Blei

I’m sorry I never met Norb Blei in person. His day of birth was exactly 19 years and 364 days before mine, so he was from my parents’ generation, but, still, I think we might have hit it off.

I know we did hit it off on the telephone. I talked to him in 2002 when I was working in the features department of the Appleton Post-Crescent. There was a community read taking place in the Fox Cities. The book was John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Blei had been invited by organizers of the community read to speak about the book, so I called him to do a

Norb Blei caricature by John Fisher.

preview story and plumb his mind for thoughts on Steinbeck and his most famous work. We talked about many things. It was more of a conversation than an interview. I believe we said we should meet sometime. But here are a few nuggets from our Steinbeck conversation.

“Too many of our writers are just churned out of universities without a hell of a lot of experience of the real world, and it reflects in what we’re getting,” Blei told me. “Steinbeck dealt with class struggles, and this country is going through that same damn problem. It’s still here. It’s a conflict in society between haves and have-nots. It’s a big American theme, and it’s still out there. We have to address that. That’s one of the functions of good writers.”

Blei said he often referred young writers to Steinbeck as a role model of the two-fisted, hard-working writer.

“He wrote with the old classic legal pad and pencil,” Blei told me. “He talked about wearing down two or three pencils a day. He was a very diligent, hard worker. He not only wrote massive novels like East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, he kept a journal about writing the novels. Here’s a guy who at the end of the day would put down what he was up against or at the beginning of the day where he’s moving into the novel. Just keeping a journal is very time consuming, let alone the complexities of a novel itself. I’ve tried it myself, but it gets very confusing and time consuming.”

In the end, Blei said, writers only can do what Steinbeck did.

“Read good work and write,” he said.

We never did meet. I finally got to Door County on April 9, 2013. Two weeks later, on April 23, Norb Blei was gone, at least physically. But as Pastor Michael Brecke of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Juddville, pointed out at the June 28 remembrance for Norb, his gravestone reads:

Norbert G. Blei, Writer

Find me in my books

To help understand the man, we asked his publisher, his longtime partner, and his son to tell you something about him from their perspectives.

An excerpt by Norbert Blei

Door to Door (1985)

“A writer needs writer friends. Men friends, women friends. He needs their letters, their phone calls, their presence, their lives. He needs the love of strangers too. He needs the work of other writers and artists. He needs his own family, though too often they experience the worst of the writer – what’s left – the dregs, the fears, the insecurities, the broken pieces, the uncommunicative parts, which often the family alone, unknowingly, in a love unspoken, serves to give the writer back to himself, in one piece…alive again.”

‘Find Me in My Books’

Norb Blei’s chicken coop studio. Drawing by Bill Stipe.

by Jude Genereaux

In my experience, there are two kinds of people in Door County:  those who love Norbert Blei and those who didn’t know him.

A brilliant, dedicated teacher, a writer who spoke up for keeping safe the treasure that is Door, Norb lived a Wabi-Sabi lifestyle. He had a penchant for finding beauty in the old, the broken, the discarded – wrote about collapsed barns disintegrating into the ground, hung rusted and dented coffee pots in trees as décor and set broken pieces of pottery on the benches near the Coop to admire. He had no yearning for the grandiose or excess; an “amenity” to Norb were the birds he tossed sunflower seeds to each morning or fresh wood chips adorning the path to the Coop.

I’ve never known anyone who so thoroughly lived his life as he felt it was meant to be. Norb moved through his days driven by instinct, following an energy he felt for a project as it hit him – not always to its conclusion. The ability to prioritize was not one of his characteristics, for if a subsequent bolt of enthusiasm intersected, he was off on a new trail, a new story. The result is that we are finding a treasure trove of unfinished “works in progress” springing from the archives of the Coop and computer files, like morels in the forest – some stories nearly finished, others never to be. The Coop itself will be preserved and moved to a place that will honor the alchemy and spirit that thrived within its cedar-scented walls.

His obsessive curiosity was both Norb’s genius and his curse. His interest was immediately engaged asking for advice on a writing project, an opinion on a new book – a movie, music – or a wisp of an idea that took him directly to a notepad. Our home was stuffed with an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 books, any one of which he could find at once, going to the exact passage sought. The Coop held the life’s work of one man, but would easily fill an entire literature wing at a small college with books, ideas, research and preparations made during 40 years of The Clearing workshops.

Norb often warned, “Artists are difficult to live with – and writers are the worst!” but I tend to believe all who are driven by a passion for their work march to a more insistent beat, myself included. More enduring to recall is the seductive joy and enthusiasm we shared in nearly19 years of life in sync. The simplicity of long rides through Door, meandering walks through the parks and forests or galleries and pottery shops, and afternoon picnics at Newport were everyday pleasures. An occasional weekend in our favorite city Milwaukee (sorry Chicago) as well as just being home…dinner with friends, evenings at the AC Tap, Camp David or local programs, were gifts of a synchronicity of spirit shared. But there was so much more we wanted to do…

I learned many things in my life with Norb – even his peaceful departure changed my perception of “death” as he quietly slipped away, his last breath on my shoulder. I miss the deep resonance of his voice and his laugh, every day. Find him in his books.

An Excerpt by Norbert Blei

Village Character: The Pioneer Store

(In Memory of a Small Shopkeeper, Lester Newman)

from Winter Book, 2002

A death in the town of Ellison Bay a few years ago caused the writer to reflect again upon the past, present, and future of Door County – where we were as a community, where we are now as a tourist attraction, and where we’re headed.

One of the local writer’s main concerns then and now is the erosion of character in our small towns and villages as tourist commerce, unchecked, insidiously works its way up and down Main Street desecrating old stores, eliminating public buildings, churches, and private homes till nothing is left but a cutesy façade of upscale buildings brightly lit, catering to every tourist taste from teddies to teddy bears. Call it Boutique Blight.

Razing or remodeling structures, painting them garish colors (lavender and hot pink the favorite hues) adding flying pennants, wind socks, tiny Christmas lights, glow-in-the-dark-all-night soda pop machines, and large O P E N signs, just in case the poor tourist fails to notice that the once old local business is now US, and ain’t we cute, smart, mini-malled to cater to your every whim. And as for what was once old Olafson’s white painted frame house built in the early 1900s with the small front porch and the American flag hanging beside the door, well, all that’s ancient history, folks. Check us out. Ain’t we hot:  pink, and lavender, with a large fancy sign on the front lawn:  DOOR COUNTY UNIVERSITY T-SHIRTS. (Another original Door County business idea.)

Turning traditional white steepled churches in the heart of our towns, villages, and countryside into trendy little gift shops is yet another sign of our time and decline. Building brand new, super-churches just to cater to the burgeoning influx of summer worshipers is yet another. (“God’s Condo” the local writer dubbed one of these edifices that began to take root and sprawl into his vicinity. What looks like a drive-thru window has more recently been installed. Along with a steeple anchored to the ground. Blessed be [not] the ministers who build monuments unto themselves.)

So much for local character. Small white churches that sang to the spirit of us all just because they were there in history, in plain view of local and tourist alike, speaking quietly of a faith we could all honor, are now marketed, face-lifted, to retain just the right touch of the old spirit (a single stained-glass window, a spotlight on the steeple after dark) to beckon the new spirit of the shop-till-you-drop-believers:  Welcome to St. Bazaar, the Church of the Big Bucks. How about some plastic seagulls for your front lawn? Leaving us all, tourists, transplants, and locals alike, short-changed – in the long run. Leaving us with architectural wonders, “Nouveau Door Grotesque.” Leaving us hollow villages and towns, caricatures of themselves, which may as well be numbered as named, with no meaning or history of any consequence other than the sizzle of summer commerce. No real stores with real products, or buildings with any sense of why they are there for the local inhabitants. Not a single authentic shopkeeper minding the store. Gas stations to gift shops, town halls to tourist offices, churches to candle shops. Absentee ownership, any-old-salesperson. Businesses to be resold next year, transformed into yet another unique clothing store, coffeeshop, internet café, run by nobody-knows-my-name (or cares).

Which brings me back to the death of Lester Newman, small town shopkeeper, teacher, proprietor, along with his wife, Carol and family, of the Pioneer Store in Ellison Bay. A man and a woman and a business who fit naturally into the Door County woodwork, defining the true meaning of pride in place.

The Pioneer Store is Ellison Bay, as much as the old bridge is Sturgeon Bay, Al Johnson’s Restaurant is Sister Bay, and Wilson’s is Ephraim. Who can miss it? No windsocks. No pennants. No neon. No glamour, no glitz. No nothing but GENERAL STORE. The fact that it still exists, is still “operational” in the oldest and present sense, in these “tear-down-for-tourist-times” in Door is miracle enough. A genuine wooden storefront, posts and gingerbread in need of periodic coats of white paint, with large windows that reflect all the truth and beauty of small town life passing by.

A building so right-where-it-is, even Hollywood set-designers might envy it, and fail miserably to recreate what it is and what it stands for. Preservation in place, in the here and now, and functioning very well as is, thank you, without perverting its location or the character of the town around it to sudden schlocky economic factors of summer design, all for the sake of business. History in the now. Door County as it once was and is. Open – whenever you need it.

When the writer speaks of lost village character, he speaks of the inevitable loss (here in Ellison Bay and in surrounding area) of people as well – hardworking, authentic, and self-effacing Door County originals like Gust Klenke and his falling-down garage; Walter Severson, the old postmaster, who ran the office out of his house; Sid Telfer Sr. and his orchards; Iron John Fitzgerald, dock-builder, earthmover; Carl (Pa) Carlson and his brother John, the local plumber on call 24-hours a day, 365 days a year (Pay what and when you can; a fella’s got to help his neighbor – Pa’s golden rule); all, alas, gone. And never to be replaced by tourists, transplants, condo clones, or any member of the Boutiques-R-Us-Unlimited and their attempt to sell plenty of nothing to everybody, paint the town pink, and bulldoze what is, what’s left, what’s real.

The writer speaks for that handful of businesses and people still here, still holding down the fort in downtown Ellison Bay:  Kenny Gobel’s gas station, Danny Peterson’s Viking Restaurant, Kubie Luchterhand’s used book store, Larry (Lighthouse) Thoreson’s pottery shop, the remains of Gust Klenke’s gas station, and the late Lester’s Pioneer Store (now Carol’s).

Long may all these business and local business people thrive, though the latest invasion of condo communities in “our town” contain within their development the seeds of destruction, the loss of what once was us. Good-bye Pioneer Store and Gobel’s gas station, inevitably, and hello Quik Stop Convenience Store. So long old, locally-owned, lived-in, white-framed houses along the main road; hello gift shop, boutique, boutique-gallery-gift shop ad inifinitum. And thank you, developers all, for nothing. Nothing but your personal greed.

What’s gained? What’s left that was once functional, meaningful, real? As real as the late Lester Newman behind the worn, wooden counter of the Pioneer, who seemed so perfectly in place you really thought you were living in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River. Lester himself, a man of few words, his gaze always lowered to the counter, destined to remain forever, it seemed, just minding the old store. Lester of the serious disposition, the boyish demeanor, the puckish smile, the slow, staccato conversation – a bit of the trickster about him:

“Weeelll [pause], at least the Packers can’t lose today,” he might say, waiting for you to take the bait.

“Why’s that, Lester?” Long pause.

“It’s a bye week. The Packers…do…not…play…today.” Followed by that Lester Newman Igotcha smile.

To have overheard a Pioneer Store conversation of the past between Lester and Gust Klenke, bee keeper, mechanic, all around handyman of fewer words than Lester on any given day, was to have been part of local color, local history.

“You got any honey, Gust?” asked Lester.

Long, long pause. “Yeeeeeeeep,” the characteristic Gust Klenke response as he dug deep into the pockets of his frayed bib overalls, looking for some change to put on the counter for the loaf of bread he’s buying.

Outside the store it was spring, or it was summer, or fall, but almost always winter, as I remember it. The quiet time. The lights on in the old store. The dusty grotesque looking plants struggling for warmth in the front windows, the old fashioned stove in the center of the store radiating waves of warmth, the antiques high up on the shelves near the old ceiling looking even more antique, cans and boxes and bags and crates and cartons and bottles and packages and freezers and display cases of food everywhere from floor to ceiling, front to back, yet all in a very small space. You could get everything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, so that ’60s song went, but you could get all that and more at Newman’s Pioneer Store.

It was morning, afternoon, or night. But mostly night. Mostly winter. Snow was falling outside the big windows. There were almost no cars on the road. Gust was down to picking pennies out of his hand and laying them down on the counter to pay Lester. “I could use a few jars, if you got ‘em.”

A long pause. You could hear the fire crackle in the stove, the wind picking up outside and blowing fresh snow across the big front windows of the Pioneer. What a perfect moment to recall the taste of honey on fresh bread, a dollop of honey in a cup of hot tea. Gust Klenke’s honey. How sweet a time it is, it was. “Yeeeeep.”

Village character. Community. An unspoken love of place and people-in-place. The very soul of a county lost in time in a way that both redeems and honors that within us which needs a place to be, rather than diminish, replace, or destroy all that speaks of local culture, local life, putting in momentary place a fast-talking, quick-dollar culture that speaks only the language of “want” but never “need” or “be.”

“Anytime.”

“Yeeeeep.”

Gust walks out of the store with a loaf of bread under his arm, pulls his cap down firmer on his forehead, unties his dog, Tragedy, leashed to the post outside, and makes his way home in the dark, snowy evening with nothing but bread and honey on his mind. While inside the Pioneer Store, Lester opens the daily paper on the wooden counter and waits for whoever may need something next, only pretending to read the news which is elsewhere, far away from Ellison Bay.

An excerpt by Norbert Blei

Door to Door (1985)

“October 6, 1976

Time Capsule:  Buried in the sand (a day before pouring the concrete) at approximately the place where my desk and chair will rest (the 3rd window, east) the following:  1 glass egg (which Bridget saved from the junk in the coop); 1 note (left from a scavenger hunt during Christo’s 10th birthday party), the note reading:  Go to the Painting of the Crow; 1 old pipe.”

Remembering My Dad – Norbert Blei

by Christopher Blei

Norbert Blei, as a father, was one of a kind. He was someone my sister Bridget and I will never forget. Dad was many things. He was a writer, teacher, poet and husband…but most of all, to Bridget and I, he was Dad. With Bridget and I not having lived full time in Door County in almost 30 years, the father portion in his life could have been overlooked by now with his passing in 2013.

Blei outside his coop, by Emmett Johns.

Dad always had his group of fans who were students of his or just fans of his work. We saw him as a great father to us even when we lived on both coasts in recent years, many miles away from Door County, both married and happy and all grown up. In our grade school days growing up, our father and mother were very involved in our lives. Dad would paint with us, write with us and help with homework.

He would play sports with me on the street on Europe Lake Road. Everything from throwing the baseball and football after school to playing ice hockey in the winter. He would go to all my Little League games in Ellison Bay and my high school baseball games in spring and summer. Dad was very interested in sharing different cultures with us too, taking my sister and me to Europe while in grade school for a whole spring, setting up classes that we could take from Greece, of all places, while he worked on articles on the Greek Islands for the Chicago Tribune travel section. We never forgot that, along with other trips to New Mexico to meet artists, and of course the many trips to Chicago.

Chicago was where we all were born. Both my mother and father had family there to visit on holidays. Dad took great pride in showing us the city he grew up in as well as take in the food from the many restaurants he loved in Chicago. The kind of food, such as Czech cooking, we could not get in Wisconsin. We would stock up on bakery to take home and my parents would make great attempts of recreating the Czech cooking when we got home as well.

Norb Blei and Al Johnson. Submitted photo.

My parents also had a choice to make and they decided we should be raised in Door County, away from the city. That turned out to be the best decision they made with us. Even though we missed out on some of the advantages of city living, Door County is what my father loved and he was able to raise us just as he wanted to. With the landscape of the county and the waters of Lake Michigan and the Bay around us, he wouldn’t have had it any other way…and neither would we.

A Note from Norbert Blei’s Publisher

By David Pichaske, Dept. of English, Southwest Minnesota State University

It’s never been easy. A book with your name on the spine – a common dream in the ’60s – requires four things beyond the eager author:  a publisher willing to make the book, an audience interested in reading it, an advertising-review system to alert the audience to the book’s existence, and a distribution system to deliver books to audience. This system exists, but it’s centered in New York and attuned to the “latest trendy thing.”

A Midwest author who writes well about local material will probably find little interest from the big commercial publishers. But a local, literary or university press probably lacks a national distribution system, will not advertise much and may not get significant reviews. What can a writer do?

Blei in his “Coyote” persona, by Mike McCartney.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Norb Blei banged on every door he could find. He wrote short stories, poems, novels, probably 200 book reviews, and newspaper stories:  some weekends his work appeared in both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times. Not, however, in the New York Times, Harper’s or Atlantic, although he once made The New Yorker. Blei did better in the small press world of the Midwest: Minnesota Review, New Letters, December magazine, Tri-Quarterly, Chicago magazine. Here Blei was a name. But a New York publisher could not connect Blei with his audience. Try somebody local. Me.

I’m a college prof. In 1976 I began editing The Spoon River Quarterly, and, with support from the Illinois Arts Council, soon had Spoon River Poetry Press (SRPP) publishing small books of poetry. By the early 1980s SRPP had expanded to big hardbacks, like Dennis Camp’s three-volume edition of Vachel Lindsay’s poems. These books got reviews in Library Journal, magazines and even newspapers. Bulk mailings of 1,000 or 2,000 fliers brought orders from individuals and libraries. Ready to move into prose, I invented Ellis Press … and published Norb Blei’s Door Way.

This book was a tremendous risk personally:  I had just been fired – okay, permitted to resign – from Bradley University, and the print/bind cost of 2,000 hardbacks was more than $10,000, or half of what had been my annual salary. Door Way, however, was a good fit for my review and distribution system, and a salvo of review copies and fliers caught the attention of Studs Terkel, Sydney J. Harris, Harry Mark Petrakis and The Chicago Tribune. Before I knew it, I was reprinting Door Way. And re-reprinting the book – 9,000 copies total.

I published Door Steps with an initial run of 5,000 books, and then Door to Door, Neighborhood and Chi Town (portraits of Blei’s Chicago similar to his portrait of Door County), and collections of Blei’s stories, short essays and even poems. I was sending Norb Blei more royalties than I was receiving from my New York publishers on my own books. Ellis Press was a significant regional publisher, and helped me land another teaching job at a college in Minnesota with a Rural-Regional Studies Program that valued my status as a significant regional publisher.

In publishing books, I have learned many things. The hard truth is that audiences are not much interested in poetry, theory, experimental fiction or an author’s personal life. Door Way and Meditations on a Small Lake sell better than Paint Me a Picture/Make Me a Poem, or Blei’s novels. I now understand that while Blei’s subject matter – rural Wisconsin and European ethnic groups – was a “trendy thing” in the early 1980s, today Swedes, Czechs and small-town folk in general do not count as “culturally diverse” in a publishing industry committed to cultural diversity. It is difficult for books on these topics, or any books really, to generate reviews in the shrinking number of review places, and attention online does not seem to sell print books. Libraries do not order books the way they once did:  they sell off old books for $1 a piece. The collapse of bookstores and book distributors, coupled with the rise of online used booksellers, has seriously reduced book sales, and thus the ability of publishers to publish. (Copies of my own latest book – on Bob Dylan, published by a New York-London commercial publisher – were for sale in online used book stores before I had received my author’s copies.) I suspect that e-books and blogs will soon terminate printed books entirely.

The world has changed since 1981, and although Norb Blei’s papers contain many unpublished stories, novels and essays, I’m not sure this material will ever become a book with his name on the spine.