Dave Wood

After reading several stories about my Grandmother Martha Wood, B.W. wanted to know “Didn’t your grandpa ever do anything interesting?”

Well, yes, his Yankee reserve was outshone by the colorful Swede grandma. But Grandpa had guts, marched to his own drum, (see Jane Pederson’s “Between Memory and Reality,” University of Wisconsin Press) and according to county records, “Ralph Wood is the first Yankee to marry a woman of Scandinavian descent.”

Until cataracts rendered him unable to walk downtown, his yearly ritual when the snow piled up around the old house on Scranton Street was walk to Fortun’s Drugstore in pursuit of one pint of 190 Proof Everkleer grain alcohol. His intent: to concoct a punch to knock the woolen socks off family members before we sat down to Christmas dinner. I’m certain his Baptist parents, had they known, would have been very disappointed in Grandpa, who had stopped attending church when he reached his majority and never went back until he attended his own funeral. As was his wife, who was devout to the end. So devout that when she read her husband’s obituary in the local weekly which said that he was a “lifelong Christian,” she shot back a letter to the editor that that was false information, reminding readers that her husband was “unchurched until his middle age.” “Before that he sent the hired hand with us and stayed home to read novels.”

But that didn’t stop him from marrying a Swede rather than a Yankee, quoting Bible passages he had learned in his youth under the stern aegis of Rev. Sweet, who was rather sour. Or from celebrating Christmas with something very special. One hundred and ninety proof was indeed something special, so special it was illegal to sell it in taverns, thus the trip to the drugstore. Roy Fortun charged an arm and a leg for the potion that’s almost three times stronger than today’s 86 proof vodka. Nowadays it’s available in most liquor stores for less than 10 bucks per liter.

Grandpa called his cocktails “hot ones” and they were most assuredly not a temperance libation or for the consumers of chocolate martinis, Pousse Cafes and similar concoctions as created by heavily tattooed bartendresses with pierced nostrils, that’s for sure. Grandpa learned how to assemble them from his hired man Albert Fjeld, who hailed from Norway, was not adorned with tattoos and who drank them in great quantities in winter when all he had to do was milk the cows and feed the hogs. It’s definitely not a drink to take into the hay mow on a blisteringly hot June day.

FOR ONE SERVING:

1 ounce 190 proof Everkleer grain alcohol

1 small strip of lemon peel, no pith

1 sugar cube

3 ounces boiling water

Assembly: with a muddler, crush the sugar clump and lemon peel in a wine glass or, better, a sturdy Old-Fashioned tumbler. Add alcohol, then hot water. Stir and sip. Carefully.

For readers who only imbibe in the summer, may I suggest an Everkleer and “Q” tonic water?  One small Can of “Q” and half a jigger of “Everkleer.” Again, in the words of Eric Escola, “Be careful!”