Mr. Warner’s Blended Whisky
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Bob was a year ahead of me in school, and he had just gotten his driver’s license at 16, so that means it was 1956, and I was 15. Bob’s dad[i]Everyone called him Doc, so I never knew his first name. was a dentist in Hammond, Indiana. They lived in Highland with all the other doctors and lawyers, and they vacationed at Fisher Lake for the Summers. Doc was only there on weekends, but Bob’s autistic sister, who was a couple of years older than Bob, along with Mrs. Jurgens, who had never been seen other than in a swimming suit, bulging in all the right places, were there for the entire summer – Mrs. Jurgens with a long-neck Wiedemann’s in one hand and a Chesterfield in the other. Bob and I were best buddies every Summer – all summer – but this Summer was destined to be special.
Most of the houses on our end of The Lake were vacation homes – cottages, as they were called – including the one next to Bob’s. I don’t recall ever meeting the owners – we just knew the place as “Mrs. Werner’s”. We were pretty sure there must have been a Mr. Werner too, but neither of us had ever seen him either.
Most of the cottages had indoor plumbing by this time, but Mrs.Werner’s still had an abandoned outhouse in the front yard – abandoned, that is, except for a shelf holding a stack of newspapers and a couple of Sears Roebuck catalogs[ii]Newspapers are a better substitute for store-bought toilet paper because it is not as slick as the catalog pages. Hidden behind the newspapers was a half-full bottle of Seagram’s 7Crown. At least, we assumed that’s what it was – the label had been removed, but it smelled like what we thought the real thing should smell like, and the shape of the bottle matched.
Finding that bottle marked the beginning of a plan that should never have come together. Doc Jurgens had just bought Mrs. Jurgens a brand new Renault Dauphine. Bob had gotten his driver’s license a few weeks earlier. We both had some money saved up. Mrs. Werner was not home. The bottle of 7Crown in the outhouse was half full. In summary – a road trip to Houghton Lake, a mere 3 hours away, was taking shape. All we needed was parental permissions, which took a bit of whining for each of us, but we got it done, and the following day was going to be another hot, sticky Summer day on Fisher Lake in southern Michigan, but this one was destined to be remembered longer than most.
I don’t think we made it as far as Grand Rapids before the curiosity about Houghton Lake became overshadowed by the curiosity around the whiskey. We checked into a three-story house that had been converted into a fleabag hotel with a sign out front that read something like “Weekly Rates – Inquire Within”.
From the third floor, we had a panoramic view of the cement plant next door through a window, propped open with a sawed-off piece of mop handle – a familiar fix for a broken weight cord. 
You see, windows did not work then the way they do today. A double-hung sash window was composed of a top sash and a bottom sash, two weights [iii]These were salvaged from a building on the Patchen property – concrete cast in tin cans. connected by cords to each sash with pulleys, the sill at the bottom, and a casing to hold the whole thing together.
The bug screen was a separate piece, attached to the outside so it could be easily exchanged with a storm window in winter – in this case, using a ladder to the third floor. The screen was hinged at the top, and it had a latch on the bottom to unhook in case you needed to push it out to throw a frying pan at a raccoon rummaging through your garbage can below.
Those old windows work fine until a rat eats through one of the cords, and the weight crashes to the bottom inside the wall. At that point, the sash won’t stay open because it is missing the counter balance, and you need to find something to prop it open in Summer – in this case, the mop handle.
About halfway into the 7Crown the room was spinning pretty badly. I jumped up from the bed and rushed to the open window. I unhooked the latch at the bottom of the screen and pushed it out to hang my head out the window. The screen came swinging back to hit me in the head, causing me to flinch upward, hitting the lower sash, which knocked out the mop handle, causing the sash to plunge down on the back of my neck, trapping my head outside the window. I suppose I was there for quite a while, barfing and gasping for breath because Bob was far too drunk to help. I eventually got the window open and crawled back to the bed before passing out.
After nearly 70 years, I have never made it to Houghton Lake and I cannot stand the taste or smell of blended whisky.