Moonshiner

 

     "Yeast is the perfect animal," Moonshine Mike Guzek likes to say. "It eats sugar and shits alcohol."
     An expression that perfectly meshes the blend of science and rustic wisdom that go into proper moonshine manufacture. Readers with long memories might remember we visited with Moonshine eight years ago, in "Setting the scope on a Jackal bow." We visited him again Saturday afternoon, well, because no visit to Ontonagon is complete without stopping by his neatly-mown property. We visitors examined his solar lumber drying kiln, cleverly crafted out of an old school bus—his father was a bus driver. As well as his automatic deer feeder, constructed from a garbage can suspended under a tripod. "Twice a day," Moonshine said, with a touch of pride. Why go hunting for deer when you can just lure them to you and shoot them? He's had his health troubles lately, and didn't tell his usual skein of deer hunting stories, but my friend Rick knows them all, and told one or two, with laughter all around.
     Beers were distributed, and Mike's special Maple Moon brought out, for those so inclined, who pronounced it fine indeed, smooth and satisfying, while I asked him questions: the beverage was distilled from grapes and peaches, making it a kind of brandy. "Though you could distill water..." he added, trailing off, the "but why would anyone want to do that?" being unvoiced.
     The simple white house, he said, was built by his grandfather in about 1900. Though Mike expanded it, and he planted the tree above when he was a boy of about 6, which would make it 75 years old, since he is now 81. The white pine would grow straight and 100 feet tall in the forest but, finding itself uncharacteristically alone, spread out wide, as if in search of the company we all crave. Mike has been making moonshine for 60 years, and announced he has given it up, though not before teaching the art to a grandson. 

"Moonshine" Mike Guzek

     We talked about the local bar, Stubb's—well, there are a couple others, but Stubb's is the one that counts, in our book—named for its long-ago owner, Stubb Nelson, who acquired his nickname because one of his forearms was missing, back when people were named for their exceptional physical qualities. Whether the limb was lost to a logging accident was discussed, but it was so long ago now, it wasn't quite remembered. It probably was; logging was the main industry around here 100 years ago, and among the most dangerous professions ever. 

     While logging feels like part of the vanished heroic past, there are still some 800 logging and trucking firms in Michigan, not to mention sawmills, pulp and paper mills, and wood processors of all kinds. Bars are also doing well, though not around here.  

     "Once there were 11 bars in Ontonagon," Mike said. Rick explained how an unfortunate bypass highway skirted the town's main drag, which fell into decline. The various bars were discussed, including Johnny's, which was out in the woods. "My parents went there," he said. 

     Mike's mother was a nurse, and remembered loggers coming in after brawls Saturday night.

 

They'd have them strip off their clothes and wash themselves, prior to treatment, and once a bag of discarded clothing was so infested with lice that the bag moved, his mother said. Like his father, Mike was a truck driver for 30 years for the Gitchee Gumee Oil Company. Lately he's been a handyman—he built the tight, immaculate cabin I slept in. "Gitchee Gumee," in case you don't know, is not some garble that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow invented, but Ojibwe for "Big Water," the Native-American name for Lake Superior.      

     I lingered in his shop, admiring the neatly arranged, if cobwebbed, tools, and the smell of oil and metal and old rubber. They were beautiful. After saying our reluctant goodbyes, we headed back into town, and I noticed that we passed an ancient bar called "Johnny's," now boarded up and sagging. Time takes its toll on everything, but we persist, best we can.

Flashback 1998: A century of cornflakes

     

     I'm on my way back from the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula after a fun weekend of hanging with my pals. The paper doesn't let me go to Michigan much on business—off the beaten path. But once I persuaded them that readers would be interested were I to poke around a certain well known Michigan cereal company.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich.—This is the town built on cornflakes.
     Not just cornflakes. Also wheat flakes, bran twists, rice crisps and more.
     But cornflakes, which turn 100 years old this year, are the leader of the pack, the king of the breakfast table, the world's most popular dry cereal.
     The company that invented and first vended the humble flake of corn—the first product it ever sold nationally—has certainly come to dominate life in this modest town of 50,000 souls. A brief drive reveals the Kellogg Regional Airport and the Kellogg Community College, the Kellogg Arena, the W. K. Kellogg Institute for Food and Nutrition Research, not to mention the enormous Kellogg factory and the Kellogg international corporate headquarters, its soaring lobby displaying metal sculptures of stylized wheat stalks and a daily posting of the latest price of Kellogg stock.
     What you can't see are cornflakes being made, not anymore. The popular tours of the Kellogg's plant, part of the childhood memories of millions of Midwesterners, were discontinued in 1986 when a state-of-the-art, $500 million plant expansion opened. The company feared corporate spies.

     Despite secrecy, the manufacturing process is fairly simple: corn arrives in the form of grits. The grits are cooked in large rotary steam cookers, then dried, milled, toasted and sprayed with vitamins.
     The resultant flakes seem fragile to support such huge popularity. Kellogg's sells them in 160 countries. Search for reasons why, and the company, perhaps predictably, points to taste.
     "Simple is good," said Anthony Hebron, a Kellogg's spokesman. "You've got a simple formula; a crispy, golden brown flake with a bit of a nutty taste, a taste that travels well throughout the world."
     The cornflakes success story is more complex than that, of course. Advertising is vital. Kellogg's spends 50 percent more to advertise a box of cornflakes than it does to buy the ingredients inside.
     This is nothing new. Advertising always has been important; the Kellogg's advertising budget first passed $1 million in 1911, five years after the Kellogg Co. was founded by William Keith Kellogg.
     He was the son of a wealthy Michigan broommaker named John Preston Kellogg, who supported the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a sect formed in Battle Creek just before the Civil War and dedicated, among other things, to a strict dietary regimen: no meat, no caffeine, no alcohol. 

     W. K. Kellogg's older brother, John Harvey Kellogg, ran the Adventists' Western Reform Health Institute, turning it into a model sanitarium (a word he coined, along with "granola") visited by the rich and famous of the late 19th century when they needed relief from their killing diets of lamb and eggs and butter and drink. Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller were both guests.
     J. H. Kellogg, a respected doctor, something of a celebrity in his trademark white suits, toured the world dispensing nutritional advice, while his brother, a self-described "flunky," stayed in Battle Creek and kept things running.
     The brothers were constantly experimenting to find ways to get the foods they considered healthful into their sanitarium guests. As with many breakthroughs, the flakes were discovered by accident. The Kelloggs were flattening wheat dough with rollers and baking it in sheets. But W. K. Kellogg left a batch of dough out overnight, so it dried, and when it was run through rollers the next day, it broke into flakes instead of flattening.
     At first, the wheat flakes were served just to customers at the sanitarium. But visitors wrote in, wanting to buy the flakes after they returned home, and in 1896, Kellogg's started selling cereal through the mail.

     Two years later, in 1898, W. K. Kellogg repeated the process for corn—history doesn't preserve the exact date.
     The Kellogg brothers were slow to realize the commercial implications of breakfast cereal. While they were still doling out cornflakes to sanitarium guests, and sending a trickle through the mail, dozens of companies sprang up in Battle Creek to sell cornflakes—Korn-Kinks, None-Such, Checker Brand Corn Flakes, Indian Corn Flakes, Corn-O-Plenty—42 in all, including one founded by a certain C. W. Post, who first made his name with an imitation coffee called Postum.
     Post sold its brand of cornflakes, Post Toasties, before Kellogg's got its on the market. The Post factory is still in Battle Creek, directly across the train tracks from the Kellogg's plant.
     J. H. Kellogg was content running his sanitarium, but his brother yearned to take on a larger challenge. In 1906, he formed W. K. Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flake Co. He was 46 years old.
     Kellogg grabbed attention by running ads—the first, in July, 1906, appeared in 17 major magazines, offering coupons for free samples from local grocers. The hitch was that few grocers carried Kellogg's cornflakes—Kellogg gambled that customers would lobby their local grocer to carry the brand so they could redeem their free coupons. He was right.
     Kellogg tried to distinguish himself from the pack by touting his cornflakes as the original and instructing customers how to walk out in a huff if they weren't available: "What? Have you no Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes! Then bring my hat and coat—I don't want any of your substitutes," read one advertisement.
     Early ads explained that cereal tasted better with milk or cream.
     A survey of the company's archives shows it trying any angle that would boost sales. Cornflakes as a refreshing meal in the un-air-conditioned 1920s. ("Kellogg's for Koolness.") Cornflakes for lunch, "for extra meals at odd hours, for children's suppers" in a 1945 ad.
     Miss America graced boxes of Kellogg's cornflakes, as did Yogi Bear. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson smiled from election-season boxes.
     That year, Kellogg's hit on perhaps its greatest idea for selling cornflakes: sugar. The company's Sugar Frosted Flakes were an immediate hit, as was one of its two mascots, Tony the Tiger. Katy the Kangaroo, the alternate mascot designated for children "scared of tigers," didn't last as long.
     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1998

Ravenswood notes: Heartfelt

     Something about enormous calamities spurs us to recount our own personal connection to them, if only the moment of discovery, and our immediate reaction. Maybe it is a form of witness, of testimony. Of participating in the pageant of history. Or the re-exerting of a tiny bit of control over chaotic, gigantic forces well beyond us. I would expect that Ravenswood Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey would have had a reaction that is both distinctive and challenging, and as always she does not disappoint. Her Saturday report:

     My mother adheres to a strict no-daytime-TV policy for herself. She’s a gardener, among many other talents, and maximizes rather than wastes her precious days. That’s why I knew something big was happening in the world when I came downstairs that warm Tuesday in September, 20 years ago today. Mom was stationed in front of the television with an expression I had never seen before.
     I joined her briefly until something inside of told me to get the heck out of there. The gist of the story was all I could handle. I said goodbye to this new model of Mom I was seeing, and walked out the front door of my folks’ home in Rogers Park (where I was staying while I completed my last year of grad school).
     I intuitively knew where to go. I walked into Evanston towards the toy store on Main Street. I bought bubbles and a ball and went to the local Montessori school where I picked up my best friend’s two children and their friend Jane. I ushered them to a park at the beach, and we played the afternoon away. I can still see their wide smiles, hear their copious laughs, and feel their youthful bliss. It was the perfect medicine.
     I knew that I could only protect them—and myself—for so long. We’d have to face the music sooner or later. I retuned them to their families, and made it home just before dark. My mother was still trying to process what was happening. My Dad was out of town on business, so it was just the two of us.
     In retrospect I’m sorry I abandoned my Mom on one of the most difficult days in U.S. history; however, back then and still today I tend to avoid and dissociate from the evils of the world. I prefer to live in a bubble of sorts, where it makes more sense to toss a ball around in the sun than it does to consume media designed to loop me into an insatiable quest for tragic information.
     The trial for the so-called architect of these attacks finally started a few days ago. I went down a rabbit hole of internet information about Al Qaeda, which led me to conflicting stories about whether or not they are currently becoming increasingly more affiliated with the Taliban.
     I was flooded with a sense that there is endless horror in our world. This led me to research theories of why there is so much war, why religion is often a driving force behind such strife, and then to the matter of how the brains of non-religious folks differ form those who are religious. Some call religion a delusion, others say it’s evolutionarily necessary to instill a sense of goodness within people so they can coexist peacefully with others.
     Some talk of a God-spot in the brain, others denounce this theory.
     In other words, no one really knows much of anything. Theorize, yes. Know, no. From where I sit, safe and sound on a comfy couch on my back porch, my good fortune astounds me. I was not forcibly recruited as a child soldier, I do not have to learn to build bombs, carry weapons, or arm myself in any way. All I have to do is live and read and learn and use my brain to philosophize about life, and do my best to live well and stay out of danger’s way.
      It’s heartbreaking to think of all of the people, near and far, who are out there right now planning ways to harm others, or in the very act at this moment. It’s not necessary. Greed, ego, fear, and the misuse of power are our mortal enemies. People don’t have to be.
     I know this because meditation has taught me patience, and a way to open my mind. I’ve learned that it’s ok not to get what I want when I want it. It’s taught me that I am no more or less important than anyone else, and I do not have to force my opinions upon others. The opposite of tyranny.
     As murderers sit around plotting how they will wipe others off the face of the earth I wish an army of concerned humans would just give them a paint brush, a book, a hug, a stellar education, alternatives, and let them see that it’s possible to live a beautiful, meaningful life rather than throwing it all away.

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With COVID-19, a new 9/11 every day

 

     A decade ago, I looked back at Sept. 11, 2001 on its 10th anniversary, recalled its “crashing planes, burning buildings, tumbling bodies” and noted, “it hardly needs to be recounted now.”
     Of course not. Because the wounds of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the hijacked flight that went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were too fresh to require much description, but too raw to overlook.
     Remembering was a duty. The lives lost that day — almost 3,000 — demanded attention. Demanded to be put into context, to understand how enormous a loss it really was.
     “More Americans died on 9/11 than in the War of 1812,” I wrote. “It was the bloodiest morning on American soil since the Civil War.”
     Things have changed. In 2021, we don’t need to reach into the 19th century in search of perspective. We can look back to a week ago Thursday — 9/2 — a date which will live in obscurity, when 2,937 Americans were killed by the current foe attacking our country, COVID-19.
     Or Feb. 10, when 3,254 died. Or Jan. 21: 4,135. Or hundreds of other days. About 650,000 Americans slain, out of sight, the nation hardly noticing, never mind honoring its loss. Yet killed all the same by a far more lethal foreign assailant.

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Michigan Flashback 2003: "The howdy boys"

     While I'm heading to the shores of Lake Superior, I thought I'd distract you with a previous foray into Michigan.

     ROTHBURY, Michigan: Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared the American frontier closed in 1893, and our national psyche has yearned toward the spirit of adventure represented by the untamed West ever since. Just the words "dude ranch" and "horses" were enough to get me in a car with my family on a Friday afternoon, fighting 200 miles through Memorial Day traffic from Chicago to the Double JJ Ranch, just north of Muskegon.
     We wanted riding, cowboys and adventure, and we got it, though first we had to pass through an initiation of sorts.
     No matter how much research you do, vacationing in a new place is something of a trust drop. You close your eyes and pitch backward, hoping the unfamiliar place will catch you in a pleasant fashion.
     At first, I thought the Double JJ was going to drop the Steinberg family. We arrived at the quaint Western town, complete with jail and ice cream parlor, that is the center of "The Back Forty," the family section of the resort (there is also "The Ranch" for adults only, and "The Thoroughbred" for golfers) at 8:30 p.m. on a Friday, hours behind schedule because of snarled traffic and the one-hour Michigan time change.
     The front office was mobbed—I counted 17 people milling before the check-in desk—and when our turn came, a pale young clerk was maddeningly vague about exactly what amenities the resort had and how we might gain access to them. As she mumbled her "yeah, maybes" as if she wasn't quite sure where she was working, my wife and I locked eyes and I had that plunging "what have I done with my weekend?" feeling of doom foretold.
     Thankfully, it was smooth sailing from there. The cabin was woodsy, but new and clean, with an upper loft for the boys and a bedroom with a big Jacuzzi for the exhausted adults. By the time the pre-dinner cocktails arrived at the handsome Sundance Steakhouse, overlooking the resort's championship 18-hole golf course, we were adjusting ourselves to the place.
     It was the next morning, however, that we really started to love it. We signed our boys up for the beginning corral rides—they like horses and I like putting them on horses, and they came prepared in their cowboy boots, belts, shirts and hats. The Double JJ has more than 100 horses and 1,500 acres of lovely Michigan property, and I could tell right away that this was no "walk 'em in a circle three times and call it a day" type of horse experience. Even at the most junior levels (my boys are 5 and 7) there was an emphasis on teaching them how to handle the horses, putting them through the paces of turning and stopping. You couldn't spit without hitting wranglers—at one point, with eight kids on horseback, I counted six staffers in the ring, helping them in the most gentle fashion.
     After the lesson, the kids were tested. I admired the way the wrangler, Nicole, kindly gave my 5-year-old his ribbon, while letting me know with a meaningful glance that he wasn't ready for the trail yet. So while he was hanging out with a group of kids and counselors, playing golf and doing crafts (one of the beauties of the Double JJ is there are activities for kids that you can hand them off to—even overnight cabins—then pluck them out as need be) my wife and I and the older boy spent a pleasurable 90 minutes on the trail, going through some of the scenic woodland and farm. The younger boy barely noticed we were gone.
     The rest of the weekend was a blur of activity—we swam in the pool and rode down the towering water slide, went on a hay ride and watched a pleasantly corny "stunt show." The ranch has about 30 sled dogs—they have dogsled races in the winter—and my boys insisted on walking one. I loved the frantic scene of the four of us, hanging on to this leash for dear life, being pulled along at a fast clip by one of these enormously-powerful, 80-pound wolfish animals.
     There were also cattle drives and camp fires, a pig roast and a rodeo—which, though we missed it, all the other guests were raving about, and seems to be a must-see.
     The best way to think of the Double JJ is as a Western summer camp for families. Guests who didn't wear their rustic name tags were called to the front of the dining hall (the food was tasty if unextraordinary) and compelled to sing—a fact I neglected to tell my wife until after she was caught tagless.
     Still, she kept calling the Double JJ "perfect" and vowed we would we return. And when we left, the boys were practically hanging out the windows, calling their goodbyes to their various horses by name. It was a rare, special weekend, and I'm glad that we went.  

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 15, 2003

 The Double JJ Ranch is still going strong, and you can learn more about it here.

‘Success means I get to do it again tomorrow’

Steve Albini

     One reason I let almost 40 years go by without reaching out to Steve Albini is that our last conversation was so engrained in my mind. It was the summer of 1982. I bumped into him at Norris Center, Northwestern's student hangout, and he showed me this little electronic drum machine he had just gotten. I told him that I was leaving soon for my first job in Los Angeles. "Well, don't die," he said tersely, and walked away. Coming from Steve Albini, that remark was the equivalent of a teary hug from anyone else, and I doubted I'd do any better than that. But perhaps driven mad by COVID isolation, I leapt across the chasm, and was glad I did.  A smart man, and there aren't enough of those around. I only wish I could have printed more of our conversation. 

     “Do you feel successful?” I asked Steve Albini, at a taco place near his Belmont Avenue recording studio, which readers visited Monday.
     Albini is successful, by any measure. A legendary sound engineer — known for producing Nirvana’s last album. Notorious lead man of Big Black, “some of the nastiest noisemakers in rock” according to Rolling Stone, and, more recently, Shellac of North America. They tour the world.
     But those tough on others, as Albini certainly is, are often hardest on themselves. So I was curious. Does he consider himself a success?
     “To the extent that I could care about that, I would say yes,” he replied. “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”
     COVID-19 has turned many friendships into slag heaps of cold ash. It seemed perverse to seek out Albini, whom I hadn’t seen in decades, who doesn’t suffer fools and can summarize your failings with a precision that’ll haunt you to your grave. Driving to lunch, I wondered if I was ready for his notorious scrutiny, conjuring a potential headline: “Steve Albini explains why I suck.”
     I told him I have a hard time sharing his perspective.
     “I can’t conceive of somebody who’s done what he’s wanted to do every day for four decades, published books and still writes a daily column and have that person think of himself as anything other than a success,” he said.
     That was unexpected.
     “You’re mellower than when we were in school,” I said.

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Put Dante in the game.

     Guys talk. And not everything we say, we want to share with the public, right? For instance. In Sunday's description of going to the Cubs game, I left out a certain digression of mine at the ballpark. Didn't seem germane. But it actually was germane, as you will see. The problem was, it's embarrassing.  A little. Okay. A lot.
     I started talking about Dante. At the ballgame. I was with book editors, remember, and the topic came to books I'd like to write someday, and I explained my theory that Dante is funny, in a wicked, Spy magazine sense, creating this hell and putting all his enemies in it. They nodded politely.

    It wasn't easy for Dante. It took some creativity, see? I continued. For instance. He was betrayed by Pope Boniface VIII. Whom he very much wanted to put in his newly-minted hell. But he couldn't, because the Inferno actually takes place at a certain time, over Easter weekend, 1300. And Boniface had not yet died. So trying to be faithful to the faux verisimilitude that lets people forget this is all something he made up, in the narrative, Dante, led by Virgil, comes to this hole, where the popes are kept, head down, their feet kicking, the red flames burning their feet a parody of their red papal slippers. And one pope hears a sound above, and says, "What, Boniface? Is that you? You're early?"

     Funny, right?

     Eventually I stopped. And no harm done, except perhaps two guys really, really sorry for whom they decided to invite to the game. My shame would have been hidden.

     Then a Facebook pal, Ann Hilton Fisher, alerted me to a program that begins tomorrow, that I have to alert you to: "100 Days of Dante," beginning Sept. 8 and running until Easter Sunday, they are reading three cantos of the Divine Comedy a week. Here's a story about it.
     I'm not endorsing the project en toto. And if you watch the video, you'll see they slip in that the Divine Comedy is "which has taught generation of people a deeper way to love God." That's one take. It could also better rationalize apostasy. It's put together by a consortium of American Christian universities, who are not famous for the range of their intellectual scope, and the lead organization is Baylor University, the Waco Texas Baptist school. For all I know, it's a thinly disguised 100-day orgy of anti-Catholicism, which Baylor was once known for. Though I hope not.

    The 700th anniversary of Dante's death is Sept. 14, and we have to do something, right? I plan to at least tune in until I have reason to drop out, and figure you might want to join me.