Trip to ancestral home brings back memories I never had

My wife and I went out of town this weekend on our annual pilgrimage to Frankenmuth.
For the unfamiliar, Frankenmuth is a little town located roughly between Flint and Saginaw that is most famous for two things: chicken dinners and Christmas decorations.

Those are two of my favorite topics, but we go for a much more personal reason.

If my paternal great-grandfather had not been a stereotypical stubborn, hard-headed German, in all likelihood I'd probably be running one of the breweries there.

But no. Great-granddad was the brewmaster and a business partner at the Frankenmuth Brewery, one of several that came and went in that town over the years.

For those who know Frankenmuth, it was the brewery on the south side of the Cass River, since torn down and replaced with River Platz, a faux reproduction of an Alpine village and filled with overpriced trinkets for unsuspecting tourists.

At any rate, after Prohibition was repealed and the brewery was again able to openly produce its liquid gold, some sort of disagreement arose between Braumeister Freundl and his partners.
Seems ol' great-granddad didn't like the bean counters telling him how to make beer, and he told them to take a flying leap -in probably more than one language.

A German not wanting to be told how to do something. Go figure.

So he packed up the family and moved to Jackson, where he hooked up with another brewery.
And that explains why I had a fairly normal, middle-class upbringing in Jackson, rather than being a beer baron in Frankenmuth.

There are a few other juicy details mixed in there; something about the Purple Gang out of Detroit wanting to get their hands on the Frankenmuth brewery - or else; but those stories are quickly being lost to the mists of time.

Frank Freundl died in the mid-1940s; his son (my grandfather), Frank Freundl Jr., died in the early '80s; and the health - and memory - of my father, Frank Freundl III, is beginning to slip away.

Therefore, my wife and I go to Frankenmuth every year to pay tribute to what might have been.

It also explains one of my father's favorite sayings:

"You can always tell a German, but you can't tell him much."

Edward Freundl
The Chelsea Standard