Cranberry Red: A Novel

Author’s Note

311 Author’s Note Readers of my other Ames County novels—The Travels of Increase Joseph, In a Pickle, and Blue Shadows Farm—often ask the location of Ames County in Wisconsin. The county is fictional of course, but when pressed to answer its location, I say it’s near Waushara, Marquette, Wood, Portage, and Adams counties in central Wisconsin. Fictional Ben Wesley, the main character in Cranberry Red, worked as a county agricultural agent in Ames County. I worked for five years as a county extension agent in two different Wisconsin counties after I graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed a brief tour of duty in the army. Wesley is a composite of several of my county extension colleagues. In the novel, the program for which Ben worked was the University of Wisconsin Agricultural Agent Program (UWAAP). The actual program, which exists today in every Wisconsin county, is Cooperative Extension, which is a part of the University of Wisconsin–Extension. Cooperative Extension (the “cooperative” refers to a partnership of counties, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the University of Wisconsin ) came into being with the passage of the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 by the federal government. United States Department of Agriculture funds help support Cooperative Extension activities, as do state and county tax dollars. County-based Extension educators are University of Wisconsin faculty and staff. They teach in the areas of agriculture and agribusiness, community and economic development, natural resources, family living, and 4-H and youth development. These men and women conduct workshops, do radio and TV programs, write newspaper columns, answer phone queries, and are generally available to assist the citizens of the state. Cooperative Extension specialists work on University of Wisconsin System campuses, where they have direct access to current research and knowledge. These specialists provide a direct link between the campus researchers and the county staffs, and thus provide a service to the people of the state, as supported by the Wisconsin Idea. See my book The People Came First: The History of Cooperative Extension (Madison: University of Wisconsin– Extension, 2004) for information about Cooperative Extension’s past. See http://www.uwex.edu/CES/ for up-to-date information about the organization. The fall after I graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, while I was awaiting orders from the U.S. Army, I raked cranberries by hand in a cranberry bog near Wisconsin Rapids. The bog was very similar to the one that Shotgun Slogum owned in my fictional Ames County. It was cold, often miserable, but always interesting work. Cranberries are native to Wisconsin and several other U.S. states; by the middle 1800s cranberries were commercially grown in Wisconsin. The historical information I provide in the novel is as accurate as I could make it. Today, cranberries are Wisconsin’s most important fruit crop. They are grown in central, north-central, and northwestern Wisconsin counties. Wisconsin leads the nation in cranberry production, and has done so since 1995, when Wisconsin beat out Massachusetts for top honors. For more about Wisconsin cranberries, go to www.wiscran.org, the website for the Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association. 312 Author’s Note ...