This from a report in today's New York Times:

"Edward Koen, 87, sat in his wheelchair outside the center Sunday in the shade, staring up at the blue, sunny skies, waiting for the bus.

''Why should I be nervous, because of a hurricane?'' Koen said. He'd rather stay put. ''My gosh. I've been living here all my life.''

Ohhhhh .... that comment brings back an important memory:

I've written three books and the inspiration for each came from some deep place in my brain -- as in, my brain said to me "HERE. This is what you should write about."

That's what happened one day in the fall of 1998. I was living in Mobile, Alabama, where I taught at a university. A few weeks prior to this particular day, I had decided to leave academia to write history for a popular audience.

This was a major life change and I was figuring out what this would entail and how to start this new career. No surprise, a large part of my brain was occupied with the most important question: What should I write? What topic would I use to launch this new part of my life?

On that particular day, I was driving home from playing golf (which, full disclosure, I played badly and which I can't play anymore because of my shoulder). The radio was on. Hurricane Georges was on the prowl and a reporter for NPR was in a place called Key West. At the time, I had no idea where or what Key West was, although I gathered it was somewhere near Florida.

The reporter talked to a 92-year-old woman who told him that she wasn't worried about the hurricane. She'd lived in south Florida all her life and lived through a worse storm in Havana in 1928.

Although I wasn't sure where KW was, I knew something about the history of south Florida. Enough to know that if this woman had lived in Florida her entire life, she came nearly pioneer stock. (South Florida was settled relatively late; anyone who was there in the early 20th century was there early. )

And the idea of Havana in 1928? That sounded ... romantic.

That interview hit a nerve that I didn't know I had.

"Wow," I thought. "That sounds ... fascinating. Maybe I should write a history of Key West."

So I did.

And that's what hurricanes and Key West have to do with my life.

So, to my pal George, who has a house in Key West, and to everyone else on the island: Be safe!

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And I got it.

I hasten to add that as many baby boomers know, it's a paraphrase of a hippie-maxim from the 1970s (and for all I know, there's some other version that's even older):

"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.

I first heard it c. 1974 (give or take a year or two) while sitting in an apartment in Iowa City smoking a joint. No surprise, under those circumstances, it struck me as the most profound thing anyone had ever said.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Temperance and prohibition were hot issues in the 1850s and early 1860s. The "drys" tended to hog the floor because then as now, it was politically difficult to express public affection for the pleasures and benefits of drink.

The editors of the La Crosse, Wisconsin Union were having none of it. As far as they were concerned, the problem with Americans, especially women, was that they didn't drink enough beer.

"Queen Victoria," the newspaper pointed out, "has raised eight or ten babies, and drinks beer. German women drink beer and are as robust as any women in the world."

"There is no denying the fact . . . that our total abstinence American women are sadly degenerating, and that the present race of Young America are dwindling, compared with generations past. The most ridiculous thing of our time is to hear little, sallow, 'dried up' men and women making an immense blow about the vices and indulgences of the community, when one good, rollicking fast-liver could clean out a regiment of them in ten minutes."

Source: The La Crosse, Wisconsin Union, as quoted in the Milwaukee Sentinel, March 3, 1860, p. 2.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's an amazing photo on the "front page" of the New York Times website. Leave your politics behind and enjoy the wonders of the internet age.

The image (it's actually a series of images taken rapid-fire) is from last night's convention, just after McCain finished speaking.

This link should take you to the large version.

Then click on "full screen" and roll your mouse. Almost enough to induce vertigo! And truly truly cool.

And in case that link doesn't work, just go to the Times website; it's the image right there front and center.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it's fall (or it feels like it here) and that means freshly sharpened pencils, the end of the peaches, the appearance of the apples and -- beer festivals right and left, including the Big Daddy, the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, now just a month-and-change away. (Tickets are still available.)

Charlie Papazian has a nice list of guidelines for enjoying festivals without going nuts. To his list I would add this:
1. pack a supply of throat lozenges (festivals are noisy; you're gonna be shouting)
2. carry some earplugs (see above)

See you in Denver!

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those just tuning in, "Detour From Beer" means this post has nothing to do with beer.

And believe me, this particular post REALLY isn't beer-related -- hmmmm . . . unless you want to visualize beer.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg test drives Google's new browser and compares it to the new version of Internet Explorer. For the time being, I think I'll stick with Firefox.

Unrelated to browsers and several degrees up the "wow" scale is many-eyes.com, a website with software that allows people to create visual comparisons and analyses of, well, just about anything. Someone could use the software to construct a visual that compares the number of times Obama used the word "tax" in his acceptance speech to the number of times McCain used the same word.

Warning: I've had only sporadic success getting into the website the past few days. My guess is that its owners, a group at IBM's Watson Research Center, weren't prepared for the traffic generated by this New York Times article about the website and software. The article is worth reading because it provides a short, coherent explanation of what the software can do, complete with an image mapping the occurrence of names in the New Testament (no surprise, "Jesus" gets the biggest bubble).

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Good news: article here about a national rollout of Leinenkugel beer.

I know people in craft brewing have mixed feelings about Leinie's, but to me, it's a midwestern brewery run by the same family for decades. And that family has worked hard to make good beer and treat people right. The Leinie-heads are legion. Me? I love Leinie Creamy Dark.

That's the good news. Here's the bad news.

When I was writing the beer book, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jake Leinenkugel and his dad, Mr. Bill Leinenkugel. Lovely people. Lovely.

Bill Leinenkugel, who is now 87 and long retired, is one of those brewers who kept the faith during the dark days of the 1960s and 1970s. The beer business is never easy, but it was particularly difficult then for the nation's smallest brewers. Their numbers dwindled dramatically and those who survived did so only by dint of hard work and, well, faith.

For the Leinenkugel family, it was all about keeping faith right there in Chippewa Falls. The brewery's survival mattered not just to them, but to their friends and neighbors who worked there.

The Leinenkugels have been criticized since then for selling to Miller in the late 1980s, but the family could see the writing on the wall: There was a good chance the company might not survive and they knew that the people who would be hurt the most were the people down the street and around the corner.

So they sold. As a result, people in Chippewa Falls continue to enjoy the benefits of local beer and a good local employer.

Anyway, back to Mr. Leinenkugel: When I finished the initial draft of my manuscript, I sent a copy of the relevant pages to all my interviewees. (I wanted to make sure I hadn't screwed up basic facts or grossly misrepresented what people had told me.)

A few days later, Mr. Leinenkugel called me to thank me. He was obviously please as hell that anyone had taken the time to write a history (albeit short) of his family. He was kind, gracious, and .... thrilled. I was in tears by the time I hung up.

Last week I learned that he has an inoperable brain tumor. He's dying. He knows he is. But in death as in life, he's keeping the faith. “God has been awfully good to me all of my life," he told an interviewer. "I have no qualms about dying.” (*1)

So -- here's to Bill Leinenkugel. I can only hope to live my life with as much kindness and optimism as he has.

Thanks and a tip o' the mug to my pal Jim Arndorfer at the "Brew" Blog for info about the interview and about news about the Leinie rollout.

*1. The interview is in Beer Business Daily, which is available only by subscription. Thanks to my dear friend Daniel Bradford, publisher of All About Beer magazine, for passing along the interview, and to BBD's owner, Harry Schuhmacher, for not minding that Daniel did so.

Posted by Maureen Ogle at 01:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)