Racine’s SC Johnson company legacy: Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces & more

On a recent August Saturday morning I met up with a group of architecture aficionados - by design, so to speak.  We’d gathered in the lobby of the Golden Rondelle,  a plush futuristic auditorium, in order to see a pair of marvels from the inside.  Built to show an inspiring avant-garde documentary film called To Be Alive at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Rondelle is Racine’s counterpart to Gaudì’s Sagrada Famìlia basilica in Barcelona, a weird flying saucer of a theater.  

For those of you unfamiliar with it, Racine is a city of 80,000 located on Lake Michigan, about 30 miles south of downtown Milwaukee.  Hundreds of extra tourists have been coming to the Belle City this summer to tour Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces for Johnson Wax, a globally successful company now called SC Johnson (known to most locals as J-Wax).  Among my group of 23 enthusiasts, the excitement was palpable.  We were not disappointed.  

Herbert Fisk “H.F.” Johnson commissioned the renowned Wright, a Wisconsin native, to design two commercial structures.  Seventy-five years into its working life, the details in the Administration Building (1939) - such as the polished kasota limestone stairs & the curving glass-and-brass-enclosed elevator - are exquisite.   

Wright’s first work for Johnson, the Administration Building was among the first air-conditioned offices in the United States.  A polymath perfectionist, Wright also designed the terra cotta-hued desks (outfitted with swing-out drawers & waste-baskets off the floor for easier cleaning), the matching steel-frame padded tilt-backed chairs & the geometric stained-light fixtures.  

SC Johnson is a privately held corporation, advertised with pride as a “family company.”  The heirs who now own it form a small yet powerful clan of billionaires.  Their companies - which include the Johnson Financial Group (banking & insurance) & Johnson Outdoors (kayaks & other outdoor recreational products) - have subsidiaries in scores of foreign countries, from the United Kingdom (since 1914) to Japan, Australia & South America.  

The pair of Wright buildings, examples of the elegant “organic” modernist style favored by the self-confident master, are located between Fourteenth & Sixteenth Streets, rising above the otherwise ordinary neighborhood a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan.  They are dazzling inside:  the Great Workroom is awash in natural light, thanks in part to the forest of dendriform columns supporting the broad translucent ceiling.    

With their streamlined edges & smooth Cherokee-red brickwork, these two Johnson Wax buildings are unobtrusive, pleasing to the eye.  Wright reportedly wanted to erect them in a more natural setting, as part of a utopian workers’ village.  He only agreed to the current location when H.F. Johnson, the client who was paying the bills at a time when Wright was nearly broke, insisted that they be situated alongside the company’s ugly cluster of structures just east of Racine Street (state Highway 32).

The 150-foot tall Research Tower (1950), a cantilevered beauty, is shaped like a giant electric solenoid.  Yet it still manages to seem warm & mysterious:  lit from within on summer nights, its curved bands of glass walls - comprising seventeen miles of Pyrex tubing - make it glow like a lightning bug in the humid air.   The tower was evacuated in 1982, partially due to handicap inaccessibility.  

With a single narrow winding staircase & tiny toilets within curved concrete walls, the building’s interior access feels confining.  This may explain why the company only opened it to public tours beginning in May 2014.  The research & development department workers who toiled in it had reportedly long complained about the heat & draftiness of Frank Lloyd Wright’s impractical take on an industrial high-rise for a modest Midwestern city.    

Among the (mostly) men & (few) women who developed new products in Wright’s bright tower was Allen “A.C.” Buhler, an in-house lawyer & marketing manager who laid claim to naming Off!  According to the late Buhler’s son Tom, one of a trio of brothers who now run Butter Buds, a dairy-products firm based on J-Wax research, his father came up with the insect repellent’s catchy name in a brainstorming session with a Navy aviation vet.  

“We could call it Wave Off - a term used on aircraft carriers,” the ex-sailor suggested.  “Why not just Off?” Buhler countered.  It was one of many eureka marketing moments at Johnson Wax as they expanded their product line in the 1950s & ’60s.

This tour was especially welcome to Wright fans due to the addition of access to the Research Tower.  The two floors we were permitted to inspect have been professionally curated with artifacts from Johnson’s mid-century heyday.   Among the used microscopes & beakers, old J-Wax advertisements, company magazines & newsletters, and that red 45-rpm vinyl recording of “The Wassail Song” by the Johnson Wax Men’s Glee Club (1951), I traveled happily backwards in time.  The future looked pretty bright in Harry Truman’s America - apart, of course, from the atom bombs & the Korean War.

“When the announcement went out about this tour, our office email went crazy,” said Sheri, a young architect from Chicago who was joined on the tour by friends & colleagues from the Windy City.  She acknowledged the continuing influence on contemporary architects of the portfolio - albeit not necessarily the esoteric theories - of the eccentric Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959).

Wingspread (1939), the Johnson family’s pinwheel-shaped mansion on Four Mile Road in Wind Point, is another Wright marvel.  It lies just north of Racine in the type of bucolic surroundings that inspired the nature-worshipping Wright.  Since 1961 it has served as the home of the Johnson Foundation, which hosts public-policy conferences & allocates grants to non-profit causes that Sam & his widow Imogene (“Gene,” an alumna of Cornell University) embraced, such as environmental sustainability.  While the Johnson family’s philanthropy is admirable, it also has tax advantages.  

Even during the Great Depression Johnson Wax was a mainstay employer in Racine, boosting its national profile in part by sponsoring the popular NBC radio sitcom Fibber McGee & Molly from 1935 until 1950.  The company certainly hasn’t lost its ambition:  SC Johnson  & JohnsonDiversey keep buying smaller companies, adding to their large roster of janitorial & personal-care products, including Windex glass cleaner, Edge shaving gel, Glade air fragrances & Raid (tagline:  Kills bugs dead®). 

In the late-summer sunshine the curving Finnish-glass-walled Fortaleza Hall, designed by Foster + Partners, gleams like a pricey monument to an adventurous spirit & a robust ego.  A red-&-black replica 1930’s Sikorsky seaplane hangs from the high ceiling.  Named after the Brazilian town where H.F. flew from Racine in 1936, on a mission to study the carnaúba palm tree in order to obtain a reliable source of wax, Fortaleza Hall is a glitzy companion to the understated Wright buildings.  It contains a cafeteria, a small museum & a gift shop called the Lily Pond.

Imagine having enough resources to (1) commission a Wright-designed tower; (2) close it as a workplace after 32 years; and (3) then spend a small fortune on annual maintenance for a purely aesthetic object.  Fellow tour guest Prof. Richard Keehn, a retired UW-Parkside economic historian, explained how it was feasible:  the Johnsons are the ninth wealthiest family in the entire USA, he told me.  The family is now comprised of Gene & her three children:  Fisk Johnson, S.C. “Curt” Johnson III & Helen Leipold, who oversee the J-Wax empire.  

Indeed, at times the tour seems hagiographic in its enthusiasm for the business savvy of the Johnson patriarchs.  It’s no surprise, since Big Money attracts sycophants like rockstars attract groupies.  Samuel Curtis Johnson, Sr., a former bookseller & failed railroad investor, founded the corporation in 1886.  It started modestly as a parquet flooring factory that he’d bought from a hardware store.  Johnson’s entrepreneurial breakthrough was the decision to sell his proprietary floor-wax to anyone who wanted it.

Samuel Curtis “Sam” Johnson, Jr. (1928-2004) took the company to new heights of innovation & profitability after World War II.  Among the many family photos & mementos on display in Fortaleza Hall, you can see Sam Johnson’s US Air Force-issued Civil Air Patrol pilot’s license from the Cold War days.  A decade after his death, Sam remains a local hero.  In his final years he publicly battled WE Energies over the health hazards of burning coal at its power plants.

For generations, the Johnson family’s philanthropy & support for the arts have given Racine some much-needed sophistication & hope.  For example, the annual Animal Crackers live-jazz performance series brings world-class musicians to the Racine Zoological Garden’s natural amphitheater by Lake Michigan.  The city that boasts J-Wax’s world headquarters could use a few more employers like SC Johnson & its affiliates.

Nevertheless, I wonder how much SC Johnson’s employee profit-sharing & other benefits have done to help Racine as a whole.  Like their publicly owned competitors, J-Wax employs an army of temporary & contract workers in order to reduce costs.  Also the home of global tractor manufacturer J.I. Case (now the Italian-owned CNH - Case New Holland), the Belle City has the highest unemployment rate (officially around 10%) - as well as one of the highest crime rates - in Wisconsin. 

The impressive Johnson legacy has been tarnished in recent years by court cases.  In August 2014, SC Johnson & JohnsonDiversey (a spinoff company that was sold to Sealed Air a decade ago) settled a federal class action by retirees (http://journaltimes.com/news/local/sc-johnson-settles-retirement-plan-lawsuit/article_febb5975-0e99-58da-9ec8-853d32e3b678.html).  More shockingly, 59-year-old Curt Johnson pleaded guilty in June 2014 to misdemeanor fourth-degree sexual assault of a minor (http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/johnson07-b99285933z1-262145461.html).  Fortunately, even in this plutocratic era legal rules & moral constraints still apply to billionaires & big corporations.

A quotation from Sam Johnson adorns one of Fortaleza Hall’s shining lobby walls, as though it had come from the potent pen of Abe Lincoln.  It does at least offer a provocative insight:  “We should not worry about whether we have lived up to the expectations of our fathers, but whether we, as fathers, have lived up to the expectations of our children.”  

Amen, Sam.

© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek

Links:

(1) SC Johnson architecture tour information:  http://www.scjohnson.com/en/company/visiting.aspx

(2) Photos of Wingspread by Racine-based photographers Brad Jaeck & Carol Hansen:  

http://www.photographicdesignltd.com/artist.asp?ArtistID=7646&AKey=2C782FMS

Bonk! at the Eco-Justice Center: barn cats & curious turkeys meet poets & musicians

I had another satisfying meal at Olde Madrid restaurant in downtown Racine on Saturday night.  But this time I dined at a long table with a dozen strangers & a few acquaintances, including young poets, potent musicians & performing-arts enthusiasts.  We had all just experienced a mind-bending installment of Bonk! at the Eco-Justice Center (EJC) in Caledonia, Wisconsin (USA).  

Bonk! is a lively cultural series sponsored by the Racine Public Library & the Racine Arts Council, and made feasible thanks to private-sector support.  Started in 2008, Bonk! is now curated & emceed by the long-haired & kind-hearted poet-librarian Nick Demske.  Like all true creative gifts, Bonk! is free & open to the public.  The solar-paneled barn at EJC's renovated farm, which serves as a hands-on sustainability education facility, turned out to be a charming venue for the 6:00 p.m. show on August 23rd.

The scene that muggy (but not buggy) evening, was weird yet welcoming.  It reminded me of a vegetarian meal & reincarnation lesson that I chewed on at the crowded Hare Krishna house in New Orleans circa 1988.  Mercifully, there was no chanting or confounding metaphysics at the EJC's Bonk! event.  Apart, that is, from what the featured artists (a pair of poets & a guitar-slinging troubadour) suggested with their lyrics.  

Despite the pungent setting, that fertile night's gathering of Bonk! participants seemed magical.  I may be a geocentric ex-Catholic agnostic, yet I still harbor residual affection for Dominican nuns.  Members of that enlightened religious order taught me at St. Edward's Grade School as well as St. Catherine's High School (Go, Angels!) in Racine, from 1966 to 1978.  Given my background, I feel spiritually uplifted at the Eco-Justice Center.  

On Earth Day (early April) 2009 I volunteered at the EJC.  A burly man handed over a chainsaw & told me to convert a mess of windstorm-felled trees to useful cordwood.  I tried to act nonchalant & manly, suppressing a well-founded fear of maiming myself by accident.  I reckoned that my skinny arms might be no match for the heavy, dangerous & distressingly loud power tool.  But I survived, stacking chunks of wood as ordered - until a timely rainshower cut short my lumberjack act.  

And I'm happy to report that no animals, human or otherwise, were harmed in the course of Saturday's pastoral Bonk! either.  In fact, we attendees were so quiet in that open barn that other creatures serenaded us.  EJC's Critter Chorus included clucking ducks, some curious turkeys, diverse territorial geese, some cooped-up contented hens & a few lucky roaming roosters.  Meanwhile, the Soul Sisters' small herd of brown & beige alpacas grazed in an enclosure near Michna Road, looking comfortable in their wooly skin despite the heat.  

Following a flurry of announcements & Nick's flattering introduction, Racine native AM Ringwalt approached the microphone.  A precocious 19-year-old student at Emerson College, Ringwalt recited her verse with poise & purpose.  Suddenly a small black barn cat named Vader climbed the stairs & hopped onto the stage.  While listening to Ringwalt, an attractive blonde in a stylish neo-beatnik outfit (black skirt, black blouse & black ankle-boots), I heard Howlin' Wolf growling the blues in my over-imaginative brain:  

Well, I ain't superstitious / But a black cat just crossed my path . . .

The gracious Ringwalt (alias Anne Malin, an aspiring folk musician) told me later that she hadn't even noticed the feline interloper - a fortunate oversight, since she's allergic to cats.  Ringwalt is a compelling literary newcomer, celebrating the recent publication of her first chapbook, Like Cleopatra.  The cover features a mirror-image photo of bob-coiffed country-pop singer Skeeter Davis.  Born Mary Frances Penick, Davis had a melodramatic crossover hit in 1963, as referenced in section XII of Like Cleopatra:  

The second time I got in a car crash I was listening to "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis.

Next came the soft-spoken mustachioed Joe Hall, taking the stage in slacker gear (powder-blue t-shirt, plain pants & sneakers).  In between reading texts from his published chapbooks, including Devotional Poems, Hall discussed his interest in the redemption of so-called human trash.  A Maryland native, Hall is now a Ph.D. candidate & creative-writing teacher who endured a decade of bohemian poverty & odd jobs.  He finds inspiration in quotidian objects as well as remote subjects.  For example, he once mined the absurd life of a Spanish conquistador for a series of poems.  

Hall had driven to Racine from faraway Buffalo via Ontario (Canada) & Chicago in a BMW.  After distributing homemade scratch & sniff styrofoam squares for a "smell my trash" bit, Hall was upstaged by a pair of turkeys.  Those bold birds pranced into the barn, undeterred by the presence of an energetic dog.  One turkey nibbled at a hay-bale while the other checked out the seated audience.  Apparently we entertained them as much as they amused us.  Joining the gentle audience for a while struck me as an intelligent - albeit bird-brained - response.

Last up was singer-songwriter Naomi Marie, a colorfully tattooed Twin Cities transplant to the Belle City.  She performed with a mesmerizing intensity that served her musical material well.  No barnyard animals dared intrude during her 20-minute set.  Perhaps the amplification & audible emotion kept them at bay.  To paraphrase the old Broadway tune:  How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they have seen Bonk! free?  As usual, a Q & A session completed the festivities.

  

To my regret, I met just one nun at this performance.  A pragmatic elder, Sister Rosemary interrupted our conversation in order to tell another guy named Joe (from Kenosha) that smoking is banned at the EJC.  It reminded me of a funny photo-calendar I had circa 2005 called Nuns Having Fun.  Among its black & white prints, one depicted a nun sneaking a cigarette while dressed in a burka-like traditional habit.  The mere prospect of cancer didn't deter that God-fearing sister.  

Later that night at Olde Madrid (a Bonk! underwriter) the co-owner & manager Natalie Salinas & her husband Manny Salinas (chef & co-owner) fed the performers gratis.  My meal - tapas of fried shrimp with cilantro sauce, cup of gazpacho, flan custard & a glass of red sangria - was also on the house, Natalie said.  I was surprised & delighted.  I'd simply given their place an honest newspaper review that drew extra diners from metro Milwaukee.  

The generosity & gratitude that I witnessed last weekend - at Olde Madrid, the Eco-Justice Center & the Bonk! show - give me hope.  That can be a lifeline for a semi-cynical loner.  Joe Hall offered me a taste of his seafood gumbo:  it was creamy, unlike any gumbo I’d ever tried.  So I passed him my plate of flan (custard).  It was a sweet fore-taste of heaven, to borrow a poetic metaphor.

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]

Links:

(1) Info about the Bonk! series:  http://bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com/

(2) Info about the Eco-Justice Center & its upcoming annual Fall Festival:  http://www.racinedominicans.org/eco-j.cfm

(3) A recent article about Anne Malin & her music: http://www.berkeleybeacon.com/arts/2014/4/16/the-eerie-music-of-anne-malin

My date with Derek: This Is Spinal Tap turns 30, mock-rock fans still love to Smell the Glove

I once had sex with Derek Smalls, fictional bass player in the parody metal band Spinal Tap (played in the mockumentary by Harry Shearer).  Okay, that’s a misleading statement.  In fact, I fucked a facsimile of gentle Derek.  

Inside that flare-legged jumpsuit with a blatantly stuffed package, the slim-hipped creature I met & made love to was actually a young woman in a gender-bending costume.  Whatever.  This faux Derek was hot - albeit androgynously so.  I didn’t know whether to kiss him/her on the cheek or merely shake hands.  

Heterosexual by nature, I found the turn-on rather awkward.  Yet I’m man enough to admit that I grew an instant - uh - crush on him/her.  This led to satisfying coitus by night’s end.  That doesn’t make me a rock ‘n’ roll groupie, does it?  I’d hate to embody that cliché.  Let me explain by setting the scene.  

Voice-over by activist-actor Peter Coyote:  It was the fall of 2001.  The nation was at war again, in remote Afghanistan this time.  Even stateside civilians lived like there might be no tomorrow.  With W & his evil sidekick Dick in the White House, things got very weird for the next seven years.

So in late 2001, on a bracing Friday evening not long after my 41st birthday, I was attending a “fancy dress” (British for costume) party on the eastside of Madison, Wisconsin (USA).  It had a perennially hip humorous theme:  This Is Spinal Tap.  I had no idea that I was about to experience a reverse-Lola moment.  In the living room a big TV played the Show of Honor on DVD.  The party’s main action, however, was in the basement.  A lousy garage band played far too loudly.  But with a keg of beer flowing freely, nobody complained.  

I approached a medium-sized person dressed in a Derek Smalls get-up, complete with dark mullet, chinless beard & a messy nest of chest hair.  I struck up a conversation.  The alto-voiced lady-in-drag & I hit it off.  Before long we left to go shoot pool at nearby Mickey’s Tavern.  Only then did she remove the fake fur, revealing a friendly babe with a fantastic sense of fun.  Later that night I learned that she was blonde underneath the wig (& elsewhere). 

You know the movie, don’t you?  If not, here it is in a nutshell:  A mostly improvised 82-minute satire with several deserving targets, This Is Spinal Tap bombed at the box office upon release in 1984 - exactly 30 years ago Friday (August 1st).  A lot of people didn’t get the extended joke:  aging British rock band releases new album (Smell the Glove) & arranges a US comeback tour that turns out to be ridiculously doomed.  

It features a host of gifted comic actors doing cameo appearances.  Bruno Kirby plays an embittered limo driver, while  Howard Hesseman is a nasty rival band manager.  Billy Crystal & Dana Carvey play catering-company mime/waiters in New York.  Fran Drescher vamps as high-maintenance record-company PR flack Bobbie Flekman & David Letterman’s musical sidekick, Canadian import Paul Shaffer, says “kick my ass” as Polymer Records incompetent promoter Artie Fufkin.

The feature film was embraced by a growing legion of fans upon its VHS videotape reboot.  But the stars who created it got ripped off & supposedly never made any money from their red-headed stepchild’s subsequent success.  Nevertheless, the movie started a buzz - it had legs that still keep it moving after 30 years.  That’s an eternity, measured in the rapidly passing time of disposable pop culture.

Sample dialog:  Christopher Guest, as boyish bullshit-artist/guitarist Nigel Tufnel, telling fan & film documentarian Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner):  I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really.  It's like a Mach piece, really.  It's sort of -

DiBergi: What do you call this?

Tufnel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump." 

Or dig the famous bit where Nigel explains to Marty that the volume knobs on his amplifiers go all the way to eleven.  But they’re no louder than standard amps, which only go up to ten.  Marty’s puzzled.  Why not just make the amps louder? he asks.  “But these go to eleven,” Nigel whines, after a long pause.  He’s a spoiled 30-something idiot, proud of his noisy toys.  

Less invention was required to author & improvise those scenes than you might think.  Reiner, Guest & company had done their research. In a recent conversation with Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis of WBEZ-FM Chicago public radio’s outstanding program Sound Opinions, co-writer & then first-time director Reiner said that the scene where the bumbling Spinal Tap members get lost en route from the dressing room to the stage was based on a real incident involving Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, who reportedly got so stoned in the green room that they couldn’t manage to locate the stage entrance.

Reiner admitted that he based his enthusiastic documentary film-maker, Marty DiBergi, on Martin Scorsese.  Scorsese’s concert film about The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), inspired some of the looniness captured on celluloid forever by Reiner.  Amateur - yet accomplished - musicians Guest, Shearer & Michael McKean (as David St. Hubbins) played themselves into pop-culture immortality.  Most enlightened rock & film critics (Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave it two hearty thumbs up) agree:  This Is Spinal Tap is not only one of the best insider movies about the business of rock ‘n’ roll & its many greedy players, it’s also one of the best comedies ever issued by a Hollywood studio.

Saturday Night Live alumni Shearer & Guest, along with McKean & an ensemble of talented improv actors that includes Fred Willard (who appears in Spinal Tap as a clueless US Air Force colonel), Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, Catherine O’Hara & Eugene Levy, went on to make several more satires.  They deftly skewered the Sixties folk-music generation in A Mighty Wind (2003).  They lambasted purebred-dog competitions (Best in Show, 2000) & community theatre (Waiting for Guffman, 1997).   They even used their sharp comic wits against their own kind, sending up vain Hollywood actors in For Your Consideration (2006).

You may be wondering, whatever became of my faux Derek?  We dated a few times, but we didn’t deploy disguises or engage in role-playing.  We had some good clean (sometimes naked) fun.  But she lost interest faster than I did, for a change.  Derek’s real name was Sara & she was a gem, but we lived 75 miles apart.  At least I have a good memory tied to that great movie, in that mad era in American history.  

This Is Spinal Tap may be 30 years old, but it still smells fresh as a new glove to its many admirers around the world.  As David St. Hubbins philosophically put it, “It’s such a fine line between stupid & clever.”  Rock on, Tap!  Milwaukee’s Shank Hall awaits your next tour.

NOTE:  Here's a link to the excellent Sound Opinions podcast featuring the Rob Reiner interview about Spinal Tap:  http://www.soundopinions.org/show/451/#robreiner

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek]

Beervana, Wisconsin: Local brewers at the cutting edge of the American craft-beer revolution

When the majority of American beer connoisseurs speak of a “craft” beer paradise, a Shangri-La of locally brewed malted barley & hops concoctions, they usually mean Portland, Oregon (USA).  Also known as Portlandia & the people’s republic of portland, the Rose City - a West Coast community of 600,000 - has embraced the portmanteau moniker Beervana.  And the hype is actually justified:  Portland deserves the craft-beer title of the continental United States, given its approximately 59 quirky brew-pubs & craft breweries.   

The term “Beervana” is simultaneously (1) a nod to the mellow Pacific Northwest / West Coast seeker vibe - available in even the rainiest parts of climatically diverse Oregon, Washington & California; and (2) high praise for the heavenly array of high-quality local beers on tap at Portland’s licensed premises.  The craft-beer revolution, of course, is not limited to the coasts.  It has spread far & wide throughout contemporary America.  

The craze for hops-enhanced pale ales & other trendy beers - whether on tap or in recyclable bottles & growlers (re-usable 64-oz. glass jugs) - shows no sign of abating soon.  Hip cities, such as Seattle & San Francisco, may enjoy a moderate climate & a sophisticated culture.  But their craft beers are no better than those brewed in, say, Kenosha (Wisconsin).  In that city of 100,000 souls, Public Craft Brewing Co. & Rustic Road Brewing Co., both established in 2012 in the city’s revived downtown, lend hipster cred & cutting-edge chic to that former AMC/Chrysler factory town.

Indeed, Wisconsin’s many craft brewers - from metro Milwaukee & Madison to Green Bay, Black River Falls & beyond - are giving Portland a run for their money.  When it comes to offering tasty options for locally brewed, small-batch craft beers, the proud brewing tradition of the Badger State has been rescued from the slow death of corporate mediocrity.  Moreover, these niche gourmet beers fit the emerging foodie economy, unlike the insipid mass-market beers sold by global giants such as SABMiller or Anheuser-Busch InBev.  

In fact, Wisconsin craft brewers have made important contributions to the small-is-better industry legacy.  In his list of the “Ten Great American Beers” (see the June/July 2002 issue of American Heritage), for example, renowned beer expert Michael Jackson includes Wisconsin Belgian Red by New Glarus Brewing Co. (est. 1993).  He says that this take on a Belgian cherry beer has “an almost purple color, a textured body, a malty background, and a beautiful balance of almondy fruitiness and tartness.”  In a nod to the international success of American craft brewers, Jackson adds that this tasty beer from tiny New Glarus, Wisconsin, “has won several awards in Europe.”

In Milwaukee (population:  599,000), home of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball club as well as the iconic Harley-Davidson motorcycle & gear brand, the renaissance of craft brewing was launched by the Sprecher Brewing Co., which sold its first beer in 1985.  What could go better together than baseball, Harley bikes & beer?  Meanwhile in the state capital, Madison (population:  250,000), successful breweries such as Ale Asylum (eastside) & Capital Brewery (in suburban Middleton) have become established leaders in craft brewing.  You might say that Milwaukee & Madison are vying to become the Mecca of Midwest craft brewing.

Today the leading innovator among Brew City’s numerous craft brewers is Lakefront Brewery, founded in Milwaukee in 1987, when it brewed a mere 60 barrels.  In addition to an annual production of thousands of barrels of its own varieties, Lakefront also custom brews proprietary recipes on contract for area brewpubs - such as the refreshing Grampa Jack’s Pilsner, exclusively available at Reefpoint Brewhouse (est. 2012) in nearby Racine, Wisconsin.  

Located in a restored warehouse on North Commerce Street, adjacent to downtown & beside the Milwaukee River, Lakefront Brewing was cited by the editors of Draft magazine (in 2008) as offering the best “family friendly” brewery tour in the world. They put it ahead of the staid yet generous tour at the gargantuan Guinness brewery at St. James Gate, Dublin (Ireland).  And deservedly so:  having taken both tours, I assure you that indie-sized Lakefront Brewery’s hour-long tour beats the Guinness version hands down for entertainment value.  

Having a sharp sense of humor is a vital tool for survival, a way of remaining sane in a sometimes crazy world.  And here’s the genius of the Lakefront tour:  it’s pretty funny (if you understand American English well).  Our middle-aged guide, Katie, presented herself as a refugee from the corporate sector:  she used to be an accountant, but switched to teaching.  Lakefront Brewery manager Chris Ranson explains that their tour “revolves around the brewing process” so that “participants get a real good sense of brewing.”   

Yet it’s not at all a dry learning experience for thirsty adults.  One happy customer called Lakefront’s tour “the Animal House of brewery tours,” reportedly because the $7 admission charge includes four 6-ounce tap beers, served in a spacious Old World-style beer hall, a coupon for another pint at a local bar & a souvenir Lakefront pint glass.  The brewery’s owner, Russ Klisch, kicked the fun up a notch by purchasing two iconic items of local memorabilia:  (1) the chalet that mascot Bernie Brewer used as an outfield perch to watch every Brewers’ home game at Milwaukee County Stadium; and (2) the bottling line used in the title sequence of Laverne & Shirley, a lame ’70s sitcom where two goofy girlfriends work at the fictional Shotz Brewery in Milwaukee.  

Lakefront also offers a “technical tour” (conducted especially for home-brewers) for $30, as well as private tours upon request.  In addition to their many year-round beers (such as Extended Play IPA) & seasonal offerings (e.g. Cherry Lager), Lakefront makes a gluten-free beer (New Grist) for celiac-disease sufferers as well as an Organic ESB for health freaks.  Lakefront Brewing has been certified “green” for its environmental practices by Travel Green Wisconsin.

Craft brewing is an industry ripe for parody, with its eccentric brewers, offbeat beer-names & garish labels.  Flying Dog Brewery in Colorado, for example, uses the punky splatter illustrations of Ralph Steadman on its labels as well as a tagline by “Gonzo” journalist and longtime Woody Creek (CO) resident Hunter S. Thompson:  “Good people drink good beer.”  Some craft brewers resort to desperate measures in order to cut through the clutter of this suddenly crowded market.  Only three percent of US beer sales (some six million barrels) last year were domestic crafts.  However, that’s up 17% from 2012, according to Brewers Association figures.  No wonder craft-beer brands keep proliferating.  

Is it a delusional business model, spreading like a beer-borne contagion?  Or a viable consumer trend?  Only time will tell.  As evidence of craft-beer marketing run amok, I offer Exhibit A (as in apropos or absurdity):  an otherwise appealing bottle of dark brown Scotch ale, by Sacramento Brewing Co. of California, is cursed with the yeti-inspired name Sac-Squatch.  Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it?  

So it’s high time that Christopher Guest make a mockumentary on the subject.  He could call it Bottles of Glory, a bizarre journey into the creative heart of the American craft brewer.  (“More fun than a lost weekend,” drones Roger Ebert’s immortal Internet avatar.)  Guest & a pair of longtime improv collaborators, Harry Shearer & Michael McKean, famously spoofed aging British rock stars & heavy-metal headbangers in This is Spinal Tap (1984).  They deftly skewered the Sixties folk-music generation in A Mighty Wind (2003).  They even lambasted purebred-dog competitions (Best in Show, 2000) & community theatre (Waiting for Guffman, 1997).  Satirizing small-batch craft brewers who aspire to make a legendary beer, while conspiring to undermine their beer-addled competitors, might make for a good film scenario.  

Lakefront guide Katie deployed bad puns & bald-faced lies in telling her condensed Story of Beer.  But she kept her balance, deftly sidestepping comic bombs.  More important, her passion for the subject was palpable.  Lakefront’s Chris Ranson hires all the tour guides, requiring each applicant to have home-brewing experience.  He made a solid hire in Katie’s case.

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the post-’80s “craft beer revolution” only happened because, in October 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed the homebrewers & winemakers bill.  That federal law led to thousands of beer enthusiasts experimenting with recipes, making up to the legal limit of 200 gallons of beer per household.  Some of them were encouraged to go commercial, opening brewpubs & micro-breweries across the vast parched landscape of North America.  

What’s usually left out of the Hollywood myth outlined above is the countervailing ’70s trend toward taste-free “light beers” (Miller Lite, Coors Light, etc.).  The aspirational American beer-lover’s palette demanded something better.  It devised an American response to such substantial European imports as Grolsch (with its porcelain cap), Guinness & St. Pauli Girl.  In the end, demanding consumers will create & sustain diverse markets - in so-called “free societies,” anyway.  Beer is no exception.

In William Hogarth’s 1751 print Beer Street, the British artist depicts drinking ales & porters as a life-affirming habit.  In sharp contrast to the dying wretches of Gin Lane (a companion illustration), people on allegorical Beer Street look healthy & happy.  Hogarth festoons the scene with a sign celebrating beer’s main ingredient:  Health to the barley mow!  Or as the old Czech folk song puts it:  Kde se pivo pije / tam se dobře žije!  [Wherever beer is brewed / life is lived well!]

In a cover story for American Heritage (June/July 2002), “Beer and America,” Library of America publisher Max Rudin calls beer the “drink of democracy.”  He embraces both the modest working-class origins & the literary legacy of a sometimes denigrated aspect of American culture.  Rudin quotes beer-praising passages from Jack London & John Steinbeck & he cites a nose-thumbing beer gag in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera as proof of beer’s deeply ingrained popularity in the USA.  

Fortunately, contemporary craft brewers, including several from Wisconsin, have not only improved the taste & variety of American beer.  They’ve also educated discriminating beer drinkers’ palettes along the way.  Cheers!

NOTE - Related recommended reading: (1) for details about the history of beer in the Badger State, get Breweries of Wisconsin by Jerry Apps (Madison, WI:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed. 2005); and (2) for a generously illustrated overview of the industry, see Brewed Awakening:  Behind the Beers & Brewers Leading the World’s Craft Brewing Revolution by Joshua M. Bernstein (NY:  Sterling Epicure, 2011).

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek]

My beer with Victor Grossman: US Army defector turned (East) German Journalist speaks in Milwaukee

On Fathers Day (June 15th) at the co-operative (i.e. drinker-owned) bar Riverwest Public House in a diverse Milwaukee neighborhood, I met Victor Grossman.  Born Stephen Wechsler to fervently Communist parents in New York, Grossman is an 86-year-old Jewish freelance journalist & a longtime resident of Berlin.  As a United States Army soldier stationed in Bavaria in 1952, Wechsler defected to the Soviet side after swimming across the Danube River to Austria. 

His rather grandiose pseudonym (which means "victor big-man"),  he said, was suggested to him by his Communist handlers.  Grossman, a reluctant draftee, said that he defected due to his (well-founded) fear of prosecution by the US military for having lied on his loyalty affidavit, a document asserting that he had never been a Communist.  A unique double alumnus of both Harvard University & Karl-Marx-Universität (Leipzig, Germany), Grossman proved his stamina as a lecturer by speaking for over two hours.  The audience of about three dozen, most of whom were - judging by the questions asked - old-school lefties, ate up the bland goulash of facts & commentary that Grossman was serving with nostalgic relish.  

First, some background information:  the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) was created by the Soviet Union during Stalin’s post-war re-organization of rump eastern Germany, mainly in order to counter the United States of America’s democratic-capitalist creation, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), aka the Federal Republic of (West) Germany.  With the help of the Marshall Plan (which Grossman described as a “plot” to undermine Soviet influence in post-war Europe), West Germany began a steep rise to relative wealth & comfort for the majority of its citizens - many of whom were fleeing the DDR by the late 1950s.  

By contrast, the DDR’s economy struggled to provide most consumer goods, having received no corresponding financial assistance from its war-depleted Communist “brothers” in Moscow.  Among Grossman’s many interesting state jobs was working as chief archivist at the Paul Robeson Archive in East Berlin.  In 1968 he became a full-time freelancer & author - publishing Rebel Girls, his populist-feminist American history in German, and Crossing the River, a memoir in English, among other books.  After the DDR regime was toppled by a peaceful popular uprising in the fall of 1989, writing assignments became more infrequent for this man with a suddenly unfashionable résumé .  

The nominally socialist DDR was far from the egalitarian workers’ utopia its manipulative leaders constantly claimed to be approaching.  The DDR’s Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, or Socialist Unity Party) leadership had the disadvantage of being adjacent to the bigger, wealthier & more glamorous West Germany.  Nevertheless, they built an economy so successful that East Germany’s standard of living was comparable to Great Britain’s by the mid-1970s.

“I saw a country with everything against it,” Grossman said of the DDR in the 1950s, “but they achieved alot.”  He cited the fact that the East German government provided free medical care, job security & a state-paid university education for qualified students of any background - so long as they didn’t rock the boat by questioning authority too loudly or persistently.  Grossman himself apparently didn’t question much about his adopted homeland’s lousy human-rights record.  

For example, he said that the forced expatriation of East German poet-singer Wolf Biermann in 1976 was a set-up by Biermann & some fellow dissidents, conspiring with their West German sympathizers, who wanted to embarrass the DDR.  No doubt he also accepted the DDR’s official justification of the Berlin Wall as “an anti-fascist protection wall.”   In fact, it was erected in August 1961 in order to deter DDR citizens from fleeing to the West.

Grossman did at least complain about the intellectually inert ideological clichés of Communist media discourse.  No wonder most East Germans tuned in to Western media - including US-sponsored radio & West German television - instead of enduring the DDR's dull & meager media offerings.

Interjecting opinions on current events in Europe& the United States, Grossman discussed his life as a journalist in East Berlin.  He hosted an American folk-music program on Radio Berlin International, an organ of official state propaganda, during the height of the Cold War (the early 1960s).  The glory years of the DDR, better known to Americans as Communist East Germany (1949-89), ended in the late 1970s.   By then the DDR government was “selling” political dissidents to West Germany in exchange for the coveted hard-currency Deutschmark.  

Based on the evidence gleaned from his long-winded talk in Milwaukee, Grossman not only drank the spiritually toxic kool-aid of Communist propaganda as a red-diaper baby of the Great Depression, he helped mix & serve it as a prominent journalist & media personality in the DDR.  He perpetuates much of the DDR’s self-justifying malarkey to this day, now as an active member of Die Linke (aka die Linkspartei, or Left Party), the fourth largest political party in re-unified Germany, combining former members of the mercifully defunct SED with some breakaway social democrats. 

For all his faults, Grossman still seems like a mensch, a decent guy to talk with over a beer.  He said that he injected a surprising sense of humor into his DDR reportage & commentary.  Four decades spent living under the deadly serious East German regime apparently did little to stunt his wit.  He credited his late wife Renate, an East Berliner, as the person who “made the difference in my life.”

From a journalist specializing in topics related to the USA, Grossman has gone on to write & speak with authority on such topics as European migrants & the neo-fascist backlash, NATO military intervention as well as social & economic justice movements.  

Best of all for me, he knows Bettina Wegner, my favorite DDR singer-songwriter, and he met Angela Davis in her glory days.  A radical American professor & activist, Davis became a popular sensation in the ’70s Communist bloc following her acquittal by an all-white California jury on kidnapping & murder conspiracy charges.  She was awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize, among other honors in the USSR & the DDR.

In the May 15th issue of his detailed blog-like Berlin Bulletin, Grossman quotes the trade-union leader & co-president of Die Linke, Berndt Riexinger:  “To be a leftist means to squarely face the people, life and the future.”  If only it were that simple, Herr Grossman.  It certainly wasn’t true of the DDR’s bullying leaders - until it was too late to reform their corrupt, inhumane system.  The DDR died a sudden & ignominious death, precisely the end it deserved.

NOTE:  The English-language Berlin Bulletin is available for free via email by writing Grossman at:  wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de.  [© 2014 by J.C. Mrazek]