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Beamish J. Bettenbaum

Beamish Bettenbaum is a railway Titan whose spirit embodies Steam and Rye, along with that of his wife Dolores. The brand identity is based around Beamish & his quirks. Beamish loved whiskey, good hearty food, steam trains & travel. He had a distinctive moustache & facial hair plays a part in the brand identity.

Beamish Bettenbaum last will and testament:
This is the letter opened on 18 September 2010, under instructions placed with Beamish Bettenbaum’s lawyers, upon which the foundation of Steam & Rye is based. Despite the hopes expressed herein for an extended life, he died 137 years earlier…

I, Beamish Jasper Bettenbaum, of the Island of Manhattan, City of New York, do leave this epistolary documentation to he whomsoever can furnish me the generosity of undertaking my final wish. I declare this day to be the 18th September Anno Domini 2013 and my two hundredth birthday, should the Good Lord find me living. There are no witnesses to this godforsaken scrittle, but to hell with witnesses and lawyers. Evil and noisome and bothersome and snake-livered, the lot of ‘em.

I care only for the man who will build my Palace of Pleasures! If you be that man, then I give you each and every one of my dollars, though I scratched for everyone, be sure and know that. Only be sure to build my Palace as I indicate on the Plans you find here, to war against the vexes and heartstalling of this existence.

Firstover, I am told that some would hear how I got into this dollarpile you see here under your no doubt feverish eyeholes. I was birthed in the deepest of dark penuritiousness down in Macon County in the state of Georgia. My Daddy, God rest him, was a worker of fields and a floorkissing drunk to boot. My Mammy was an angel but the rapacious Lord took her to his breast sooner than I could barely hold a glimpse on her. Daddy wed up some more but she was harder than cold stone and I was gone up country by the age of 9, working the Carnies.

A good living that was in the circuses, if you could upraise your wits and resist the inroadations of the mean scallions and sneak rat-tinkers that fully infested the livings of our great land. I labored hard, spent none, and soon there was not one Showman in all Georgia didn’t holler my name. And money, like long-eared rabbits, being best fixed at making more of itself, from that exact point it was short before I had a stake in every town in our Glorious South.

I had my pleasures too, be assured of that! I loved women, perhaps most specially my sweet wife, Dolores – a finer singer and dancer than could be found in any bawdy house in these stinkatious times, though the Lord has her now. I dined on the food of our glorious American land: her beef cattle and her cornfields, her seas and lakes, her verdant gardens. I lavished my best hours on her most golden sipping whisky. There were cards and games of chance, at which I flatter myself I was a dandy competitor. I played, my friend, and with a full heart, be most confident in that.

And I bore my children with the gentlest will I could, and their kin too, though none amounted to the meanest hill of turkey dung. But mostly I loved to amass my Curiosities; they were my children, each and every one. My Wonders of Nature! The striped horse that once, they told, rode the African prairie. The wrapped babes of the Incaman, abandoned by those godrejected savages on the hills. The machineries of the Arab, said to prelocute the future. Eggs of the giant lizardmen which trod the world before even God held his rule. These are my true Fortune!

In the years that followed, I, with the guidance of God, sank my dollarmonies in the great iron roads that were crossing our land. A glorious thing, the steam train, the mechanation to transport and transform! A engine of change! I made more money than men had dreamed since the days of King Midas or the Bible Pharos! (I t mell you this, my wretched friend, not so as to imprimate my smarts or my potentosity, but merely so you meet the truth with full eye.) The great Bank of New York did see fit to configure a wing that would carry my name, as my Shows had in posterior times. I have it on the highest authority that Mr Cornelius Vanderbilt finds my name – BEAMISH J BETTENBAUM – truly injurious to his ears. Ha! The rogue has not even a mustache!

For 2 score years, I did little but marry enthusiastically and take and share my pleasures. New York is a town filled with excitation and with good company and I remain a man blessed. Who would not desire to share? It is therefore that I turn to you, my Chosen Successor, to build my Palace of Pleasures. The location is to be in your choosing, but it must in all ways otherwise be to my most rigorous instruction, as you find it in the documents here applied. Pursue my desire and you shall consequently be honorised. Ignore it and be goddamed!

I am, for good and all,
Beamish J Bettenbaum
New York, New York

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