Given that I wrote a book on beer, it struck me as funny that my insurance company has this program.  I hadn’t ever thought about it but I guess many businesses need specialized insurance to provide coverage for their specific activities. The Institute of Brewing Studies/ Association of Brewers endorses the Whalen program.

The insurance is for breweries and brewpubs and covers property, general liability, workers’ compensation, liquor liability, equipment breakdown, and automobile. Liquor liability must have to do with serving alcohol and the risks involved.  On the website, they provide information about brewery safety and OSHA regulations.

Looking at all the different aspects of insurance for a brewery, I realize how complicated an endeavor opening a brewpub or brewery would be. Despite the romanticizing of craft brewing, it really is a business.

That question arose in the mind of a professor interviewing Bick for her first academic position. Bick’s essay mentions this sexist thinking about her husband potentially being a hiring issue. However, this is not really the main point of the article, which is not about sexism in academia but is about the intersection of careers and relationships.

Her advisor reassured her potential employer, not Bick as Tenured Radical indicates. Bick wishes she could have responded. She would have told them that it would be no problem because she planned to chain him under the bed. Bick does acknowledge that the “adult” behavior expected of her in the moment would up influencing her choices for many years.

Tenured Radical and many of the commenters felt that Bick’s story had a happy ending because she, her husband, and their children live together in the same city. It is a successful conclusion from the point of Bick’s relationship with her husband. The husband’s first career ended and he had to reinvent himself. As I know from personal experience this can be very difficult. If the woman had to give up her chosen academic career but got to live in the same city with her husband and children would it still be a successful conclusion?

Tenured Radical feels that the issue of “academic commuting” is a recent problem. “Once women decided to stop baking cookies for their husband’s seminars and type manuscripts for love and pin money, it occurred to them get their own advanced degrees (it was around the mid 1960s, when women’s liberation really took off,…)” Was feminism really as straight forward and simple as women making a conscious choice to stop baking cookies and get PhDs? I guess there were not any social forces that kept them baking and no changes that enabled woman to have more options, in both career and personal life.

The post contains several pictures of Elizabeth Taylor from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the reader might assume she represents the prototypical faculty wife. Honey, the younger woman in Edward Albee’s play, actually better fits the stereotype of the faculty wife.

Sandy Dennis, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Martha, the character Elizabeth Taylor plays, is an alcoholic, frustrated and vengeful woman. Her frustration does not seem to be related to her not having obtained an academic job. She does not really fit into the point Tenured Radical makes about  secret drinking by faculty wives.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

College campuses across America have scholarship funds for women returning to school, loans for students, funds for campus beautification, and wings in medical centers because of faculty wives. Apparently, these women found time to do other things besides baking cookies and becoming alcoholics.

Spousal hires are much more likely if one or both of the people are stars or if they are looking for jobs at large public universities. In general, small private liberal arts colleges cannot easily add a second line when trying to hire someone. In addition, spousal hires can often conflict with affirmative action goals.

Two people in the same field are unlikely to wind up with two jobs at the same institution.   Someone will have to give up and do something else; that is what happened to Bick and her husband.

I have been a Yankee fan since the early1970s and for many of the years I disliked Steinbrenner and his antics with managers and players. However, more recently I watched “The Bronx is Burning”, the ESPN series about the Yankees during the 1977 season.  Oliver Platt’s portrayal of Steinbrenner was nuanced and empathetic. I appreciate the dedication and commitment Steinbrenner provided to making the Yankees the great team they are.

The other great Yankee owner was Jacob Ruppert. Ruppert created the Yankees through his purchase of Babe Ruth and building of Yankee Stadium. He was also a major figure in the brewing industry. Here is an excerpt from Brewing Battles about Ruppert’s death:

“On January 14, 1939, Jacob Rupert died at the age of 71. He had been sick since April, and his death was front-page news in New York. Besides Rupert’s family, Babe Ruth was the last person to see the Colonel.
When Ruth arrived at the Rupert apartment, the Colonel was in an oxygen tent, in which he had been placed at 4:30 o’clock. He was removed  from  his tent at 7:15 P.M., and the first thing he said, according to his nurse Ann McGill, was:
“I want to see the Babe.”
“Here he is, right beside you,” she said.
The dying man opened his eyes and reached out his hand to Ruth, but was
too weak to speak. Ruth patted his hand.
“Colonel,” he said, “you are going to snap out of this, and you and I are going to the opening game of the season.”
The Colonel smiled faintly but still could not talk. Ruth turned away and started to leave the room, but the Colonel summoned up his strength and called to him weakly. Ruth returned to the bedside, and the Colonel again held out his hand and murmured the one word “Babe.”
“It was the only time in his life he ever called me Babe to my face,” Ruth said after he heard the news of the Colonel’s death. “I couldn’t help crying when I went out. (New York Times January 14, 1939)

At the time of his death Ruppert had a wealth of more than $100 million. Descended from German immigrants, he had risen to the upper echelons of New York society. Much of his fortune was in real estate. His brewery holdings included Hell Gate brewery which he had purchased from the heirs of George Ehret in1935. Under his leadership the Yankees won ten American League pennants and seven World Series. After purchasing Babe Ruth from the Red Sox for $100,000 in 1919, he made him the highest paid baseball player for many years. Prominent honorary pallbearers at the funeral included Joe McCarthy, manager of the Yankees, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, former Governor Alfred E. Smith, Senator Robert F. Wagner, Julius Leibmann, President of Leibmann Brewery, Babe Ruth,Edward J. Schmidt, Philadelphia brewer, C.D. Williams, Secretary of the USBA, Lou Gehrig, representing the Yankees, and Rudolph J. Schaefer, President of F. & M. Schaefer Brewing Company.

Over 15,000 people attended the services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Among the mourners was a delegation of beer distributors from New England. Lou Gehrig expressed his condolences as follows, “His loss is a great one. He was one of the outstanding sportsmen of the era, and a most loyal friend.” Seven months later, the talented and durable first basemen would ceasse playing, a victim of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The Iron Horse declared himself “the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”

Jacob Ruppert and Miss Harwood at Yankee Stadium, 1921

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours putting the above information on my website. That felt a little strange because of course my website is entitled Amy Mittelman Brewing Battles. I have many questions about how I will maintain a focus on beer and Brewing Battles and move towards prompting and discussing the new book.

I have been on Twitter for about six months and I am one tweet away from 100. As if have probably said before I feel twitter is best for things I probably would not blog about. I also like that you can follow a conversation about trending or immediate events. It is a lot of fun to follow #Yankees during a Yankee game.

I still have not really figured out how my various online activates connect or should connect. I had decided to keep tweeting and the blog separate but I am rethinking that. I also do not really see how to keep the website vibrant since most of the new content winds up on the blog. One idea I have is to put my twitter feed on the website, but I am not sure how to do that. I also think it would be nice to give my readers the opportunity to tweet about the blog. Again, I will have to figure out how to do that.

Getting the Associateship is a wonderful opportunity; I am most excited about having a Mount Holyoke College library card. I feel motivated to think about new directions for both my work and my online presence.

Wine tourism, particularly in California, is very big business. One could make the case – Peck does not – that the best aspect about the liquor industry for the American economy is that they produce their products in America. They make something and offer traditional, well paying unionized jobs, particularly at the macro brewing level. If the industry shifts its’ focus toward tourism and away from production, these jobs will be replaced by lower paying service jobs, a familiar story for much of American industry.

Of course many places want to become tourist attractions. As part of the Little Berks, on Saturday I went on a  walking tour of Florence, Massachusetts. Florence use to have some industry; Pro Brush was a big employer. It closed in 2007. The David Ruggles Center is trying to restore and promote the history of the village. Florence was involved in many of the reform movements of the nineteenth century including the water cure, abolitionism, and the underground railroad.

Sojourner Truth Statue Florence Massachusetts

Sojourner Truth lived in Florence for a while and there is now a beautiful statue of her there. The house she lived in still exists but looks completely different. Local historians would love to be able to restore the house. If they do, it will certainly be a tourist attraction. Many of the places we have gone this year while traveling also hope to have something that will produce a steady stream of visitors.

Last night, many of the sixty women attending the Little Berks got “dressed” for diner. Most people were wiring skirts, dresses, or nice pants. When I looked at the assembled group in their finery the first thing that came to mind was how similar they were to the women from the University of Chicago who organized and attended the yearly Faculty Wives Dinners.

These dinners began as a response to the male only trustee dinner that the University held every year. The faculty wives wished to have alternative entertainment on that evening and in an eventually very elaborate volunteer effort provided dinner and a skit.  These women wanted to have something of their own in a similar fashion to the women who founded the Berks. Those historians desired have a network that would be comparable to the “old-boy network” they observed at meetings of the American Historical Association.

I find the discovery that the two groups of women have much in common very interesting because I am fairly certain that the individual who comprises the two groups would not feel that they are comparable.

The discussion was mainly about publishing articles in scholarly journals, which seems like an arduous task. Several of the speakers connected publishing to advancement in one’s career. Given that it can sometimes take up to two and a half years for an article to be published, the process seems designed to be very anxiety provoking.

One of the questions from the audience was about journals not wanting an author to submit to more than one journal at a time. Karen Sanchez-Eppler said she feels it is because the peer reviewers are volunteers so the journals’ editors want to be protective of their time and energy. She suggested that it is a system of collegiality. Of course, whether they mean it or not, it also acts as a barrier to entry for aspiring academics. The journals’ editors and reviewers are already in, to a greater or less extent, and their decision on your journal article submission can play a role in whether you rise up the tenure track ladder or not.

Another group of questions was about images and copyright issues more generally. This is a very grey area since a lot depends on whether you think somebody will notice if you have used an image or not. I tried very hard to acquire permission for all the images in Brewing Battles but I know that other authors are sometimes not as scrupulous. It can cost you a lot of money to use images; authors usually bear the cost.

Marilyn Billings is a librarian at the University of Massachusetts where they are encouraging PhD students to place their completed dissertations in an open access format, Scholarworks, that the University maintains. This is not a replacement for what in my day was UMI and is now Proquest UMI Dissertation Publishing.  Although Scholarworks is not competing with UMI, I wonder about its future.  As both print on demand companies and open access services provided by universities increase, the option of placing your thesis with UMI to be “published” seems less automatic.

I am not an academic although I am a historian and I do have a PhD. Listening to both the speakers and the audience, I realized once again what a difficult career choice academia is, certainly, until you get tenure.

A news story about the number of murders in Chicago this year, 113 so far, and calls for the National Guard to come in, prompted me to reflect on the experience. To a great extent, we were in a bubble by staying in Hyde Park and visiting the Loop and the Magnificent Mile. When you are a tourist in a city, you tend not to see the poorer and more crime-ridden areas

We did go to Pilsen, which is a Mexican- American neighborhood. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods, which I feel gives it a less cohesive identity. Pilsen has a wonderful museum, The National Museum of Mexican Art and a great restaurant, Mundial Cocina Mestiza.  There were several closed shops and rundown buildings, but there was also a nice park with several baseball games going on.

Chicago has a large African-American population, although at the museum, an exhibit said that in a few years, Hispanics would be the largest ethnic group. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, many areas of Chicago underwent urban renewal. The government took the lead in these endeavors. Today private developers revitalize neighborhoods, and it is called gentrification.

Hyde Park-Kenwood was one of the areas that experienced urban renewal, although large housing projects were not built there. In this case, both the University and the city played a role. The main consequence appears to be that poor people moved somewhere else and the number of bars diminished.

I live in a college town. This year I have visited other college towns and have been surprised that they are not as similar to Amherst as I would have thought. Neither Raleigh nor Hyde Park had the number of shops, pizza places, bars, restaurants, or bookstores that Northampton and Amherst have. Perhaps what I think of as the typical college town is really more of a New England phenomenon?

We stared from Valois, which is supposedly President Obama’s favorite restaurant. It is a cafeteria and it had a sign about President Obama’s favorite breakfasts. There were two: steak and eggs, hash browns and toast and the other: egg whites, bacon or sausage, hash browns and toast. I am guessing the steak is really his favorite and the egg whites are his healthy choice.

Along the midway, we also passed the Law School. When I think about Obama being president, it fills me with a certain delight because he will be a historical figure. Just as I visited Rutherford B. Hayes’ home last week, future generations will visit sites associated with Obama. That’s cool.

We tried to get as close as we could to his house but the security is intense. The guard said it was against the rules even to tell me which house was his. Since you can find out the address on the Internet, I don’t get that restriction.

Of course, I support keeping the President safe and understand why they do not want to let people get close. There is a synagogue right next to his house. It must be quite a hassle to attend services. Never mind being one of the neighbors.

We had a lovely day exploring both the past of Chicago and the present and future of our country.