Book talks

Posted on April 12, 2011 by hro50ta1

Northville District Library, 7 p.m., April 13. Joel Thurtell will lecture on the 27-mile canoe trip he made in 2005 with Patricia Beck up the Rouge River. Their journey was the subject of a Wayne State University Press book, UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER. In 2005, the project led to a Detroit Free Press series that won the 2006 Harry E. Schlenz Medal of the Water Environment Federation.

West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation, 2 p.m., May 1. Joel Thurtell talk about canoeing on the Rouge River and what is being done — and NOT being done about restoring the river to a swimmable state. In addition to the May 1 talk, there will be a display of photos Patricia Beck took on the Rouge trip along with an exhibit of objects they used on the trip, from hip boots to rubber gloves and more.

REI store, 17559 Haggerty Rd., Northville Township, 11 a.m., May 14. UP THE ROUGE! writer Joel Thurtell will show a video and discuss the 2005 canoe trip up the Rouge River in metro Detroit that was the foundation for an award-winning Detroit Free Press newspaper series and the award-winning Wayne State University Press book, UP THE ROUGE!

St. Christopher’s Church Community Center, McGregor Bay, Ontario, July 20. Time to be announced. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. Joel Thurtell will reflect about his experiences in the Peace Corps in West Africa and his book, SEYDOU’S CHRISTMAS TREE.

UP THE ROUGE! will be for sale after the talks, along with other books by Joel Thurtell and an audio book of UP THE ROUGE!

In addition to UP THE ROUGE!, Thurtell has published:

PLUG NICKEL, about his adventures restoring a classic wooden sailboat.

SEYDOU’S CHRISTMAS TREE, the story of a Muslim youth who taught the author and his wife important lessons about Christmas when they were Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa.

SHOESTRING REPORTER, how-to break into news reporting without going to Journalism school. Subtitle: HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY REPORTER WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO.

CROSS PURPOSES, a novel about the news industry subtitled: IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION.

CROSS PURPOSES will be published April 22, 2011, but should be available in early April.


Posted in Adventures on the Rouge, Books, Hardalee Press | Leave a comment

Fury coming, past and present

Posted on April 12, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

I have my old friend Barbara Stanton O’Hair to thank for my current reading program. Barb is the longtime sparkplug and mainstay of Bookies, a book club of mostly former Detroit Free Press writers who meet episodically either at her house in Detroit or at the home of retired Free Press business writer Barry Rohan in the Pointes.

Agreeing on the next book to read is one of the Bookies group’s weak points. We can jawbone for hours and still not decide which title to invest a few hours of reading time.

I’m not sure what our next assignment is, officially. The last book we read was TRUE GRIT
, by Charles Portis. Great book, by the way. Led me to read Portis’ book about American expats in Mexico, GRINGOS

. Another fine book, which prompted me to order the other three Portis novels.

But let me get back on track. Barb sent an e-mail suggesting we read Bruce Catton’s THE COMING FURY

Today is the 150th anniversary of the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. Good time to be reading about the Civil War.

It had been some time since I opened a Civil War book, but it’s a topic I enjoy. I sporadically re-visit those turbulent times through a disorganized approach to reading that is mainly propelled by whimsy.

I went online and ordered the Catton book in hardback for less than four bucks, including postage. THE COMING FURY was published in 1961, the centennial year for the beginning of the Civil War. I thought the history might be a bit old-fashioned, but I’d read other Catton books, always found him engaging.

The book duly arrived, and I duly began reading it. I wish I could say I’ve finished it, but as of last night, before I fell asleep on the sofa, I’d read nearly 80 pages. Enough to realize that the intransigence of congressional radicals that we’re witnessing today in the Republican-owned House of Representatives has its parallel in the pre-Civil War Congress where conservative Southerners protective of their “peculiar” institution of slavery were plotting secession before and during the nominating conventions of 1860.

Catton was writing thirty-some years before the GOP’s “Contract with America” and 50 years before our current Republican obsession with throttling down government and selling the whole country to the Koch brothers. Had Catton possessed a crystal ball and known about the kind of gridlock that would dominate national politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he might not have agreed with the statement he made early in THE COMING FURY:

“The truth of the matter was that the American political system, which can survive almost any storm because of its admirable flexibility, was in 1860  breaking down because it had been allowed to become rigiid.”

That statement doesn’t make sense to me. “It had been allowed to become rigid.” No, the system operating in 1860 was essentially what was embodied in the Constitution. It was not ALLOWED to become rigid. It WAS rigid, if we’re talking about the so-called “checks and balances” that in theory prevent radical things from happening by “balancing” deliberations between two representative assemblies, an executive and a judiciary.

A century and a half later, we can see both merits and demerits in the system. It’s difficult for an executive to get things done, yet a radical House of Representatives stands a chance of having its hotheaded urges denied by a Senate or a presidential veto.

What I did not know about the opening months to the Civil War was that the beginnings of the military conflict occurred in a series of Democratic conventions where the party split wide open between factions openly advocating secession of the South and northern Democrats who found slavery less appealing. Lincoln would be elected because there were actually four men running for President, including two Democratic candidates.

Pundits write and talk about the lack of civility in today’s politics. Thanks to Catton’s THE COMING FURY, I realize there’s nothing new in that.

Posted in Adventures in history | Leave a comment

Plugging their ears

Posted on April 11, 2011 by hro50ta1

The strike took an unusually nasty tone.

— The New York Times, April 4, 2011, writing about the strike of Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians

By Joel Thurtell

Strikes are by their nature nasty things. Maybe the Times art critic who seemed shocked at nastiness in the DSO strike has not been through a strike. I have, and one of the things I learned from Detroit’s Great Newspaper Strike of 1995, besides that they are nasty, was that newspapers are inherently hostile to unions because they either have unions to bargain with or fear that they might get them.

That hostility, I believe, makes most American newspapers simply unable to treat unions — and striking workers — fairly.

I, too, am happy that this strike at last was settled. But it’s worth remembering that Detroit newspapers could not find a way to touch on the management bungling that put the DSO into the financial pickle that caused the board to squeeze the musicians. The Times and other outlets decry Detroit’s downward spiral, as if that were the explanation for the DSO’s financial mess.

No, folks, it was not the economy. It was a stupid move by DSO bosses that placed tens of millions of dollars raised for the Max Fisher addition into an investment fund while arranging to pay off construction costs with loans.

Not a bright move at any time, but when the stock market tanked the DSO management was in deep doo-doo.

Easiest thing to do — foist the deficit off on the musicians.

Make the workers pay for the bosses’ stupidity.

Good luck finding any mention of that in mainline newspapers.

Meanwhile, this blog scored record hits when I reported the simple facts of the DSO predicament.

Now, does anyone wonder why newspapers themselves are in trouble?

Or why people are increasingly turning to non-newspaper Internet sources for news?

Posted in Unions | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Covering (or not) the oldest profession

Posted on April 8, 2011 by hro50ta1

After her daughter went missing in late 1996, Patricia Barone, 67, tried to get news media outlets in Poughkeepsie to cover the story. Most declined. The body of her daughter, Gina Barone, 29, was discovered nearly two years later,…in a ramshackle house a block from Vassar College…. “If one Vassar College girl was missing, we would have had cops all over the place,” Patricia Barone said. “Every one of these women is somebody’s child, and people don’t kind of get that. Your children are your children no matter what they do out there.”

— The New York Times, April 7, 2011

By Joel Thurtell

Hundreds of murdered women are found, but news media won’t write about them.

Why?

Because the victims were prostitutes. But why would that make a difference?

Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I encountered this prejudicial attitude in editors when it came to covering people whose lives didn’t measure to the orthodoxy demanded by those arbiters of what’s fit to print.

I tried if not to explain at least to describe such prejudicial mindsets in my novel, CROSS PURPOSES, OR, IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION.

Here is an excerpt from CROSS PURPOSES. The scenes are fiction, but they pretty well describe what passes for mental processes in newsrooms about topics editors think are not “respectable.”

Rob Wolfman is night cops reporter at the Detroit Filibuster, a daily newspaper. He was sentenced to this purgatory by City Editor Chutney Vipes because Wolfman, once the Filibuster religion writer,  was too vocal in expressing his independent views. Don Strodum is an assistant to Vipes.

This CROSS PURPOSES excerpt is from Chapter XIII, “Maudlin is Okay,” pp 72-73 and p. 78-79:

Just now, the telephone had rung and Rob Wolfman, temporarily back at police headquarters, had announced that the bodies of two women, partially clothed, had been found by some kids beside, but not in, a factory Dumpster.

“Why weren’t they in the Dumpster?” Strodum demanded.

Whatever reply Wolfman gave apparently was inadequate.  “Find out why they weren’t in that Dumpster and then get back to me.”

There was a pause as Strodum listened impatiently to Wolfman, speaking in a whisper from the police office the Filibuster shared with the Detroit News and Free Press. The NFP reporter was sitting not five feet away from Wolfman, who knew his rival was out of the loop on the Dumpster story because he’d been having a long lunch with a police officer from the Public Information Office whom he was dating. If Wolfman spoke softly, the Filibuster might keep its exclusive.

“Hey, listen, Rob,” Strodum cut in, “First of all, find out what those ladies were doing.  Were they on their way to temple?  If so, it’s a big story.  But if they were out buying crack cocaine, or something equally illegitimate such as selling pussy, we don’t have space for them.”

Bodies in–or beside–a Dumpster.  That was a run-of-the-mill news story, not the sort of thing the city editor should be involved in.  Vipes didn’t want to know whatever it was that Rob Wolfman was finding out about.  He’d had enough of Wolfman for one day–for one lifetime!

……

For the first time in days, Vipes felt like the old Chutney Vipes was back.  He was elated–all the more so when he returned to the city desk and heard Don Strodum again on the telephone with Rob Wolfman.

“What’d you find out about those ladies’ bodies, Wolfie?”

Pause.

“Prostitutes?” Strodum bellowed.  He turned to Vipes.  “Those two bodies beside the Dumpster were ladies of the night, Chut.”

Vipes shook his head.

Into the telephone, Strodum said, “Don’t waste your time on whores, Rob–they got what they deserved!”


Posted in Books, Hardalee Press, Joel's J School | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Beaten to the punch

Posted on April 3, 2011 by hro50ta1

By JOTR Staff

We were still editing a long-winded review by JOTR books editor Floyd Inkjet of a new book by this blog’s founder when amazon stole a march on us. The books were still in transit from the printer when amazon listed as “in stock” JOTR editor Joel Thurtell’s satirical novel, CROSS PURPOSES, OR, IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION.

Almost as quickly, the indefatigable book reviewer Fiona Lowther posted on amazon a five-star review of CROSS PURPOSES:

Wrote Lowther:

This book is so different that it’s difficult to describe. It is, however, bitingly witty — to the point where I laughed aloud several times while reading it.

It’s a novel — a roman à clef? — about what would happen if one of today’s big-city dailies were to cover the Crucifixion. Now, I know that doesn’t sound very funny — and in one way, it isn’t: But just as the death of Jesus was a tragedy that became a triumph with His Resurrection, Cross Purposes delineates the tragedy of today’s mainstream Journalism — and it’s only with an understanding of what’s going on that readers may be able to turn the tragedy of today’s newspapers into a triumph by recognizing the situation and seeking alternative publications and online blogs that will take us back to the days of hard-core investigative Journalism and crusading publishers and editors — and reporters who were willing to dig deep to get the facts and give them to the public.

Aside of that, read this book for its entertainment value: It would make one heck of a good movie; I couldn’t help casting the characters as I read it — and I’ll bet many readers will do the same.

Don’t miss this one; I have a feeling that it will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

JOTR’s Floyd Inkjet will just have to wait in line. Which is just fine — it gives us more time to fine-tune and whittle down our reviewer’s florid prose.

Posted in Books, Hardalee Press, Joel's J School | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Fantasy JOA, Round Two

Posted on March 30, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Guess I was ahead of my time.

I could have won myself ten thousand big ones if I’d just been a little patient.

But now, I had to shoot off my big mouth.

Actually, I’m glad I was a bit soon off the mark with this one.

The Detroit Media Partnership, aka the monopoly that owns and runs the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, is offering ten grand in prizes to people — including their employees — who suggest ideas that improve the papers.

That would seem to take in former employees, as well. Of those, I am one, having worked as a reporter at the Free Press from 1984 until 2007, with a little vacation between 1996-97 when I was on strike.

As I was heading for the door of the Free Press back in November 2007, I happened to attend a little cake-cutting ceremony given for roughly three dozen of us older Freepsters who’d accepted a buyout. I’d started this blog, joelontheroad.com, a couple weeks earlier, and I quipped to Free Press Editor Paul Anger that he might want to consider a Joint Operating Agreement between the Free Press and JOTR.

He joked that the company’d need to hire better lawyers this time.

Guess that means Gannett honchos think they got stiffed somehow in the real JOA between Knight-Ridder (now defunct) and Gannett than joined the two papers.

A friend warned me that I’m lucky I didn’t do that deal with Gannett.

Metro Times pundit Jack Lessenberry outlined in “Gannett’s Goofs,” a pretty thorough set of reasons why these two papers are on the ropes. When I reminded him of my JOA proposal, he e-mailed, “You damn well better be relieved. You’d be on the spike for half their losses since then!”

Good point. There was a flaw in my deal. I was offering to merge JOTR with the Detroit papers. I demanded to name four of the five directors. I would be a member, as would Ed Wendover and John Kelly, both of whom waged a noble but losing court battle to stop the JOA. I also planned to name Lou Mleczko, administrative officer of The Newspaper Guild in Detroit, to my board.

My mistake was in leaving one board member under Gannett’s control.

It’s evident that any company that has to hold a contest to seek ideas for its survival is managed by just the kind of people who should not be in charge of any business.

I was going to call them “utter incompetents,” but I’m trying to be nice. I sort of feel sorry for them.

Three years after I made my offer, to which there was no response, the papers are in such bad condition that in a JOA negotiation this time, I’d be within my rights to name all five members of the board. I’d name Jack Lessenberry as the fifth member of the board.

But I don’t think I’d have lost my shirt in my original arrangement, either.

If I’d had control of the Detroit papers three years ago, here’s what I would have done: Fired all managers.

Everyone from publisher down to the lowliest assistant metro editor would have been sacked.

This would have taught all of them the value of a union contract and a solid set of procedures and due process in firing, which managers at the Detroit papers don’t have, thanks to their lack of a union.

I would have offered very generous buyouts to all Guild members over the age of 22.

I’m not calling the deadwood. But they have too many bad habits.

These papers are sick institutions. One way to invoke change would be to erase institutional memory, which carries with it an indelible record of learned behaviors such as sucking up to management and sucking up to sources.

Next, I’d hire bloggers and stringers.

Unlike so many blog news outlets, I’d PAY the new staffers. Union scale.

Michigan’s Morning Tradition would start with a clean slate.

Oh yes, another idea worth a bundle: Deliver the Free Press seven and the News six days a week.

Daily newspapers — What a radical idea!

Wonder if I’ll win that ten grand?

Posted in future of newspapers, Joel's J School | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Book talks: ‘UP THE ROUGE!’ & ‘SEYDOU’

Posted on March 10, 2011 by hro50ta1

Northville District Library, 7 p.m., April 13. Joel Thurtell will lecture on the 27-mile canoe trip he made in 2005 with Patricia Beck up the Rouge River. Their journey was the subject of a Wayne State University Press book, UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER. In 2005, the project led to a Detroit Free Press series that won the 2006 Harry E. Schlenz Medal of the Water Environment Federation.

West Bloomfield Parks and Recreation, 2 p.m., May 1. Joel Thurtell talk about canoeing on the Rouge River and what is being done  — and NOT being done about restoring the river to a swimmable state. In addition to the May 1 talk, there will be a display of photos Patricia Beck took on the Rouge trip along with an exhibit of objects they used on the trip, from hip boots to rubber gloves and more.

St. Christopher’s Church Community Center, McGregor Bay, Ontario, July 20.  Time to be announced. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps. Joel Thurtell will reflect about his experiences in the Peace Corps in West Africa and his book, SEYDOU’S CHRISTMAS TREE.

UP THE ROUGE! will be for sale after the talks, along with other books by Joel Thurtell and an audio book of UP THE ROUGE!

In addition to UP THE ROUGE!, Thurtell has published:

PLUG NICKEL, about his adventures restoring a classic wooden sailboat.

SEYDOU’S CHRISTMAS TREE, the story of a Muslim youth who taught the author and his wife important lessons about Christmas when they were Peace Corps volunteers in West Africa.

SHOESTRING REPORTER, how-to  break into news reporting without going to Journalism school. Subtitle: HOW I GOT TO BE A BIG CITY REPORTER WITHOUT GOING TO J SCHOOL AND HOW YOU CAN DO IT TOO.

CROSS PURPOSES, a novel about the news industry subtitled: IF NEWSPAPERS HAD COVERED THE CRUCIFIXION.

CROSS PURPOSES will be published April 22, 2011, but should be available in early April.


Posted in Adventures on the Rouge, Bay, Book signings/book events | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Sham environmentalism

Posted on March 8, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

I’ve got to hand it to Friends of the Rouge and the Detroit/Wayne County Port Authority.

When it comes to finding ways to waste money on high-gloss publicity stunts while ignoring the need for ongoing evaluation and remediation of the hugely-polluted Rouge River, they surely deserve some kind of prize.

But wait a minute.

They just took the prize — a $150,000 grant from the port authority — disbursing federal grant money — to haul the carcasses of dead boats away from Fordson Island.

That’s a significant amount of money — it would pay for almost two years of measuring dissolved oxygen and temperature levels in the unswimmable and mostly unfishable Rouge River.

But two years ago, the powers-that-be who control environmental policy in Detroit and Wayne County said they couldn’t afford the roughly $91,000-a-year it costs to test whether there’s enough oxygen in the Rouge to support life. For lack of money, those measurements ended two years ago.

Now they can afford to haul junk boats out of the Rouge.

A Friends of the Rouge official once told me there’s no reason to keep measuring the Rouge because we already know it’s bad and not getting better.

It was an amazing statement, coming from a person who likes to present Friends of the Rouge as an organization that fosters scientific inquiry about the Rouge.

On the other hand, if you’ve been promising for decades to make the Rouge “swimmable,” and the data show it’s not safe for human contact nearly 100 percent of the time, you might just want to trash the collection of numbers that expose your efforts as a waste.

How does yanking a bunch of rotting hulls improve water quality in the Rouge?

It doesn’t.

But it sure gives officials $150,000 of opportunities to grind out self-adulatory press releases that generate the photo ops that obscure the futility of the alleged cleanup effort.

Do you think these self-proclaimed “friends” are some kind of watchdog group?

Think again. Look at who serves on their board of directors: Industrialists and government contractors.

Here’s a little test: Try asking FOTR for documents related to their environmental efforts on the Rouge.

I did. What I got back was a denial on the grounds that Friends of the Rouge is a private, nonprofit organization and not subject to disclosure.

Because they are a nonprofit,  they are not accountable to the public — despite their use of public money.

Let me ask this: What harm are those Fordson boats doing?

It is not the old wrecks that made the Rouge unswimmable and unfishable.

Talk to Ford Motor Co., Marathon Oil, United States Steel and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department about that.

Talk to myriad dumpers of PCBs and trichloroethylene cadmium and heavy metals over the past century and more, up and down the Rouge and its tributaries.

Oh yes, please check the Michigan Department of Community Health website for fish advisories and tell me if you’d eat fish caught in the Rouge.

No, those boats are inert, unlike the factories and other commercial enterprises that line the Lower Rouge from the Turning Basin to Zug Island.

What are those floating booms doing at Severtal Steel and at the mouth of the O’Brien Drain? They are there to — supposedly — contain oils and other floating chemicals released from the plants that are customers of the Detroit sewer system, which releases oil and other chemicals when it overflows into the Rouge in a heavy rain.

Are they removing the old boats because they’re ugly?

That’s a quaint notion.

If ugly is the criterion, how about a grant to get rid of those blast furnaces and related industrial eyesores on Zug Island? Or how about removing the largest single-unit wastewater treatment plant in North America? Not only is it ugly, but it stinks to hell.

What about those piles of salt and heaps of gypsum alongside the river?

Ugly is too mild a word.

Try walking around the river on a breezy day and you’ll rub your eyes from the air pollution.

Can’t remove the industrial monsters because the furnaces belong to United States Steel and are an ongoing profit-making business?

Ditto the Severstal steel plant and the Detroit sewage plant itself, a stinking mess that is the largest single-unit wastewater plant in North America. Ugly as hell, but too important to get rid of.

Eyesores, literally, but they represent jobs and taxes.

The entire Lower Rouge from Zug Island to Michigan Avenue — nine miles of river — is lined with steel and concrete.

Ugly as sin, but no grant will remove it.

A hundred fifty thousand smackers to haul out dead boats.

Will the Lower Rouge look prettier with those old boats gone?

The boats are parked in out-of-the-way spots that make them invisible to anyone who is not consciously looking for them.

All you have to do is drive the I-75 bridge over the Rouge to see the manmade ugliness industry has spawned on the Lower Rouge.

Does removal of those boats fit into anybody’s plan for improving the Great Lakes’ water quality?

A first step towards a rational approach to water quality improvement would be to fashion a Great Lakes-wide plan for improving water quality with a key component being mitigation of the Rouge River.

Next would come reinstatement of measurement, both of dissolved oxygen/temperature and E. coli, followed by systematic measurement of toxic chemicals throughout the Rouge watershed.

Finally, and most important, no money should go to any entity that refuses to be accountable to the public. If their response to our Freedom of information Act request is to get lost, we should tell them to get lost.

Here is a simple acronym that captures the essence of such an approach:

MAP

M

A

P

Measurement

Accountability

Plan

I don’t see MAP in the removal of those old boats.

Posted in Adventures on the Rouge | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Which one?

Posted on March 5, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

Which will it be?

Both, maybe?

The Musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra are giving two — TWO! — performances on Sunday, March 6.

At 3 p.m., the MDSO are playing at Kirk in the Hills, a posh gothic-style Presbyterian church in Bloomfield Township.

Glenn Miller is the organist for Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings in G Minor. The orchestra also will play J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major, BWV 1046 and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48. Eduard Perrone is the conductor.

Then at St. Jane Francis de Chantal church in Sterling Heights, at 7 p.m., the MDSO is performing J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, BWV 1048, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, Op. 40, Eaton’s Suite for Sasha, Op. 42 and Zaltz, Selections from the CD “Symphony of Life.” This concert features Sasha Mishnaevski playing the five-string electric violin/viola.

Tickets are $25 for general seating, $35 for preferred and $50 for premium seating.

To reserve tickets, call 248-860-6786 or buy them online at detroitsymphonymusicians.org.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Music, Unions | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How to cut your booze bill to zero

Posted on March 4, 2011 by hro50ta1

By Joel Thurtell

The simplest way to cut your booze bill to zero would be to just stop buying liquids with alcoholic content.

That would be so easy, such a certain shortcut to success, that we the writers and editors here at JOTR wouldn’t want to consider it.

We’d be far less likely to write about it, since it would require so few words that it would be hardly worth posting.

Recently, I calculated in the roughest way how much our household spends on booze — beer, wine and whiskey.

On an annual basis, there is only one word to describe it.

Appalling.

We could sure save a lot of  money if we would only stop drinking alcoholic beverages.

The only time we drink around here is before dinner. A glass of beer or wine before dinner oils the conversation, and in the case of beer, especially on a hot winter day or a cold summer night offers a certain refreshment that is hard to give up.

But a replacement beverage is in sight.

Cider.

I’ve written about Tom Barkham, who with his wife Ruth owns the Rochester Cider Mill. Their Holiday Cider is the best-tasting beverage in the world. Every fall, I stock up with as many gallons of Holiday Cider as I can freeze in our little chest freezer. Right now, we have about an inch of Holiday Cider left in a plastic gallon jug, and the time is nearly at hand when it will be all gone.

For three years, my son Abe and I tried to convert Holiday Cider into hard cider. It was a misguided adventure. Somehow, through luck, we managed to produce some tasty hard cider the first season. After that, we ruined many gallons of Holiday Cider. When Holiday Cider season came around this year, I declared there would be no more attempts at applejack. Holiday Cider is a perfect food. Can’t be improved.

Back in November and again in December, I bought several gallons and found I didn’t have enough space to store them in our chest freezer. I left several gallons of cider in the garage. Eventually, it froze. No problem. Cider, once thawed, is just fine.

Except that we’re running out.

Last week, I stopped at Best Buy and priced upright freezers. For about $700, I could buy a 21-cubic-foot freezer that would store at least 50 gallons of cider. That would tide us over a whole year.

Now, our annual booze bill is classified. But I can tell you that at $9/gallon, 50 gallons of Holiday Cider would cost $450. Add $700 for a freezer, and the cost is $1,150.

But the freezer is a start-up cost. That expense does not recur.

The first year’s cost of a year’s supply of cider, including new freezer, is considerably less than our annual booze bill.

Now, this plan does require a commitment, which would be that we stop drinking beer, wine and whiskey and take in only cider before dinner.

Did I mention that my great-great-grandfather, Francis Thurtell, founded the Prohibition Party in Traverse City?

Well, that is beside the point.

I am calling for a teetotal household, but not on moral grounds.

The basis for renouncing booze is strictly economic: To make this formula for year-round Holiday Cider work on paper, we have to agree to stop buying booze. That would mean we’d have to cease drinking it.

Next, I’m going to negotiate a bulk price on cider.

Then, I have to clear a space in the garage for that big freezer.

A year’s supply of Holiday Cider. Wow. Who wants beer when the most delicious cider in the world is waiting in my new freezer?

The annual outlay for cider would be a fraction of the cost of booze.

But there is a downside to my plan.

A steady diet of cider will surely produce certain, you know, side-effects.

Actually, to be accurate, we’re talking “after-effects.”

And not just talking.

Smelling.

Hearing.

I’m working on a solution to the atmospherics issue.

An economic approach is in the air.

It could even zero out my cider costs and generate a tidy profit.

If only I can bottle the flatus!

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

Posted in Cider, retirement | Tagged , , | 2 Comments