The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger

 

 

 

 

Back in September 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism?  Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food? Who’d a thunk it?

Admittedly, I had written on occasion about food, especially fast food, prior to venturing forth with soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) but not that often.  Mainly if it involved a road trip from Southern Ontario to New England or vice-versa that wound up taking me to my favourite Red Barn, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, New York, or something got me thinking about high school back in Oshawa, Ontario and memories of Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza. That sort of thing.

Just taking a quick look here, it looks like I’ve become an insatiable lowbrow fast food blogger who dreams of being to blogging what Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is to TV. And that’s just looking for headlines that trumpet food, not so much others posts that mention food either in a secondary or passing fashion, overshadowed by a main non-food story. Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

In a similar vein, I’ve written a couple of times about the Burntwood Curling Club’s monthly, from November to April anyway, fundraising pickerel fish fry, now in its third season, to bring in some revenue at $20 a plate for the older crowd and $10 a plate for those 12 and under, with proceeds going towards what it cost to replace the club’s aging ice plant, a big ticket six-figure item for curling clubs. The last fish fry of the season is set for Monday, April 3 in the upstairs club lounge from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The fish fry involves club volunteers cooking about 50 pounds per fish fry of  fresh pickerel, also known as walleye, from the commercial fish packing station in Wabowden. Pickerel is the most valuable commercial fish catch in Manitoba, with an average value of  about $20 million per year, which is about 70 per cent of the landed value of all species, and comprise more than 40 per cent of commercial fish production in the province by weight. Am I writing primarily about curling or pickerel? I suppose some of both really, but I know a bit more about pickerel. Jeanette and I are looking forward this spring and summer to marking a decade fishing together off the dock for pickerel at Paint Lake Marina!

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

Maybe we all just love food, no?

In Winnipeg, we have V.J.’s Drive Inn at at Broadway and Main with its overstuffed double chili cheese dogs, greasy spoon certified cheeseburgers, golden fries and chocolate milkshakes, all for the more discerning among the Fort Garry Hotel clientele methinks.

And speaking of chili dogs: should you ever find yourself down in Durham, North Carolina, you can’t go wrong enjoying a meal at The Dog House, locally owned and in business in Durham since 1970, and serving up an assortment of Bull-Dogs, Boxer Dogs, Collie Dogs, Hound Dogs, Puppy Dogs, Ol’ Yallows and the like.

Living in North Carolina was where I developed tastes for chili dogs, deep-fried cornmeal-batter Hushpuppies, pork barbecue and fat back, cracklins and wash pot pork rinds, while prudently not losing said tastes by overdoing it with low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol testing at nearby Duke University Medical Center, although I visited the world-class medical facility for other ailments on occasion.

The Dog House says its chili is made from a family recipe with pure beef, and no beans, soy or other fillers; just a blend of secret spices and 47 years of experience.

As for the slaw, it is “not too sweet and not too spicy,” and always freshly made.

But closer to home, when you’re appetite is a bit larger than a sausage dog or one of its cousins,  my pick is Lovey’s BBQ in St. Boniface for hand trimmed briskets, pork shoulders and ribs. Yum!

Sometimes you get to combine your writing interests, say about Catholicism and food, as I did in “Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/)

I combined Catholicism and food on a few other occasions as well: In “‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/make-mine-halibut-please-fish-and-chips-catholic-on-friday/) I wrote that until Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays. Catholics had been eating fish on Friday under an edict in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851. With the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day.

No need to feel too sorry though for us fish eaters for having to forgo meat on Fridays from 851 to 1966. We made up for it on an annual basis on “Fat Tuesday,” which fell on Feb. 28 this year. Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but we made sure we ate  – and ate big and ate rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon – the last day of Shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes. Come to think of it, even though we can eat meat on Fridays now outside of Lent, we remain fond of Shrove Tuesday.

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican or Episcopalian brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/).

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

And you can be pretty sure that while I might not post about it on soundingsjohnbarker, I’m quite likely to put in a bit of a plug on my Facebook page at least for annual Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day come Wednesday, April 12. I’ve done so for the last two years.

Melting cheese on top of bread is a culinary concept that has been around since the time of Ancient Rome,  but modern grilled cheese sandwiches, as we know them, didn’t become popular until the 1920s. Due to the ready availability of cheese and sliced bread for the average consumer by the early 20th century, they became an American staple, but a connoisseur’s love for grilled cheese sandwiches also spread around the world.

Thanksgiving, of course, gives me a change to give holiday nod to turkey, such as in this piece, “Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/mouthwatering-american-thanksgiving-recipes-correction-in-the-new-york-times-and-other-pardonable-acts/):

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And I wouldn’t be much of a former New Englander, if after enjoying a “blue” rare steak, I didn’t enjoy  scarfing down some super premium ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream, named after Steve Herrell, as it was in the early 1980s at the original location on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, or Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., which got its its start  in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont. In 1980, they were  showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.\

Burgers have been the continuing jackpot for my food entries, however, which may not surprise many. What might surprise you, however, is the relatively big numbers (outpacing anything I’ve written on Thompson city council, can you believe it?) has been for two posts on two defunct American burger chains, both of which also operated for a time in parts of Canada, particularly in the 1970s.

Apparently former employees of the two burger chains and hungry aficionados who remember them fondly, salivate, or so it seems, to a helping of words on the Red Barn and Burger Chef, gone, but never forgotten.

Both stories get read pretty much daily somewhere in the world and “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) was published here back on Sept. 13, 2014, while “Burger Chef: The story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/burger-chef-the-story-of-the-greatest-might-have-been-in-the-history-of-the-fast-food-business/) appeared originally on March 13, 2016.

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Through the eyes of a hermit: Maine’s North Pond Hermit and the Hermit of Gully Lake in Nova Scotia

Hermits fascinate us. Or maybe it’s just the idea of hermiting that fascinates us, especially after a bad day in civilization. In any event, hermits were back in the news recently with the publication of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, which the Guardian had a March 15 online excerpt from at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/15/stranger-in-the-woods-christopher-knight-hermit-maine

Finkel is an immensely talented writer, and in an odd way perhaps the perfect choice really to write Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit’s story. Finkel’s also been an outsider and a rule-breaker, which might be considered more praiseworthy than condemnatory, if he wasn’t also something of a fabulist. I’m not sure much other than Finkel’s more polished writing skills and a matter of degree of culpability separate him from such other well-known earlier fabulists as Stephen Glass, who was a staff writer at the New Republic in the late 1990s, or contemporaneously with Finkel’s own work, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Perhaps we just need to have faith that time has redeemed Finkel.

In 2002, Finkel was a New York Times Magazine contract writer who wrote the infamous feature story, “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” which chronicled the life and work conditions of a young labourer on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Although Youssouf Malé is real person who indeed exists, Finkel built his feature story for the New York Times Magazine around a composite character, combining the stories of several boys, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified. The real Youssouf Malé spent less than a month at the plantation, not a year as Finkel reported. Youssouf’s return to his home and his parents, of which Finkel wrote, was told to him by another boy. A scene from the article in which a psychologist interviews Youssouf Malé never took place. Finkel wrote about what he had done three years later in 2005 in True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, and has pretty much gone onto successfully resume his freelance journalism career over the last decade.

As for the subject of his new book, Maine’s Christopher Knight, one expects that someone who voluntarily disappears from the world and into a hermit’s life from 1986 to 2013, might have some deep philosophical insights with all that away-time from the distractions of the Modern World. You might expect that, but you’d be wrong. It’s not Knight’s story, at least as Finkel tells it here. Still, it is an absorbing story, a compelling read, but you get no sense of Knight being analogous to fellow New Englander Henry David Thoreau and  Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he goes to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”

Assuming Finkel is a reformed fabulist and not a fabulist of 18th-century English history, aside from Knight’s personal story, I can’t deny being fascinated by the background to the piece, where I learn: “It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.”

Who knew? Not me.

The closest I’ve ever been to a real-life hermit was on the  day of the two H’s in the late fall of 1999. I was assigned by the then Truro bureau chief of the Chronicle Herald to spend a day deep in the woods looking for a hermit near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains of Nova Scotia.

Or in the alternative, he said, I could spend the day up around Londonderry and the Cobequid Toll Plaza on Highway 104, climbing down highway embankments counting lost hubcaps, as he speculated there was an inordinately large number of same to be found. Either way it was going to be an outdoor day. Hermits or hubcaps: I opted to look for the hermit, Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, who didn’t like killing people, he said later, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police, and never came out of the woods.

Well, at least that’s what folks around there said to strangers. When I stopped in at Earltown General Store on Highway 311 up in the Cobequid Mountains between Earltown and Tatamagouche on the North Shore to enquire about MacDonald, I was met with more or less polite silence, although one person allowed it might just be possible the Hermit of Gully Lake just might be known to Canada Post and the occasional piece of mail might arrive for him to be held for general delivery.  And that was the extent of the helpfulness of folks who were protective neighbours solicitous of Mr. MacDonald’s long-held privacy. MacDonald may have been a hermit, but he wasn’t without friends, lest anyone think the two – being a hermit and having friends – were incompatible. Not for all hermits apparently. Reclusiveness is a relative thing.

So  it was then that I spent an unseasonably warm late November day tramping around the sun-dappled woods and sun-reflecting and still unfrozen ponds, squinting and listening, trying to somehow locate the Hermit of Gully Lake. It was a very pleasant gig as daily newspaper assignments went, but I never did find MacDonald. But he may have found me. There were several discretely unsettling moments that afternoon when I had the certain feeling I was being watched from the dense bush and forest by someone. I could feel their eyes on me, although I never saw them. The watcher had become the watched. Little did I know that day near the close of the 20th century and dawn of the new millennium that within a couple of years of my futile late 1999 hunt for MacDonald, the Hermit of Gully Lake would become something of a Nova Scotia folk hero and minor celebrity of sorts during his twilight years.  There were indeed people who knew about his dilapidated, two-metre-by-two-metre shack, where he would sometimes compose music on a homemade guitar.

The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services financed construction of a small cabin for him. He tried it but found it too close to civilization. A forest fire wound up destroying his preferred dilapidated cabin, so he went back to the winterized cabin.

MacDonald, 87, disappeared for good when well-meaning and probably conflicted visitors went to get medical help, against his wishes, after he became ill in late November 2003, almost four years to the day after my one-day quest to find him.

MacDonald had been born in the Bay State, more specifically in Somerville in the Commonwealth of  Massachusetts, on Aug. 13, 1916. Many years later, I, too, would live in Somerville, more specifically West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, between August 1980 and August 1981. It is also known as Powder House Square. Circle, square. Where else but Massachusetts would the two be synonymous? I was 23 and 24 years old at the time. My daily walks often included strolls over the Somerville-Medford-Arlington lines,  passing Tufts University on my walk. Or a bicycle ride over the Cambridge line on my 10-speed CCM Targa up or down nearby Massachusetts Avenue, invariably known locally as “Mass Ave,” the second-most famous Massachusetts Avenue in the United States, trumped only by the street of the same name in Washington, D.C.

But this was our Massachusetts Avenue right in Massachusetts. Harvard Yard in Cambridge in one direction to the southeast and Minute Man National Historical Park at Concord in the other to the northwest. In November 2007, Boston Magazine aptly enough described Mass Ave this way: “Its 16 miles of blacktop run from gritty industrial zones to verdant suburbia, passing gentrified brownstones, college campuses and bustling commercial strips.”

Which makes wonder what Somerville was like in MacDonald’s 1920’s youth? I never got to ask. Willard Kitchener MacDonald’s body was found on June 27, 2004 by more than 100 volunteers searching the Gully Lake area for his remains. Since then, the Truro-based Cobequid Eco-Trails Society has officially named a trail the Willard Kitchener MacDonald Trail. One wonders what MacDonald might think of that.

Pictou County, Nova Scotia songwriter Dave Gunning wrote a song about Willard Kitchener MacDonald in 2004 called “Let Him Be.”

The old cabin’s gone, it burned to the ground
They go looking still to find him but he doesn’t make a sound
60 years of walking down, this long road alone
He’s earned the right to stay and choose how to go

Joan Baxter, a well-respected Nova Scotia author, journalist, development researcher/writer and anthropologist, who now divides her time between Canada and Africa, wrote a biography, The Hermit of Gully Lake: The Life and Times of Willard Kitchener MacDonald, published in 2005. The book was short-listed for the Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 2006 Atlantic Book Awards.

A year later, in September 2007, Toronto-based filmmaker Amy Goldberg’s Willard: The Hermit of Gully Lake, a documentary on the by then famous recluse, debuted at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.

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Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage

Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’

“CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.’”

Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

Really?

Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.

But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.

As I wrote earlier this year, “In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938.” It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And it was the year 1938.

Although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938. We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

As Mitchell Kalpakgian noted in a July 6 essay headlined “Fanatical Ideas and Reasonable Convictions” in Crisis Magazine, a self-described “voice for the faithful Catholic laity” published in Manchester, New Hampshire, “A fanatic is a person obsessed with one idea, a monomaniac ruled by one dominant compulsion that governs all his thoughts and actions. He is enslaved by one predominant passion that dictates all his motives and decisions.”

While their ideas might differ, it is that fanaticism not Fascism that rules this American historical moment.

Quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic convert and apologist, Kalpakgian notes in a chapter entitled “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained that the fanatic’s thinking is too “rational” in the sense that he ‘overlooks many other considerations and ignores other evidence that surrounds him.

“The fanatic’s extreme mental concentration on one thing leads to madness at the expense of openness to larger universal truths that lead to wisdom … To think with rabid intensity on one subject consumes the mind to an unhealthy degree of concentration.

“It warps a person’s mind, making him pay undue attention to one matter and ignore objects of larger importance. The fanatic makes himself the center of the universe as only his passions count.”

Wrote Chesterton: “Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business?”

Kalpakgian writes that to be “haunted, obsessed, and enslaved by one rigid idea ultimately distorts a person’s humanity. A fanatic lives and dies for one thing only, whether it is revenge, money, work, pleasure, or fame. To think like a monomaniac eventually leads to thinking only with the head and without the conscience or the heart. Ironically, the overworking of the mind on one narrow subject breeds some degree of insanity.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason,” writes Chesterton.

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From Steve’s in Somerville, Massachusetts to Ben & Jerry’s in Burlington, Vermont, New Englanders have a single-minded zeal for super premium ice cream

It has now been more than 30 years since I lived in the Boston area but Boston stays with you forever.

I lived in West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, which is a few blocks east, if I’ve recalled my geography correctly, of the Cambridge line and Massachusetts Avenue, and just south of Tufts University and the Medford and Arlington boundaries. Somerville is where I discovered Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell seven years earlier on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville in 1973, which was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer, making for a ice cream based on a low overrun, or the amount of air in the ice cream while freezing, with  “mix-ins” like Heath® Bar Crunch added at the counter. At the very center of the twin-blade dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer is a center blade turning clockwise while the other blade turns counter clockwise, which are in a canister that also turns clockwise. This triple-motion action mixes and folds the ingredients completely creating smooth and creamy homemade ice cream.

What you need to know about northern New Englanders is they are crazy in love with their super premium ice cream. And I’m not shitting you on that, as a New Englander might well say in a way that sounds much less vulgar verbally in Massachusetts than it probably appears here in print. Some things do sort of get a bit lost in translation. To say I was surprised to discover how much residents of Massachusetts and Vermont in particular love their ice cream year-round would be a really big understatement. Up until then, I had lived all of my life in Southern Ontario in Canada, just a bit to the northwest side of the Adirondacks, and the climate I was used to was at most just a few degrees colder than much of northern New England. And, hey, I liked my Central Smith Creamery ice cream, found between Peterborough and Bridgenorth from what had started out as a farmer’s co-op in 1896, expanding to scooping ice cream in 1979, just fine, but they very sensibly, or so I thought anyway, closed their retail window at the creamery for the winter given the almost zero demand for a cone in December, January and February. Canadians, eh?

New Englanders are fanatics, however. Fanatical about ice cream any time of year; fanatical about their Bruins, as I discovered sitting in the “Gallery of the Gods” high up in the cheap seats in the old Boston Garden; and fanatical about the Red Sox, I also discovered sitting behind the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot, two-inch high left field wall at Fenway Park, which is only 310 feet from home plate.

I actually worked for a few weeks right in Harvard Square in Cambridge for yet another ice cream joint, Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor during the long ago summer of 1980 (no relation to Brigham’s briar pipes, founded by Roy Brigham in his pipe repair shop in Toronto in 1906), the legendary Boston ice cream shop founded in 1914 by Edward L. Brigham. Sadly, neither Steve’s or Brigham’s has their ice cream parlor businesses in the Boston area any longer, although you can still find tubs of ice cream distributed under their brand in New England grocery stores, or at least so I’m given to understand.

I can’t remember now if we sold burgers at Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor in Harvard Square and actually had grill cooks or just ice cream and pop, but what I recall most was it was a cultural introduction to those small but significant differences between Canadians and Americans. I used to actually work the cash and give customers their orders on occasion.

Around the Boston area the most common term used for chocolate sprinkles on ice cream is “jimmies,” which I got used to more or less soon enough. But every time someone bought a cold drink in one of those waxed cups, I’d ask if they wanted a lid with it. Invariably they would look happily stunned, while my co-workers would just look plain stunned. A “lid” was a drug term not much used in Southern Ontario at the time but apparently universally used in Massachusetts in 1980 for either an ounce or gram of marijuana, depending who you ask for the history of the measurement (which some say relates to coffee cans). “Do you want a lid with it?” made me a very popular Brigham’s employee during my brief tenure in Harvard Square.

Ice cream is the stuff of legend in New England. And no ice cream scoopers have been more legendary than Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg (a.k.a  Ben & Jerry). Their story of meeting in Grade 7 gym class in 1963 at Merrick Avenue Junior High School, as two chubby kids who liked to eat and disliked running track, while growing up in suburban Long Island, New York – and then in their mid-20s, after Greenberg had been rejected from some 20 medical schools and was not content to work as a lab technician – splitting the cost of a $5 Pennsylvania State University correspondence course in ice cream-making with Cohen, so that on Saturday, May 5, 1978, with $12,000 scraped together from loans and savings, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont, has been told now so often for so long, it is as smooth and as well crafted, as, well, a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.  In 1980, they were still showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.