never know what you’re going to run into and it requires every bit of imagination you’ve got,” Hindy said, adjusting his wire-rim glasses.
His experience working in conflicts helped Hindy keep his cool when he was robbed at gunpoint in 1995 for $30,000 from the company’s safe. It also helped one day when he was cornered by a group of union workers straight out of GoodFelleas. The three men, each flanked by two bodyguards, wanted a cut in his beer business, implying he should put a few “no show” positions on the payroll of a brewery’s distribution to ensure the safety of himself and his new enterprise. Hindy promised the men jobs in his next venture, and the men went off to discuss.
“I was sitting there just shitting in my pants,” Hindy said, “and one guy comes back and puts his hand on my thigh next to my balls and says, “I’m sorry, but we’re gonna have to hurt you.”
The man flung Hindy into the chain-link fence behind him and said, “Just Kiddin’! We’re gonna leave you alone.” He and his entourage turned and walked out of the warehouse. In 2004, two of the men were put in jail for extortion and racketeering, charges unrelated to their visit with Hindy.
Today, Brooklyn Brewery is a privately held company with international distribution and annual sales close to $12 Million. Hindy’s industrial-style office is plastered with posters of the company’s retro, green curvy “B” logo, and decorated with trophies and plaques engraved with titles such as “entrepreneur of the year.” A lone piece of shrapnel, tucked between vintage beer bottles, and his enthusiasm for storytelling, are the only evidence of Hindy’s five-year stint as a correspondent in the Middle East.
Hindy pulled a black leather jacket embroidered with a small Brooklyn Brewery logo over his yellow collared shirt and navy fleece vest as he left his office Thursday morning. An open room of mostly men in their twenties and thirties called out hellos and howdies as he crossed the office, and across the street warehouse employees went out of their way to chat with him.
Neither of Hindy’s children were interested in taking over the Brewery, he explained, but his daughter Lily, a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, takes after his interest in the Middle East. She has studied Arabic in Damascus and Cairo, and plans to do an internship in Israel this summer. Lily, 27, smiled as she talked about her father’s ability to take risks and follow his passion without needing to be the center of attention. “He’s a great story teller and he loves talking to people,” Lily said. “But he can be really quiet.”
Hindy, starting to show patches of gray in his moustache and beard, survived five years in war zones, and managed to navigate Brooklyn’s petty mobsters. But, in 2007 he experienced a parent’s ultimate tragedy: the death of his son. Sam, then 27, was killed riding his bike across the Manhattan Bridge.
Her brother’s death ‘turned the family upside down,’ Lily said, and her father talks little about the loss that he clearly thinks about all the time. “You can tell he carries a weight with him,” she said.
Hindy is proud of his daughter, inscribing a copy of his book “Beer School,” published in 2005 with the message “Thanks for bringing the Hindys back to the Middle East.” Though, Hindy admitted he’s nervous watching Lily go to Jerusalem for an internship this summer, especially after what happened to Sam, he said, “but what can I say? Yeah, it’s dangerous, but I did it.”