captain frederick pabst

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Ahoy!

January 12, 2012 in History | 1 comment

Live from Milwaukee: Last night at dinner I lamented Detroit’s dearth of places to get a beer and a great piece of pie. (If you know of a good one, please share.)

Then I thought, Maybe it is OK that I no longer have a pie and beer habit. A beer habit on its own is more than enough.

This morning, though, just for old time’s sake, I had pie and a beer (New Holland Oatmeal Stout — from MICHIGAN!)

It still feels strange to be hosting an out-of-town book event, since my book is so specifically about, you know, one specific town. So I have been over-explaining myself. (“Wisconsin and Michigan! Part of the same Territory! Had some of the same Governors! Great Lakes fur trade and so on!”) When ThirdCoast Digest (I used to be their senior editor) asked me to write a short preview of my party, I turned in a 1300-word historical essay/love letter.

I’ve shared my affection for Captain Frederick Pabst before. What I forgot about — until I woke up in the middle of the night and remembered it — was that Captain Pabst, in his sea-captain days, crossed paths with another captain — Detroit shipping king and mega-millionaire industrialist Eber Brock Ward.

Captain Pabst was a real captain. In 1848, at age 12, he moved from Germany to Milwaukee. Striking out here, the family moved to Chicago, where Frederick’s mother died from cholera. Frederick Pabst had to find work. After odd jobs at hotels and restaurants, he landed (no pun intended) as a cabin boy on a Great Lakes steamer.

It was his job to collect tickets from passengers as they disembarked the ship. One day, the story goes, a passenger claiming to be a certain Captain E. B. Ward tried to leave the ship without handing over a ticket. Frederick Pabst stopped him. Captain Ward protested on the basis that he owned the ship. Pabst made him go back to his cabin and wait until his identity could be confirmed. Ward was impressed, not disgruntled. (OK, maybe he was also disgruntled. But hopefully just a little.) Pabst had composure. He showed some pluck. Some resolve.

Captain Ward knew something about that. Born in Canada in 1811, Eber Brock Ward came to Detroit with his family in 1821. The frontier port town was muddy, provincial, and had yet to recover from a devastating 1805 fire. Just a few rickety boats, mostly British-owned, plied the Great Lakes, and whenever one of them sailed into Detroit’s harbor — announcing her arrival with a booming report of the cannon — the entire town wandered to the river to watch.

You can read the whole essay here.

Detroit and Milwaukee: Meant to be!

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Margaret Mather

January 19, 2011 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 1 comment

Oh, gosh. We have to talk. About this woman.

Margaret Mather (nee Finlayson) was born in Canada sometime in 1859 or 1860. Her impoverished family moved to Detroit when she was five; her father John Finlayson may have run a boarding house for sailors.

When she got a little older, Margaret took to the streets to sell newspapers for the Free Press. As a teenager she washed dishes at a fancy hotel, where she watched well-heeled girls her age come and go on the arms of rich, influential men.  As her tragical, romantical Victorian biography goes (who knows if any of this is true!), Ms. Mathers, despairing over her lot in life, tried to throw herself into the Detroit River. But a handsome German stranger rescued her, took her home to her family, and her fortunes forever turned. Someone in New York — a successfully married sister? a sympathetic brother? — sent for her, and off she went with a picnic basket and a dream. Somehow, she found someone to pay for some acting lessons. And that is how this tiny, rough-haired, provincial Scotch-Canadian from the dirty wharves of Detroit came to play one of the most iconic Juliets of the 19th century.

In 1882, Margaret Mather’s manager, J.M. Hill laid plans to mount a lavish new production of Romeo and Juliet in Chicago, with Margaret Mather its debutante star. The production went on a lengthy North American road tour before its debut at the Hill Theatre in New York City in 1885.

Here’s critic William Winter on the production on J.M.’s  Romeo & Juliet, which he chided as being farcically concerned with trappings of polite domesticity:

In the scene of the secret marriage of Romeo and Juliet, two monks, moved, apparently, by springs, suddenly came out of the wall of Friar Lawrence’s cell and placed hassocks for the bride and groom to kneel on … Juliet’s bed-room — the time of her nuptials being the middle of July, in a hot country — was thoughtfully provided with a large fire of brightly blazing logs.

Winters didn’t think Mathers was much good, either:

Miss Mathers showed no comprehension of Juliet’s character or temperament … Her notion of acting was to goad herself into a frenzy, to rage, storm, and “tear a passion to tatters.”

Her elocution was of the sing song variety, and her method of action was mechanical and coarse. When the Friar offered the Potion to her, she snatched the vial from his hand, emitting hysterical shrieks, and after she had swallowed the dose, she collapsed in such a way as to roll down a short flight of steps and land on the stage level. She was essentially a commonplace person fortuitously placed in a prominent public position.

Poor Margaret Mather. A star in her day, but posthumously eviscerated by critics, who tended to echo the sentiment that her acting was mostly frenzied, shrill, and hysterical.

Her private life: predictably tumultuous. She secretly married her manager’s music director. It didn’t work out. She took a second husband, Gustav Pabst (SON OF CAPTAIN FREDERICK PABST!), but they split after he alleged that she tried to horsewhip him. In public! In Milwaukee! Oh, Margaret Mather.

And she died young — after collapsing on stage during a performance of Cymbeline (some said the best role of her career, but no one really cares about Cymbeline, and the production flopped) — possibly of kidney disease. She was 38.

She’s buried at Elmwood. Her funeral there, held on Easter Sunday, was thronged by a celebrity-crazed mob of thousands, who tore flowers and evergreen from the gravesite for souvenirs.

Margaret Mather was buried in a jeweled white gown she’d worn a hundred times on stage, as Juliet.

More on Margaret Mather:

William Winter’s review

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography online

The Willa Cather Archive

A variety of clips from the New York Times

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Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery

May 3, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 2 comments

An excursion to Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee’s Lincoln Village had been on my mind for more than a year, since the early days of my love affair with Captain Frederick Pabst. I hadn’t realized until recently, though, that many of Milwaukee’s other famous brewers are buried there, too. The family plots of Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz form a kind of beer baron delta, where three of Milwaukee’s greatest brewing kings are locked in eternal rest as they were in mortal destiny.

Valentin Blatz was born in Bavaria in 1826. He came to Milwaukee in 1849, established his brewery in 1850, married the widow of the brewer Johann Braun in 1852 and produced Milwaukee’s first individually bottled beer in 1874.

Just across the road from the huge Blatz family mausoleum is the Schlitz family plot, featuring the brewer Joseph Schlitz’s towering cenotaph:

Joseph Schlitz immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1850. Like Val Blatz, he married another brewer’s widow and took over the brewery subsequently. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 helped Schlitz become the Beer that Made Milwaukee Famous, as his frequent donations of beer to the city filled the void left by burned-down Chicago breweries.

Joseph Schlitz died in the shipwreck of the steamer Schiller in 1875, off the coast of England.

And now, if you will, a moment of silence for the Captain:

I like to imagine that in death, as in life, his cup overfloweth with Blue Ribbon.

Beyond the corridor of beer greats, Forest Home rests a huge number of Milwaukee magnates, city founders and street namesakes, including Byron Kilbourn, George Walker (as in Walker’s Point), the Davidsons (of Harley-Davidson fame), the Usingers, the Pfisters, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler and seven Wisconsin governors.

Henry Clay Payne was U.S. Postmaster General under Theodore Roosevelt;

The Froemming Brothers were Milwaukee shipbuilders, and these sculptures on their family monument are gorgeous:

Everything is in bloom right now. We saw some baby geese and a lot of fat, purple flowers that really bring that whole “circle of life” concept into perspective.

Forest Home was incorporated in 1847 on a hilly, forested plot of land about 2 miles away from the city along the Janesville Plank Road. Since its first burial in 1850, the cemetery has interred more than 110,000.  It would have been nice to spend a few hours wandering the grounds (Forest Home’s website has a nice self-guided history tour), but we had other dweeby tasks to attend to, as well as several mai tais to drink.

More fun in creepy old Detroit cemeteries:

Woodlawn Cemetery
Elmwood Cemetery

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The Captain

March 25, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 5 comments

captain pabst

If you’re enjoying this blog, you have, in part, this man to thank. Explaining why requires a detour from Detroit for today, but I hope you’ll humor me.

This is Captain Frederick Pabst, and this Sunday will be the 174th anniversary of his birth in Saxony in 1836. When he was 12, he immigrated with his parents to the United States, first to Milwaukee, then to Chicago. Before long he was working as a waiter, then a cabin boy, on the Great Lakes. By the time he was 20, he was first mate on the steamer Traveler. He saved passengers from the burning wreck of the Niagara, today still buried underwater and covered in zebra mussels not far from Sheboygan. At 21, he became Captain, as he would be known for the rest of his life, of the steamer Huron.

I read once, and only once, in The Pabst Brewing Company: History of an American Business (as recounted here), that Captain Pabst met his future wife, Maria Best — the young heiress to Phillip Best’s beer dynasty — when he saved her from icy Lake Michigan after she accidentally fell from the gangplank of the Comet.

The story is most certainly arcane, but I think this was the crystallizing moment for me, the pinpoint-able instant where I became transfixed with the Pabsts, and more generally, with the stories of the people behind the things and places I took for granted. I had held that cold can of swill beer so many times — Established in Milwaukee, 1844 —without a whit of wonder about its namesake.  Now I can’t drink Pabst without talking about him. (Consider yourself warned.)

Maria’s helpless-princess slip from the gangplank was the hook, but the sinker was how much Milwaukee’s actual modern-day texture can be traced to the Pabsts. From the Captain’s 1904 obituary in the New York Times:

Frederick Pabst was one of the most conspicuous citizens of Milwaukee, in whose development from a village to one of the great cities of the continent he was a large factor. Among the familiar features of the city — in addition to the great brewery — there are the Pabst skyscraper office building, the Pabst Theatre, the Pabst Hotel and the pleasure resort on the lake shore.

pabst theater

Frederick Pabst, curious and energetic, built his gilded, palatial New German Opera House in 1890. It burned down almost immediately, but the Captain had it just as promptly rebuilt, this time with state-of-the-art fireproofing, including one of the country’s very first fire curtains. It also had a rudimentary air conditioning  rig composed of fans and ice. At the opera house, as well as the Pabst Mansion west of downtown, all illumination was electrical, a major technological feat at the time. And it was all built in the grand Flemish Revival style, red or cream brick and stone with gables, Gothic arches, spires and turrets. It was Deutsch Athens, the center of German society away from Germany, and it was a boom time to live in Milwaukee.

pabst buildin

When Milwaukee’s City Hall was commissioned in 1890, the architect based its design on the city’s emerging skyline, and on buildings like this one, the Pabst building, commissioned by the Captain. (The Pabst Building was demolished in 1980.) When City Hall was completed in 1895, it was the tallest building in the world.

milwaukee city hall

Captain Pabst was a city Alderman, Maria a cosmopolitan supporter of music and the theater; both of them worked philanthropically to help the poor, patronize the arts and support women in business.  As I learned more about them, I started to see them as the Fords to my Milwaukee, without the unsavory sniff of racism that complicates Detroiters’ relationship to the man that made their city.

For three years I lived in a neighborhood in clear view of the those bright red letters bridged across the former brewery. I went to indie shows at the Pabst Theater and drank PBR Tall Boys at the Captain’s splendid theater and climbed its grand Carerra marble staircase. There’s a bar on the East Side, Von Trier, where the original wrought-iron-and-antler chandelier that hung in the Captain’s foyer graces the back room, or so the bartender says.

By the time I moved back to Michigan, I think I had become accustomed to wondering what glorious, mustachioed German sea captain might be lurking behind the most prosaic object, like a tin can of budget beer, a dilapidated street with a majestic name or the most unceremonious historical marker. I think of him as this blog’s grandfather, and this weekend I will drink PBR and tell some poor bored person the dramatic story of the boy from Saxony who made Milwaukee a good place for a girl like me to live.

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Valentine’s Day

February 12, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History, Meditations | 4 comments

st valentines day

(Harper’s Magazine, 1861. Library of Congress.)

I didn’t realize that Valentine’s Day was this weekend until late this afternoon. The fella and I don’t have anything planned, except we might have lunch with an out-of-town friend who’s flying into Ann Arbor to visit his long-distance girlfriend. For Valentine’s Day.

My blog has lately suffered at the hands of a story I’m putting together for the weekly about accordions in Detroit, so the chance to take advantage of an easy editorial plug-in would have been really appealing, had I not completely forgotten that it’s happening in like two days. And everyone knows that despite our 24/7 communications-saturated society, no one really reads blogs on the weekends. Okay, that’s not true. But if you post on the weekend, it doesn’t count. That’s what I was taught in internet school, anyway.

So, in between checking Facebook and not working on my story, I thought about some lesser-known famous romances. Mary Vining and Mad Anthony Wayne? I don’t really know enough about that one to know if it even happened.

mary vining

Captain Frederick and Maria Pabst? A handsome couple, magnanimous citizens, upstanding Germans and good parents, but I don’t really know anything about their love. Just their beer. There’s an arcane story that delights me about Frederick saving Maria from a shipwreck when he was still a Great Lakes captain, but chances are better that Maria’s father, the brewer Philip Best, just wanted Frederick in his camp.

maria

Mostly I’ve been thinking about love affairs that are a little closer to home.

margaret and bill fw

(Family photos courtesy my mom.)

This is my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill in 1963 or 1964. They met on a blind date when Margaret was 19. Uncle Bill used to tell me that Margaret wore all blue on their first night out: a blue dress, blue stockings, blue shoes, a blue handbag. I bet she looked incredible.

Bill and Margaret got married seven years later, at a hunt club in Farmington Hills. They spent the rest of their lives, as far as I could tell, marvelously in love.

My mother was nine years old when they were wed, so she grew up with Bill and Margaret as much as I did. They were like grandparents to me in a lot of ways: Margaret picked us up after school, cooked us fishticks and frozen vegetables or macaroni and cheese for dinner, read to us. But more importantly, she tended to the small, real people growing inside of us. We had conversations with her. We shared ideas, defended convictions, talked about books we liked, boys we liked, places we wanted to see. She was honest, and joyous. It’s hard to even write about her without stooping to tripe; I can walk my brain through every corner of her house,  but the influence she had on my life and the incredible love I still feel for her really overpowers any constructive details I can remember about her besides the last three agonizing weeks of her life.

So thank god for old family photos; I can see them like this, 20 years before I was even born, when they were gorgeous and adorable. Even when they were aging, Margaret grey and papery from decades of cigarettes, Bill bald and permanently sun-leathered, both of them losing their teeth, their love for each other was radiant, and together, they were a pretty beautiful thing to behold.

When Margaret died of lung cancer in 2001, Uncle Bill was permanently wrecked. It took years for him to cut his trips to the cemetery from twice a day to once. When we buried him in 2008, we arrived at the mausoleum to find the flowers he’d taped to the marble wall of her crypt the day before he died, peacefully, while he was napping on the couch.

I have a fiancé now, and it tears my heart out that Margaret and Bill don’t get to meet him — and that he has to settle for an occasional teary (and usually sad-tipsy) monologue from me about how great they were. On our first date, we went to the opera. I tried not to think too much about it, but my favorite vintage shopkeeper talked me into a stunning wool shift dress, with sheer mesh netting at the neck, dotted with tiny sequins.

It’s royal blue.

egglestons

Sometimes it’s so mind-boggling to remember that people who lived in the past really lived, you know? Ate, and drank, looked around, talked to each other, made love, fell in love, had bad days and good days and boring days, and maybe sometimes thought to themselves, how weird is it to be alive?

I don’t know why this is especially resonating with me in the run-up to Valentine’s Day. Maybe because even though it’s hard to understand, emotionally, what it might have been like to live without electricity, paved roads, heat, grocery stores, or to be the commander of an army, the governor of a frontier state, the wife of an aristocrat or the daughter of a beer baron, the capacity to understand a love affair is readily accessible to just about everyone.

Those are my great-grandparents in the black-and-white picture above, dolled up in their Sunday clothes. I don’t know anything about them, not even how they felt about each other, but I’m glad they got it on at some point. Happy Valentine’s Day to them, and to you.

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