The second surviving issue of Bud Kessler's Bushel magazine is now in the archive. Vol. 1, No. 4 is the Winter 1975 issue, and it's a good one—possibly Bud's best.
Some context: Bushel was a quarterly magazine published out of Milwaukee from 1974 to 1982. Issues #1 and #2 have never been found. We added Issue #3 to the archive recently, and now #4 completes our earliest pair of consecutive issues from any single publication in the collection.
Bud's publisher's letter opens with a confession: the heat in his office on South 27th Street went out in January, and he's writing the issue wearing his sister-in-law Donna's bathrobe. (Donna, as regular readers know, wants it back and also wants her forty dollars.) The letter is vintage Bud—self-deprecating, warm, and somehow both sad and funny at the same time.
The feature article is Bud's guide to the Brandy Old Fashioned—Wisconsin's unofficial state cocktail. It's less a recipe and more a love letter to Friday nights at the supper club. He describes the best one he's ever had (at the Lighthouse Supper Club in Ripon, made by a bartender named Phyllis who's been making them since 1952) and the worst (a hotel bar in Chicago where the bartender had never heard of one).
Hank Dietz returns with a road test of the 1975 Ford F-150—the truck that replaced the F-100, which he describes as "more truck than you need." His verdict: overbuilt, overpriced, and probably the best truck Ford has ever made.
This issue's cover girl is Nancy Kopinski from Muskegon, Michigan—night shift supervisor at a brake plant, bowler, and the kind of woman Bud describes as "dared into this by her sister." Nancy is thirty-five, she's big, and she owns it. Her photos were shot at the Lamplighter Tavern on a Thursday night.
Linda Jablonski, forty, has been waitressing at the Pine Cone Diner in Rhinelander for eighteen years. Her photos at Pelican Lake are some of the most natural we've seen in any issue of any magazine in the collection. Debbie Schaefer is the youngest at twenty-two—a vet tech student at Purdue discovered at the Tippecanoe County Fair. And Greta Hoffmann, the "Late Night Discovery," is a bookkeeper from Cedarburg who's been doing her laundry at the same place as Bud for six years before he worked up the nerve to ask.
The advertiser roster has shifted slightly from Issue #3. Schlitz is out, replaced by Old Milwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon on the inside covers. Brinkley has rebranded to Brinkley Ford-Mercury (same Mel and Junior). Menards makes its first appearance—an early ad for what would become one of the Midwest's largest home improvement chains. And the back cover belongs to Carhartt, which in 1975 was still a niche workwear brand decades away from becoming a fashion statement.
This copy is in fair condition—moderate yellowing, some foxing on the interior pages, and a crease across the back cover that suggests it was rolled up at some point (probably in Donna's husband's van). The pages are intact and the spine is solid. Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent.