Father, son bond writing U.P. bars book and it becomes a cult classic A father and son wrote a book about U.P. bars. Little did they know it would take on a life of its own.

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Book about Yooper bars becomes underground classic A father and son took a road trip to write a book about places to drink in the U.P. Neither realized it would be the last trip they’d take together.

THE UPPER PENINSULA – Randy Kluck liked to drink. If he wasn’t drinking wine on his front porch at his house he was drinking liquor on a barstool at some dive bar in Sault Ste. Marie, where he moved to be close to his son Kevin, who came here to attend college.

The two were such buddies that Kevin refers to his dad by his first name. “He really was always my best friend,” said Kevin, 36. “So I just think of him as ‘Randy.’ ”

Six years ago, they were drinking on the porch, and Randy came up with an idea — how about they spend the summer together on an epic road trip through the Upper Peninsula and write a book about all the amazing bars they’d stop at along the way? There would be so many nights they’d get to spend side-by-side on barstools, so many long drives along the empty highways, so much to tell each other, so much to see.

“When we first started, I don’t think we were really cognizant of what kind of bonding experience it was going to be,” Kevin said. “But we were already so close to begin with that a lot of it was business as usual for us.”

The resulting book, “Yooper Bars: Visit the Finest Bars in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” took nearly a year to finish, and came out only after they paid to have it published themselves. It was a beer-goggles view of the Upper Peninsula as seen from the barstools of 109 watering holes like Jack’s Tee Pee in Ishpeming, Buckshot’s Bar in Manistique, the Pine Stump Cook Shack and Drinkery in Newberry, and the Bear Belly Bar and Grill in Lac La Belle.

But “Yooper Bars” was more than just a drinking guide. With its affectionate descriptions of the unique world inside each bar, it was an ode to Upper Peninsula life. It showed that many bars serve as more than just a place to drink for a small town’s residents. And it gave a father and son something important that neither at the time knew they would need.

At first, it drew some interest. A few newspapers did articles about the father-son authors, and several TV stations came Up North to interview them about this unusual travel guide.

Once the attention faded they moved on with their lives and forgot about their book. Kevin relocated downstate, got a job, got married and had a child. Randy stayed in the U.P., spending perhaps a little too much time on barstools. A mere 10,000 copies of the book had been printed, yet it seemed unlikely that even that many would sell and that the book was probably doomed to obscurity.

Then a funny thing happened.

One thing in common

There are lots of dive bars in the U.P. Some are little more than crooked shacks with a deep-fryer and two beers on tap. But there are also some spectacular bars, usually in those few places with money and jobs — or places that once had money and jobs — like former copper mining towns. There’s Shute’s in Calumet, a 128-year-old saloon with an elaborate stained-glass canopy above its bar, hand-carved wooden lions heads and a basement speakeasy from the Prohibition era. The Nahma Inn in Nahma, built in 1906 by a lumber company for its workers, still featuring antique-furnished rooms for overnight guests. The Jack Pine Lodge in Manistique, once lost during a poker game in 1936, whose tables, chairs and lamps are made of pine stumps and roots.

And there’s the Islander Bar and Grill in Hessel, which resembles the large, idealized cabin of an eccentric, seafaring collector.

Kevin stood at the 50-foot wood bar, across from the large stone fireplace, ordering a beer. It was a spring afternoon, and this was his first stop on a road trip he was taking across the eastern U.P., visiting a string of bars that he hadn’t been to since Randy last took this route with him. He wanted to see whether any of the bars had changed, if anyone would remember the two of them or the book they wrote.

This time, though, he was taking the trip by himself.

The Islander is housed inside a century-old former general store and ice cream parlor in the heart of downtown Hessel, a genteel waterfront vacation spot that draws well-to-do visitors to its gift shops, an art gallery, a boat-building school and a culinary institute. The polished wood walls here are crowded with vintage clocks, nautical gadgets and posters from the town’s annual Antique Wooden Boat Show.

“For people who’ve been up here, when you think of Yooper bars, this is a classy bar no matter where you put it,” Kevin said.

If there’s any unifying theme to the book, it’s that in the U.P. — regardless of whether a bar is a crumbling cabin serving skunked beer to lumberjacks, or an ornate, beachfront pub offering tourists filet mignon with steamed vegetables — there’s a common Yooper ethic that underlies each establishment.

“It kind of takes you back 30, 40 years to the way things were back then,” said Johnny Edington, 55, of Pickford, sitting at the Islander's bar rail. He and his buddy were out running errands from town to town, and they figured why not drink at some bars along the way?

“Communities are very community-oriented, you know what I’m saying? Where, if somebody in the community is sick, they’ll have a big bash for them and raise a bunch of money and give it to them,” Edington said. “That’s just the way it is here.”

His dad’s nearby barn burned down years ago, he said, and, within a week, 30 local men showed up and built him a new barn. “Never charged the man a dime,” Edington said. “It’s just the way it is. When you see a neighbor in need, you go take care of them.”

“Well that’s what you get in small communities up here, ‘cause everybody knows everybody, so everybody’s close,” said his friend, Mike Marble, 54, also of Pickford. “That’s the biggest difference from downstate to up here.”

Each of them was drinking an Escanaba Black from Upper Hand Brewery in Escanaba. In the past few years, dozens of breweries have opened in the Upper Peninsula — including Blackrocks Brewery in Marquette, Keweenaw Brewing Company in Houghton and Les Cheneaux Distillers just down the road from the Islander — and the bars up here have expanded their offerings from the previously typical Budweiser and Miller. But no matter how much they upgrade, some things in the U.P. never change.

Marble said a small bar up in Hulbert — nameless because the story he likes to tell technically violates health codes — is a great example of this.

“We go up there a couple months ago, and I took a bunch of fresh fish with me that a buddy give me, and we go in, we sit down and order a beer, and I say to the bartender — we call her Aunt Nancy — ‘What’s the chances of us, if we brought in some fresh fish, that you’d cook it for us while were here?’ She looks at us, (jokingly) gives us a dirty look and says, ‘Bring it in,’ So we bring the fish in and I said, ‘Cook it all up and give the guys down the bar some too, spread it around.’ And that’s what they did. And again, that’s like anywhere you go. That’s how people treat you.”

A joke until it wasn’t

As Kevin headed farther east from the Mackinac Bridge on his road trip along M-134, the towns grew smaller and the bars became more rustic. And, unlike at the Islander, the souvenirs on the walls were valued more in sentiment than in money.

At Snow’s Bar in Cedarville, for example, the walls feature a collage of sports equipment — antique sleds, snowshoes, ice skates and hockey sticks — each of them scraped and scuffed by years of use; most of them just things people had in their basements and garages, all of them the embodiment of Upper Peninsula winter life.

Snow’s is tucked several side roads deep into a residential neighborhood. Nobody would stumble on it. Either you know it’s there or you don’t. The few tourists who do come regularly are longtime boaters familiar with the area.

“A lot of the bars in the U.P., they’re hidden gems,” said Shirland Cardinal, the 58-year-old bartender at Snow’s. “The locals know about them, but unless you know some of the locals you’re not going to find them. I get people all the time — ‘We’ve been coming up here 20 years, never knew this place was here.’ ”

But a few years ago, something unusual began happening — strangers started showing up at the door with an odd little book in their hands.

“You wouldn’t believe the people we had coming around who made it goals after this came out to come in and have us sign our pictures,” she said of Kevin’s book, which was on a shelf behind the bar, offered for sale. “There would be groups of them — ‘Oh, we’re doing the tour’ — and they were gonna hit so many bars today and so many bars tomorrow, and they were literally planning vacations around hitting bars in the ‘Yooper Bars’ book.”

Kevin smiled about this. After all the work he and Randy put into it, it was gratifying to hear that so many people liked it.

For years, Kevin and Randy joked about writing a book on all the unusual bars in the Upper Peninsula to share with outsiders everything they loved about the region, the kinds of things they never saw in any guidebook.

“The original impetus of the project was to showcase all the great bars up here and let all the people downstate know what a good time it was,” Kevin said.

Kevin moved from Kalamazoo to "The Soo" — as Sault Ste. Marie is called — in 2007 to attend Lake Superior State University, where he majored in business administration. Randy soon followed. After a shaky business venture had collapsed and he’d lost his house in Saginaw to foreclosure, he decided to start over in a part of the state he’d always loved.

“As a child Randy came up here; his love of the U.P. trickled down to us,” Kevin said. “I can remember as a child coming up here almost every summer.”

Randy always wanted to be an author, but he figured his college-educated son would do a better job writing the book. Besides, Kevin was the only one of them who knew how to use a computer.

So extroverted Randy would hold court on a barstool while the quieter Kevin would dutifully take notes and photos, conduct the interviews and chronicle the decor on the walls. They couldn’t afford to stay in motels, so they’d leave the Soo in the morning, drive five or six hours to some bar, immerse themselves in its atmosphere and drive back that night as the sun was rising, talking for hours along the way.

They started with a $500 budget, but that quickly evaporated, and they came up with the idea to charge bar owners $199 each for the privilege of being in their proposed book. “Because I can’t afford to publish the book and take an entire summer off,” Kevin explained. Surprisingly, more than 90 percent of bar owners paid the fee, which went toward bar tabs, gas money and the $25,000 it cost to self-publish.

The project took 10 months — much longer than planned. They put 47,000 miles on Kevin’s maroon 1998 Grand Prix — far more than anticipated. They each added 30 pounds to their waistlines — a lot more than either needed.

Early on, they sensed that every bar embodied its town’s personality. “It started out with a template for each bar,” Kevin said. “But each bar had such unique character, so much different than the next bar, we couldn’t keep the same criteria for each bar. We had to find out what was special about each place.”

What they found was that for some small towns up here, the local bar is sometimes the only public establishment in town where people can gather. So bars are often the location of wedding receptions, baby showers, divorce parties, birthday celebrations and funerals. Bars hold fundraisers to help neighbors who’ve fallen on hard times, or throw midwinter parties just to break up the snow-white monotony of the longest season of the year. Some serve as their town’s unofficial historical museum, posting old photos and documents on the walls for lack of anywhere else in town to display them. And for many people living in rural isolation, they become a home away from home.

“You and I could walk into some of these bars as perfect strangers, and within 15 minutes you’d think you were at a family reunion,” Randy told Michigan Radio in 2013, just after his book’s publication. “It’s just really cool.”

They found unusual events like the Spam-carving contest every spring at Cat Tails Cove in Cedarville. The Hula-Hoop Happy Hour at Silver Creek Grill and Pub in Eckerman, where people get on the dance floor at 4 p.m. and Hula-Hoop with their drinks in the town where it was invented in 1923. The reverse drag party at the Cozy Corner’s Tavern in Barbeau on deer rifle-hunting season’s opening day, for which the wives of hunters come out in fake moustaches and camouflage for a party while their husbands are gone.

The book splits the U.P. into three sections, each fronted by a locator map showing the location of every bar, the pages where each can be found in the book, and highways that suggest the paths of long-distance bar crawls. Its 224 pages are dense with photos of the bars and the customers, plus facts and stories about each place, the kind of granular details that become apparent only after long hours on a barstool — who has a stuffed bear, which place serves cattle testicles, which bartender won the most arm-wrestling contests.

The book lists each bar’s hours, its house shot and house drink, celebrity sightings (lots of Jeff Daniels) and the favorite joke told at each place.

Question: How do you double the value of a Yooper’s car? Answer: Put gas in it.

Question: How is a Texas tornado and a U.P. divorce the same? Answer: Somebody is going to lose a trailer.

Question: Where does a Yooper go on vacation? Answer: To a new bar.

And so on.

There was nobody drinking at Snow’s that day except Kevin. It was late April, the worst time of the year in the tourism-reliant U.P., the way the end of the month is rough for poor people in urban areas who rely on public assistance. And even though this spot gets few tourists compared with the coast, everyone here needs those few tourists to keep going.

“Most people who are in the tourist industry, you’re laid off at the end of October and you’re usually down for the winter,” explained Cardinal, who’ll work on visitor-crowded Mackinac Island in the summer. “You don’t go back until the start of May. And that’s just another part of being in the tourist industry. They only give you 20 weeks of unemployment. You know, you’re laid off every year for 26 weeks. There ain’t much you can do about it.”

A place for everyone

Up the highway was a bar run by dogs and ghosts.

To announce this, a German shepherd hopped in the recliner by the front door of the Runway Bar in Hessel, and gave the strangers walking into the bar a stern look to signal that nobody but this dog sits in this chair. Two other dogs threaded their way through the legs of the customers, as if they owned the place. Because here, they essentially do.

“Dogs are welcome,” declared Wendi Smith, 65, the bar’s longtime owner. She started the tradition years ago by designating every Sunday as Dog Day. That soon stretched into every day, and now everyone who has dogs brings them. “I know all the dogs by name and what they like for treats and stuff,” she said, smiling.

The Runway was built in the 1930s. The original bar burned to the ground years ago, and the owner at the time rebuilt the whole thing out of fireproof concrete, visually unappealing but certainly fireproof. Smith’s dad bought it in 1959, and when she took over in 1984 she had the bar rebuilt to look like the original — a cozy, wood cabin.

“But the old bar is all under here,” she said. “It’s completely cement — the floors, the walls.”

The interior is decorated with ancient saws and axes, left over from the region’s lumber mill roots, and deer heads and antlers, donated by generations of hunters. As in many U.P. bars, historical photos on the walls document the town’s history, this time from the bar’s front porch — the evolving models of the vehicles parked out front, the dated hairstyles and clothing of the customers, the changing appearance of the bar itself. And the mysterious orbs that sometimes appear in pictures taken here.

“This place is known to be a haunted bar,” explained bartender Staci Fountain, 52. “Drink at your own risk.”

A lot of bars in the U.P. claim to be haunted. At the Nahma Inn, a ghost is said to occasionally rearrange things in the kitchen. At Tovey’s Jolly Inn in Germfask, the now-110-year-old original owner is said to change radio stations and turn lights on and off. And at the Runway, a ghost likes to flirt with women.

“I was bent over, and I felt my hair go back, and a kiss on my cheek, and I turned around and there was nobody there,” Fountain said.

That’s the ghost’s trademark. “We had a girl almost in the same spot sitting there,” Fountain noted, “and she said, 'Do you think this bar is haunted?' and I’m like, ‘Yeah,’ and she goes, ‘Somebody keeps whispering in my ear and playing with my hair.’ ”

Over the years, several bartenders have claimed to see a man emerge from the kitchen and walk through the bar. Some have quit in distress over this. A few customers have quit their barstools, too.

“We have a guy that won’t come in after dark unless there’s a lot of people here, ‘cause he swears he seen someone come out the back room,” Fountain said.

The Runway is up the road from a small tribal casino but far from anything else, including the prosperous shore by the islands. Its customers are almost all locals, some living in far-flung rural isolation. So every Thanksgiving and Christmas, the owners cook a big dinner for those in the area who don’t have anywhere else to go.

“We’ve done it for many years, at least since 1984, and I’m pretty sure on Thanksgiving my mother had cooked for people who didn’t have a place to go, didn’t have family,” Smith said. “We’ve had as many as 30 for dinner and we play bingo and we buy all kinds of not-expensive little gifts, and everybody that comes to dinner at Christmas brings a little gift, and we buy extra so nobody goes without.”

For the longest time, Smith knew everyone who came in the door. At least, until a certain book came out, and strangers started showing up as part of a peculiar drinking game.

“I really met some super people from all over that had purchased these books and had decided to go to as many of the bars as they could and get their book signed,” she said. “And a lot of them asked for me to write a little note to them.”

It was the same story Kevin had heard earlier in the day at Snow’s Bar. It turns out that in the years since it was published, the book slowly became an underground classic, selling one at a time in gas stations and souvenir shops, and a game spontaneously grew from it. People were driving all over the U.P., visiting the places highlighted by Kevin and Randy, asking the bartenders to sign that bar’s pages in the book as proof of their visit, trying to be the first to hit all 109 bars.

Smith said she understands the fascination with U.P. bars that motivated Kevin and Randy, and all the people now following in their tracks to see these places for themselves.

“I think the Yooper bars have a tendency to know their customers, to be closer with their customers. It’s not strangers walking in every day,” Smith said. “It’s like family. I think Yooper bars have more of a tendency to connect with their patrons and become family. We do get our tourists, and they’re very, very appreciated. Extra money is awesome. But Yooper bars are family.”

In like a Lion

Hugh Speier needed swear words to fully convey what he first thought of the Upper Peninsula when he moved here a few years ago at his wife’s request.

“She said, ‘I want you to come up to the U.P. and see how I live, where I was born.’ I thought it was totally crazy,” said the blunt-spoken, 75-year-old New York City native in a thick Brooklyn accent. “Why would anybody fucking live here? You’d have to be crazy. Why would you do that?”

He was sitting at Yooperman’s Bar and Grill in Goetzville with a group of friends, having lunch. “My son, who’s a sports fan, said, ‘Pop, you’re going to rot up there. You’re going to have nothing to do, you’re going to lose your Yankees, you’re going to lose football, you’re going to lose sports.’ And my wife brought me here and I said, ‘Holy shit, this is unbelievable.’ ”

In a place where not every sports fan can afford cable, Yooperman’s is a sanctuary, where the walls are covered in flat-screen TVs always tuned to sports and where the man in charge is a boisterous sports lunatic.

Owner Donnie Stefanski has not missed a single Detroit Lions home game in 25 years. This, despite living in the Upper Peninsula. This, despite the team doing everything it could over the years to disappoint fans like him.

“It would’ve been nice to have had a championship so far in there someplace,” said Stefanski, 60, a retired truck driver and foreman for a local township. He was given the nickname “Yooperman” by fans at Lions games. “But other than that, it is what it is.”

During the fall, he and his 37-year-old daughter Megan Stefanski, who tends bar here, typically leave Raber Township at 3 a.m. or so on Sunday morning, after Donnie paints his face and puts on Lions-themed hunting gear. Megan’s just getting off work and will sleep in the passenger seat while Donnie gets them as far as West Branch in the middle of the night. Then she’ll hop behind the wheel until they reach Eastern Market in Detroit at about 8:30 a.m. to tailgate. After the game they’ll drive back and get home just before midnight.

“My mother, she lives about 1,000 feet from me, and I haven’t seen her in 30 years on Thanksgiving,” Donnie said, laughing. A few years ago, he was inducted into the NFL Fan Hall of Fame. “Of course, how I grew up, Thanksgiving’s a holiday if you’re a Lions’ fan. You have a home game every year.”

His bar is a Detroit sports shrine. An archway in the dining room is wallpapered in Lions season tickets. Lions jerseys autographed by Calvin Johnson and a Red Wings jersey signed by Henrik Zetterberg hang above the bar. And a forlorn little sign above the salad bar notes that Ford Field is 346 miles away.

That salad bar is a magnet around here. In many Upper Peninsula towns, the bar is the only place to eat, and people will drive a long way for a decent meal because they’re hard to find. This has led to a surprising competition among U.P. bars to elevate bar food to an unexpectedly high level. “Some of these bars could be five-star restaurants,” Randy told a Marquette-based TV show in 2012.

At Yooperman’s, that means Donnie’s wife Joanne, 58, creates all the salad dressings from scratch, makes a couple different soups every day and bakes her own desserts instead of just slicing up store-bought ones. It’s hard to find this kind of homemade cooking in actual restaurants in most places, let alone a sports bar. And people up here know this. “My mom’s an amazing cook,” Megan said, “So we get people from 60 miles away for dinner. Everything’s homemade.”

But even more so, drunken driving laws changed the culture of rural bars. To survive, they had to adapt and become for their communities more than just a place to drink.

“It’s where you meet,” Donnie said of Yooper bars. “I have a sandbox out back … ‘cause we always have kids around, and of course we're not worried about them getting kidnapped here or nothing; we’re more worried about a truck going by on the highway and a kid running out. Kids go play in the back yard, it’s not a problem. The parents can sit here and visit and have dinner, whatever; my grandkids are around so there’s kids in and out of here all the time. It’s community.”

For Brooklyn-native Speier, his new home is still a culture shock. He grew up in Manhattan, where his high school graduating class had 2,500 students. His wife’s in nearby Pickford had 25. He has lived in France and Maine during his career in the dairy business, he’s an abstract painter, and now in retirement he has settled down in a town of maybe 600 people living along dusty roads and cattail marshes.

“But the people are good, the air is clean, there’s no crime, well there’s crime but not real crime. And it’s more private, you get a little piece of property, you live your own life, you live your own destiny. And if you fuck up here, it’s your own fault.”

A sudden end

After the book was done and all the attention faded, Kevin stopped partying. He moved to Muskegon, found a job inspecting blades for aircraft engines, got married, had a daughter, got back in shape.

But Randy kept going.

“Dad’s drinking took a turn after the book,” Kevin said. “I should say probably during, or before.”

Wherever Kevin stopped in on this road trip, people told him they’d seen Randy drinking there long after the book came out. “You don’t write a book about bars and not have a love for going to bars,” Kevin said of his dad, who had already lost a leg to diabetes, and who smoked a pack a day. “Left unattended, I’d say a pack and a half.”

One night in June 2013, Randy called his son to say he wasn’t feeling well, then drove himself down from the Soo all the way to his familiar Saginaw to check into a hospital where his sister worked.

“I got a call, they said things weren’t going well,” Kevin said. “I’m like, 'no, he’ll be fine.' Well, no — on Saturday I went down. And he was gone on Sunday.”

Randy died at 59. Cause of death was everything. “The doctor summed it up as just doing shit to your body for so long,” Kevin said.

For a while, this weighed on him. After all, he was the one who had just taken Randy on an epic drinking binge. “I mean, I feel a lot of guilt about this, like I was an enabler,” he said. “I’ve gotten over it; I don’t think like that anymore. But without me this book wouldn’t have happened. I enabled him to go on a year-long bar crawl and that wasn’t good for his health. But he wanted to.”

In fact, whenever the scope of the project became daunting, it was always Randy who would push the two of them to keep going, as if driven by the opportunity to spend all this time with his son, on his own terms, in the places he was most comfortable —inside the bars of his beloved U.P., a drink in his hand, talking through the night with someone he loved.

“It was a tremendous bonding experience, a lot of time in the car with my dad,” Kevin said. “I didn’t take it for granted. I think I knew what we were doing along the way.”

Last call

The end of the road was a gravel parking lot at the edge of the peninsula in Sault Ste. Marie. Across the water, low on the horizon, was Canada. In the middle of the river stood Sugar Island, 50 square miles of woods containing a closed church, a community center and a single bar.

Kevin was waiting for the ferry to the island, which went back and forth twice an hour across St. Mary’s River. He’d just come from Raber Bay Bar, named for the bay along which it was located. It was another bar drawing people with its meals, cooked by owner Mary Lou Harmon, 70, on whose kitchen window customers like to post pictures of their kids and grandkids like it’s a family home.

“If I wasn’t selling food I’d really be hurting,” said her husband, Rich Harmon, 66. “And that’s where a lot of … the country bars, they didn’t adapt to selling food. You know, a shot and a beer, and it didn’t work.”

And it was another bar where newcomers came with the book in hand. “I got a bunch of traffic out of it,” Harmon told Kevin. “People come in, I signed it. They were traveling around, having the book signed. Quite a few of ‘em. More than I ever thought.”

Now, Sugar Island’s lone bar, the Hilltop, would be the last stop of the road trip, a fitting ending since it was a bar that his dad loved. Whenever Randy tired of all the places to drink in downtown Soo, where everyone knew him, he could hop on the ferry and vanish from the world for a while.

Sugar Island is best known because in 1945, Chase Osborn, a former Michigan governor (1911-13) with property on the island and the only Michigan governor ever from the U.P., launched a campaign to locate the proposed headquarters for the United Nations here. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers even drew up plans featuring an airport, docks and a skyscraper. It wasn’t enough to beat New York City, though. The ex-governor, who died not long after, is buried on the island in what’s now a 3,200-acre nature preserve maintained by the University of Michigan.

At the Hilltop, the names of its patrons over the years have been carved with knives deep into the wood rail. Hundreds of $1 bills are tacked to the ceiling, yellowed from the days of indoor smoking. Elderly houseplants droop from pots in the window. A stage stands ready for a local band called Three and a Half Men, so named because one of its four members lost his legs. And once again, black-and-white photos on the walls document the history of the island.

It’s the quintessential Upper Peninsula dive bar. And the drinkers here cherish it.

“What makes it special? Solitude,” said 62-year-old Mike Williams, a Sugar Island resident who moved here from Hazel Park years ago.

His wife Debra Jo, 62, sat next to him. They were in love with the simplicity and serenity of life on the island, where visitors are rare. “I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like a sunset, watching the boats go by. You have a little campfire, and you wonder what the rich people are doing, because you are so comfortable sitting back and watching all this.”

When Kevin walked in, he received something close to a hero’s welcome. Customers came up to hug him or shake his hand. His drinks were declared on the house. Off-duty staff were called and told Kevin was back, come in and see him.

And everyone had fond memories about Randy.

“Oh my golly, it touches strings,” said owner Steve Miller, 57. “He showed so much respect for us. He sat down and talked to us, he touched hearts. He was just a good person, a really good person. I was thankful to meet him.”

They were also thankful that the book highlighted this faraway bar, nestled between two countries, as remote as can be. To them, Randy was the one who thought this unheralded bar was worth telling the world about, that the Upper Peninsula was worth being proud of, and whose pride in the region had brought so many new people through here.

“The book brought people, but more than that, more than the book, was the fact that they showed interest in our community and our place,” Miller said.

Before he died, after all he’d been through, Randy got to see the first flush of his project’s success, and he was happy.

“Randy had so many — I don’t want to call them failures — but misses, that he was very proud of this,” Kevin said. “We felt it was an overwhelming success. He loved showing it off.”

And Kevin was proud, too — of the book he helped write, of his dad seeing his dream through, and of everything that came from an excuse to spend a summer together, father and son, drinking at bars and bonding like pals one last time.

“For two people who had absolutely no business doing a book — I’m not a writer, I’ve never written more than 12 pages in my life; Randy’s a career salesman — to have a finished project that started with absolutely nothing and have it end up like that," Kevin said, "is incredible.”

"Yooper Bars" is available on amazon.com.

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep