Year: 2006

In January, when the Winona Pie Lady, aka Mary Zimmerman, baked her one-thousandth pie, she called up Governor Tim Pawlenty to see if he would accept it. She talked to someone in his office but never heard back.

So the seventy-three-year-old great-grandmother phoned Representative Gil Gutknecht, the Republican congressman from Rochester. Gutknecht agreed immediately and showed up on Zimmerman’s doorstep. His much-publicized visit resulted in a fifty-dollar donation for Zimmerman’s landmark caramel apple pie decorated with two tiny American flags and the number “1,000.”

During a twenty-minute conversation—“I thought he would talk all afternoon, but whoever drives him around said, ‘We’d better get going,’ ” she recently recalled— Gutknecht even told Zimmerman that he would eschew his previous plan to pack chocolate-chip cookies for an upcoming trip to Iraq, instead taking some of her pies. She never did get his order, though she was too busy filling other requests to notice.

Zimmerman began baking pies and selling them for charity (at a cost of six or seven dollars each, depending on the filling) after the tsunami struck Southeast Asia in December 2004. The conservative Christian spent a week praying for a way that she could help; meanwhile, she kept thinking about how popular her pies were at church bake sales. “I don’t have many talents, but making pies came to mind,” she said. Zimmerman, a slight woman with brown curly hair, has been periodically hospitalized with depression and found that baking pies kept her mind occupied. She hoped to make five hundred dollars to donate to a missionary priest she knows in Sri Lanka. But after she was featured in the Winona Daily News, her phone began “ringing off the hook,” she said. “I’d bake into the evenings sometimes, and sometimes I would get up at 4:30 in the morning.” One anonymous local paid $250 for a pie. Someone else sent her a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope with no return address. A local orchard donated several bushels of apples. People began to recognize her in public, nicknaming her the Pie Lady. She raised $7,500 in nine months—enough to build three houses and support a shelter for homeless youth.

Zimmerman bakes all her pies in a small, 1970s-style kitchen dominated by a wooden dining-room table the size of a twin bed. The table allows her to lay out ingredients for an entire day’s worth of baking the night before. She started off making apple and cherry pies (the latter is her favorite; the former, the most popular request) and later expanded her repertoire to include caramel apple, blueberry, and pumpkin. At a customer’s request, she even added sour cream pies.

When it comes to the baking process, Zimmerman has two tips, both of which she’s more than willing to share. The first: canola and vegetable oils. “I would never use lard,” she said. “It makes good pie crusts and people used it years ago, but it has more cholesterol.”

The second: “When my granddaughter helps me, we put lemonade Kool-Aid in the apple pies to make them more tart.”

Zimmerman was initially uncomfortable in the spotlight but soon learned the value of publicity. When she baked her five-hundredth pie, she aimed straight for the top: In a letter to President Bush, she made it clear that she was willing to mail him the pie if he couldn’t make it to Winona to receive it personally. Some time later, she received a letter with the presidential seal at the top and Bush’s signature stamped at the bottom. “Thank you for taking the time to write and for the enclosed material,” the letter said. “Our nation faces great tasks and we’re meeting them with courage and resolve … Thank you for taking the time to share your views.”

Zimmerman interpreted the note as Bush’s rejection of her invitation—this being the era of Homeland Security and six-week presidential vacations—so she sold the pie to the local bishop instead.

In August of 2005, Zimmerman burned out. Then Hurricane Katrina struck, and she knew she couldn’t stop. She raised two thousand dollars from pie sales for Catholic Charities, and another six hundred dollars went to a local girl who suffers from spina bifida, bringing total donations to over ten thousand dollars.

This past summer, however, her depression returned, and Zimmerman stopped baking after selling around eleven-hundred pies. She thought briefly about abandoning her pies altogether, then thought again.

“I was very happy about being able to do what I did,” she said, looking longingly at her spotless kitchen. “I don’t know what to do with myself right now. When my health gets better, I would like very much to continue making pies.”

She paused. “I would like to bake pies right now. People liked them a lot. They said they’d never had a pie like that.”

Pipe smokers like to claim they live longer than nonsmokers. More than four decades after the fact, they’ll still cite a 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking, which stated: “Death rates for pipe smokers are little if at all higher than for non-smokers …”

That report and others that followed warned of negative health effects for practitioners, including oral and lung cancers, but there’s a state of mind—a “calm and objective judgment in all human affairs,” according to pipe smoker Albert Einstein—that enthusiasts claim the habit enhances.

“Pipe smokers are just more relaxed people,” said Rich Lewis, the owner of Lewis Pipe and Tobacco. “Especially compared to cigarette smokers.” Despite lean times, Lewis himself, a fifty-four-year-old pipe maker and tobacconist, definitely fits that description. Adorning the walls of his tiny shop, located on the street level of the historic Rand Tower in downtown Minneapolis, is an assortment of antique pipes. Tiny nude figures and stags’ heads are carved atop pearly meerschaum bowls amidst stranger contraptions made of metal and briar—the hard, ball-shaped Mediterranean burl from which most pipes are made. Cases hold the cigars, pipes, and tobacco that make up most of Lewis’ sales stock, along with some imported and domestic cigarettes.

The current seventy-percent wholesale tax on non-cigarette tobacco products has hurt business, as have the smoking bans that eliminated many cigar customers’ and downtown corporate accounts. Since laying off a longtime employee this past spring, Lewis has been running a one-man operation. Yet he seems to take all the glum news in stride, just as he did the chaos of relocating from Nicollet Mall last summer. This despite the fact that for five months, while his workshop was in shambles and he waited out construction next door, Lewis was unable to make a single pipe—his true love and talent.

Lewis hopes the new workshop, visible from the Rand Tower lobby, will interest passersby in his arcane craft. He also agreed that the Rand is a good fit for his business. The building’s Art Deco design evokes an era when tobacco was as ubiquitous as the fedora, another anachronism in the twenty-first century. Calling his business “kind of a dinosaur in that sense,” Lewis said he’d hate to go the way of the haberdasher.

Lewis has run the shop since 1972, when his father passed away. (His mother worked with him until 2001.) Nearly thirty-five years later, he is the authorized U.S. repairman for many of the world’s top pipe makers, and some believe he deserves a place among their ranks.

“When I tell you that Rich Lewis is the best pipe maker in the world, I am not blowing smoke,” quipped Tony Soderman, president of the locally based Great Northern Pipe Club and a pipe collector for forty-two years. “I have heard two of the world’s foremost pipe makers say the same thing,” Soderman added. One of them, Giancarlo Guidi, tutored the previously self-taught Lewis in 1986 and 1989 at Guidi’s Ser Jacopo factory in Pesaro, Italy (just above the calf on the Adriatic coast).

These days, the number of master pipe makers is dwindling, Lewis said. After World War II, European factories brought in train cars full of briar to craft hundreds of thousands of pipes. Now, those companies are gone or have whittled their ranks of craftsmen to a handful. Even the gathering of briar, which is done by hand, is a dying art relegated to the older generations.

Lewis says he’s not in danger of going out of business but admits it’s a struggle to be the only employee. In addition to tending the store six days a week, he fronts the Rich Lewis Band at night, playing covers and Lewis originals—New Orleans-style R&B and boozy, bluesy rock ’n’ roll—as an acoustic trio at Erte Restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis or with a full band and horns at Neumann’s in North St. Paul.

What keeps Lewis Tobacco going is a core of regular customers, both in-store and online, who buy cigars, pipes, tobacco, and related accessories. Les Pettit has been a Lewis patron for twenty years. “It’s the only place I can find this particular brand of weed,” he said. Pettit smokes Upshall “estate” (a fancy name for used) pipes, which Lewis buys and sells. The shop owner even makes custom mouthpieces to fit Pettit’s teeth. “I chew a pipe a lot,” Pettit said as he stepped behind the counter to weigh out his tobacco.

Neither man smokes cigarettes, an experience they differentiate from the fine feel of a burning briar bowl. Both spoke calmly, if not quite objectively, about the smoking ban and the tabooing of tobacco. Pettit referred to pipe smoking as a dying art, and Lewis admitted doubt about future demand.

“Will the boomers pick it up as they get a little bit older?” Lewis wondered. “I don’t know.” Despite that professed uncertainty, the question didn’t seem to raise his blood pressure much.

Five years ago, when we looked at the Twin Cities publication scene, one of the things that struck us was the editor’s column in the front of the various mags. Almost without exception, each month’s installment would feature a list of all the cool things they’d done that month. There was the businessperson they’d lunched with. There was the trip with the wife. There was an inventory of stuff they’d bought from their advertisers.

At The Rake, we were determined to differentiate ourselves. Our columns would be thoughtful, significant. We would talk about intellectual issues, not about the society folk we ran into that month. We’d write essays, not snippets.

Sorry, but to hell with that. It’s two weeks ’til Thanksgiving, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, and you’re going to have to bear with me for the next six hundred words or so.

First, though it may be trite to say so, I’m thankful for my parents. The best thing a parent can teach a child is right and wrong, and I can imagine no better teachers than my parents. My dad sold insurance—still does, in fact, at age 84. Every morning, he got up, got dressed, had a glass of water for breakfast, and was at his office before 7. He never avoided a household task and openly enjoyed hands-on projects such as refinishing the basement, building furniture, and rewiring lamps. When I was interested in something, he’d teach me, but he didn’t force it on me if I wasn’t. Although he was a decorated veteran of World War II, he taught me that all reasonable people should hate war.

My mother is Motherhood personified. She made sure the clothes were clean, the lawn got mowed, our homework was done, and we got to the dentist. She kept in touch with the family as it dispersed and still writes letters, by hand, every week. All family members get cards on their birthday, anniversary, Valentine’s Day—you name it. Mom also made sure we got to church, which for three boys seemed like punishment for all the fighting she’d had to put up with during the week. But the church, too, was instructive. There was no dogma. Every week we were read the epistles and the gospel, and those were followed by a short explanation from the priest. It wasn’t an oppressive religion; it was sort of like dinner at our house. Mom never made us eat all our vegetables, and she never made us swallow the church whole, either.

I won’t bore you further with all I’ve learned from my wife and partner and my two perfect children other than to say they never let me get away with anything, yet always prick my balloon with humor rather than the pique I’m sure they often feel.

I’m particularly thankful this week that I was born in the United States. Whatever your politics, most Americans respect the process and recognize the great gift of free speech and free press that—ideally, at least—informs our debates and ensures the good sense of Americans eventually wins out. The best news of the recent election is not that one side won and the other lost; it’s that the politics of fear and suspicions of other Americans has been pushed back, at least for now.

I’m thankful I get to work in an industry where no government inspector can tell us what to do. I’m grateful that this industry is best represented by the reporters who are relentless in their search for true stories, despite their constriction by some corporate editors. Please don’t be discouraged, friends.

Finally, there are all the friends we’ve made over the last five years of publishing The Rake. The subjects of our stories, our clients, our freelance writers, and our readers have supported what we’re trying to do beyond all of our expectations.

Our staff makes it easy to come to work. Everyone puts his or her best effort into this magazine every day. They work very long hours. They suffer criticism of an impatient boss who doesn’t always think before he opens his mouth. But most of all, they laugh. This office is loud with laughter at least a couple of times every day. Sometimes I have to close my office door to drown it out. But mostly, I revel in it.

Thanks for reading The Rake. Next month, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled lineup of sarcasm.