Bushel Magazine

Bushel was a Midwest gentleman's magazine that ran for eight years out of Milwaukee. It was the creation of Earl "Bud" Kessler, a shoe repair shop owner on the south side who bankrolled the first few issues with his own savings and a small loan from his brother-in-law. Bud handled everything from ad sales to paste-up layout in the back room of his shop, surrounded by shoe leather and rubber cement. The models were local girls—waitresses, factory workers, secretaries—shot by a rotating cast of amateur photographers Bud found through classifieds in the Milwaukee Journal.

The magazine catered to a working-class Midwest audience and reflected it. Between the pictorials you'd find articles about ice fishing on Lake Winnebago, reviews of supper clubs, tips on deer hunting, and full-page ads for regional breweries, snowmobile dealers, and tool-and-die shops. Bushel never pretended to be anything it wasn't—it was cheap, cheerful, and unapologetically provincial.

Rising paper costs and the arrival of national magazine distribution into small-town newsstands finally killed Bushel in 1982. Bud went back to repairing shoes full-time. The archive was recovered from a storage locker in Waukesha County in early 2026. Issues #1 and #2 have never been located—Bud apparently printed only a few hundred copies of each, and none are known to survive. Issue #3 is the earliest we have.