What's the name of your chocolate?

I baked brownies yesterday, and they are, as usual, fantastic. Of course, brownies from scratch are always going to be better than brownies out of a box, and it is not any more difficult.

I got the recipe from a box of Baker's Unsweetened Chocolate about 45 years ago. They still print a brownie recipe on the box, but they have changed it over the years. I stick with the original.

Just out of curiosity, I Googled Baker's Chocolate this morning and was surprised to learn that the company began in Massachusetts in the 1760's. It was also very interesting to discover the origin of the company name. I always assumed it was called Baker's Chocolate because it was intended for use by bakers. In fact, the name comes from a co-founder, one James Baker.

Brownie time. A glass of cold milk, please.

Class of '39

One day about 35 years ago I was in Litchfield, Illinois, my mother’s home town, doing genealogical research. At the public library there, I got to talking to one of the librarians, and I mentioned that I happened to be in possession of my mother’s high school yearbooks, and I wondered if the library would like to have them.

Without any enthusiasm at all, she said, “Oh, yes, we’ll take them,” which rather put me off, but I was tired of carrying those books around with me every time I moved, so I said I’d mail them to her when I got home. With what sounded like idle curiosity, she asked me what years they were from, and I told her they were from 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939.

I thought the woman was going to leap over the counter at me, she was so excited. Well, excited for a librarian anyway. It turns out that the library had every yearbook from Litchfield Community High School from 1876 (or whatever it was) to the current day, which at that time was 1979, but they were missing four years – 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939.

To make sure I would send them, she provided me with shipping materials, a label and the postage.

Going out with a bang

My father used to like to say that his grandfather blew himself up and that there was so little of him left, "they buried his shirt."

That would have been my great-grandfather, Matej (aka Michael) Knez who was born in 1858 in what is now the Czech Republic. He came to America in 1902, got a job and saved his money so that the next year he could send for his wife and five kids. They settled in Chicago originally, but some of the family went to Wisconsin; some stayed there and some returned to Chicago after a couple years.

My dad said that Michael and family had been living on a farm in or near Phillips, Wisconsin, and that he hated it. One day he was drinking heavily in a local tavern and bragging that the box he had with him was full of some highly dangerous explosives and that he intended to go home and blow up the farmhouse.

The genealogist in me has always wanted to find what truth, if any, there was to this tale, and I've been looking for a death notice or coroner's report or even any proof that the guy ever actually lived in Wisconsin. But I found nothing.

Then one day last month I got a brilliant idea and posted a question to a Facebook group called Wisconsin Genealogy Network.  Shortly thereafter one member of the group supplied me with a short article from a Rhinelander (Wis.) newspaper about the incident, and the next day someone posted an image of an article that appeared in the Phillips newspaper, The Bee, on Decebmer 17, 1914. This is the gist of it, which appeared under the headline, "Suicide by Dynamite:"

"The shattered remains of Mike Knez, a resident of the town of Emery, were found in the woods about a half mile from the home of C. F. Glissendorf, on Saturday last, Dec. 12th.... It is evident from all that can be learned that Mr. Knez took his own life, as on Monday, Dec. 7th, he came to town and purchased five pounds of dynamite and from remarks he made to people in the city that day he had made up his mind to commit suicide.  The deed was done, it is thought, on Wednesday.... It is supposed that he either sat upon or laid down on the dynamite and lighted the fuse."

It's good to know finally that this outrageous story is actually true, but what is more astonishing is that I chased this for 40 years without success, but once I put it out on Facebook, I had an answer within ten minutes.