Лилиан Браун: Moose County Legends

What happened, you see: Hilda’s dog had been howling for hours, and Grandpa called the sheriff.

Eventually Hilda was lodged in a foster home—for her own protection—and had to surrender her hedge clippers.

The whole town breathed a lot easier. I asked my grandfather why they put up with her eccentricities for so long.

He said, “Folks still had the pioneer philosophy: Shut up and make do!”

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5.

Milo the

Potato Farmer

As Thornton Haggis Heard the Tale

from His Grandfather

Thornton is a fifth-generation stonecutter witha degree in art history and a keen interest inMoose County’s past. Now retired, Thornspends countless hours at the Art Center as avolunteer.

—JMQ

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Milo Thackeray and my grandfather were good friends.

They played checkers and went hunting together—

varmints and deer. Hunting was not a sport in those days.

For many struggling families it was a way to put food on the table. Hard times had come to Moose County in the early twentieth century. Yet this had been the richest county in the state when natural resources were being exploited.

Then the ten mines closed, leaving entire villages without hope of work; the forests were lumbered out; there was no market for quarry stone; the ship-building industry went elsewhere when steamboats replaced tall-masted schooners. Thousands of persons fled Down Below, hoping to find work in factories, and those who remained had little money to spend on potatoes and tombstones. Milo was a potato farmer, and Gramps was a stonecutter.

It had been a year of tragedy for the potato farmer. His 쑽쑽쑽

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Lilian Jackson Braun eldest son was one of the first casualties of World War One; two younger children died in the influenza epidemic; and now his wife died while giving birth to twins, Thelma and Thurston. They were his salvation! Gramps was there when Milo swore an oath to give them a better life than he had known. A sister-in-law came in to care for them, and eventually Milo married her. Eventually, too, his life took a strange turn.

In 1919 the Volstead Act went into effect, and thirsty citizens provided a large market for illegal beverages. Somehow, Milo learned he could make hard liquor from potatoes. Gramps helped him build a distillery, and it worked!

Customers came to the farm in Model T cars and horse-drawn wagons. Unfortunately for the jubilant farmer, rev-enue agents also came. They smashed the still and poured the liquor on the ground. (Even to this day the belief per-sists that the act accounts for the superior flavor of Moose County potatoes.)

Milo was undaunted! His twins were growing fast, and he had sworn an oath.

Across the lake, a hundred miles away, was Canada, famous for good whiskey. On the shore of Moose County there were scores of commercial fishermen who were getting only a penny a pound for their catch. Milo organized a fleet of rumrunners to bring the whiskey over under cover of darkness. Soon a steady stream of Model T trucks was coming north to haul it away, camouflaged in many ingen-ious ways.

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Short & Tall Tales The poor potato farmer became the rich bootlegger.

Transactions were made in cash, and Gramps held the lantern while Milo buried the money in the backyard.

Every weekend Milo took his family and their young friends to Lockmaster for a picnic and moving picture show. The back of the truck was filled with kids sitting on disguised cases of contraband. Milo never attended the show, and the seats were never there for the return trip.

There was no such entertainment in Moose County.

The twins begged their father to open a picture show in Pickax.

Prohibition ended in 1933, but the potato farmer was in a position to indulge his twins. He bought the old opera house, long boarded up, and made it the Pickax Movie Palace. He financed their chosen careers.

Besides their sex, the twins were very different. Thurston was slight of build and more sensitive; he loved dogs and horses and wanted to be a veterinarian. Milo sent him to Cornell, where he earned his DVM degree.

Thelma was taller, huskier, and bolder; she wanted to be “in pictures”. Milo sent her to Hollywood with her step-mother as chaperone. He never saw either of the women again.

Thelma obtained bit parts in two B films and decided she would prefer the food business, playing the leading role as hostess in her own restaurant. Milo first financed a snack shop (the Thackeray Snackery) and then a fine restaurant called simply Thelma’s. She did very well. When Milo died 쑽쑽쑽

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Lilian Jackson Braun he left his fortune to Thurston, to establish the Thackeray Animal Clinic in Lockmaster, and to Thelma to realize her dream of a private dinner club for connoisseurs of old movies.

Milo was buried in the Hilltop Cemetery, with Gramps as the sole mourner. And Gramps chiseled the headstone the way his friend wanted it: milo the potato farmer.

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6.

The Little Old Man

in the Woods

As Told by Dr. Bruce Abernethy,

Black Creek Pediatrician

He doesn’t mind if you refer to him as “thedoc”. Kids like to go to the doc for shots. Adultslook forward to reading his letters to the editor.

When he asks to say a few words at a citycouncil meeting, everyone sits up and listens.

Here he talks about trees.

—JMQ

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When I was eleven years old, we were living in a wooded area outside Fishport, and behind our property was the forest primeval—or so I thought. It was a dense grove of trees that had a sense of mystery for an eleven-year-old. I used to go there to get away from my younger siblings and read about flying saucers. A certain giant tree with a spreading root system above ground provided comfortable seating in a kind of mossy hammock.

I would sneak off on a Saturday afternoon with the latest science fiction magazine—and a supply of pears. You see, the early French explorers had planted pear trees up and down the lakeshore. To own a “French pear tree” was a mark of distinction. We had one that was still bearing lus-cious fruit. Before leaving on my secret Saturday reading binge, I would climb up into the tree and stuff my shirtfront with pears. Then I’d slink away into the forest.