THE SOURTOE COCKTAIL CLUB-Ron Franscell

grew up in Wyoming. A lifelong journalist, he worked for newspapers in Wyoming, New Mexico, and California's Bay Area before hitting the road in one of America American Journalism's best beats, covering the evolution of the American West as a senior writer for the Denver Post. Shortly after nine to eleven, he was dispatched by the Post to cover the Middle East during the first few months of the Afghan War.

In two thousand and four, became the managing editor for the Beaumount, TX Enterprise, where he covered the devastation of Hurricane Rita. After Ron's divorce, he feared he was the link in a long chain of his strange fathers. But when the author and his teenage son embark on a road trip to the Yukon to seek out a macabre cocktail containing an amputated human tow, they unwittingly begin a

journey into their own present and future. The Sour Cocktail Club is a true life love story about fathers and sons, set against epic backdrops and overlooked places. It is also a roadbook that attempts to answer, for one father and son a pivotal life question, where does the road go? Our book that we're featuring this evening is The Sourtoll Cocktail Club with my special guest journalist and author Ron Fransell. Thank you for agreeing to this program and welcome back

to True Murder. Ron Francell, p Pell Dan.

We're going to know, we're going to learn quite a bit about your son, and we're gonna learn quite a bit about yourself and your history. And so being a prolific writer, a true crime writer, has written a couple things that are very that have affected a lot of people.

I think our audience will be very interested in how you came to all of this and how this has informed your personality and this great book that we have here now again, like I say, a life changing experience for those that don't know otherwise a true crime writer. So let's get to the Sour Tool cocktail club now. Now, first, I think we should talk about your job at the Denver Post. You say you drove more than eight thousand miles per week writing about the West, eighty thousand miles

in your first year and root sixty six. Tell us what your first tell us about your marriage, and then tell us about your job at Denver Post. And where are you at that point in your marriage when you have this job at Denver Post.

of very slowly. Gave is sagged under its own weight, and we ultimately divorced when my son was thirteen and my daughter was seventeen. Being a small town and being the publisher of the newspaper up to that point, it wasn't possible for me to just go get another job there in town. You know, there was no other newspaper, There was no other media outlet that I could just

casually show up and start a new job. In the American West, the next biggest place for me to go, or the next best place for me to look for a job, was Denver, Colorado. And as it happened, they had been dreaming for some time about some new kind of reportage that for them anyway, where the typical ordinary journalism was told with a little bit more narrative flare.

And because I at that point I had written some novels as well as had long experience as a journalist, they thought I was perfect for that, and so they assigned me to the job as a senior writer and a columnist to write about the evolution of the American West, and and my job was to wade out into this vast, vast region and find stories where the past, the present, and the future all intersected, where where by looking backward, we might see where we are and where we're going.

And it was a beautiful job for me. I got to blend, you know, real journalism, real stories, truth, with all those tools that I developed as a novelist, to to bring drama to a story, to bring to give it a pace, to give it, to give it a meaning, and and I just loved that. And it was doing that that caused then my bosses to send me to the Middle East right after nine to eleven in hopes that we could begin to answer some of the questions that we were all asking ourselves in North America at

that time for an American audience. And they saw no better way than to send someone who could tell that story on the short runway that I had become accustomed to working. So that's where I was, And in that process I didn't travel eight thousand miles a week, but my first year on the road was eighty thousand miles. What was happening was I was using the road as therapy.

It was my sanctuary. I would spend five or six weeks generally out reporting and driving all over the American West looking for these stories and writing them and living that road life kept my mind off all the pain that was that that that that had uh just gripped me in in the in the backwash of this divorce. And during that time I was able also then to spend a lot of time with my son where he lived in Wyoming, because I was on the road and I could visit fairly often, but it wasn't every day.

And it was in the first month or I'm sorry, in the first summer of of after that divorce, that he came to me in my my little house in the Colorado Rockies and we spent that glorious summer together and we we tried to do too much. We we wanted to fit every mist day into the days we had.

So it was during that time that I ran across a mansion and I think on the internet one night about this bar in Dawson City and the Yukon, And what I learned was that you could go there and you could order a drink, and they would show you to a little room in the back, and there you would be sworn to an oath and having taken the oath, a funny little guy would drop into your drink, a mummified human tow. And when I told my son this, now he's thirteen years.

that we would do it someday. When he became a college student eighteen years old, he was driving to college and I was checking in with him throughout the day because it was a long trip and it was his first time doing that sort of thing. And toward the end of that day, I noticed he was getting tired, and so we just would we just spend a lot of time on the phone talking, not doing not really

talking about much of anything, just keeping him talking. And he mentioned that during that day he had thought about the toe, and it was at that moment that I decided we were going to do this. And so it's the road you know lies literally under this story obviously, you know, a nearly five thousand mile journey to the Yukon and to the Arctic beyond. But it lies in the sort of metaphoric sense under this story too.

it was confusing to me. Nevertheless, I grew up with my stepfather. I continue, you know now to have a wonderful relationship with my stepfather. But for many years I didn't know anything more than what my mother had told me, which wasn't much about my biological father. I found him

when I was thirty years old. I was a journalist, and I used a lot of the skills that I'd learned as a researcher and as a journalist to find him, and he at that time was living in Panama, so it was another couple of years before we actually met, and it was it was a very strange meeting, as you might imagine. I told him in our very first face to face meeting, that I wasn't looking for a father.

I had curiosity about where I came from, as you might imagine, but that I had a wonderful father and I didn't need a father, and that the best he could hope for was that we might be friends. In time, I learned his story, and I learned that he too had been abandoned in his life by his own father, And as fate would have it, I learned even later that my grandfather had also been abandoned by his father.

So we're looking at essentially four generations of what I call accidental bastards, people who ended up not having a close relationship with their biological fathers. And here I was newly divorced and contemplating that I had just in my way, abandoned my own son. Suddenly it became very important to me to try to rectify that. I couldn't go back,

I couldn't change time. But I began to think about how I might disrupt this rhythm, how what I could do that might cause my son not to be in the same position I, my father, my grandfather, and my great grandfather had been in. So that that all plays into this this very very interesting, very poignant, very funny at some point story into the wilderness of Canada.

you know if you're doing it right? So that that's what was kind of going through my mind that that, Uh, I questioned his obviously I questioned his capacity for love, but I wondered if I had inherited that in some way, And so I was really kind of exploring. I was really kind of exploring the nature of love and and the love, the kind of love we talk about between fathers and sons, and and do do I answer that? I don't know. I think people take away from this

kind of a story what they will. There's it's very difficult sometimes to to to predict or even to expect that your message is what they will they will get. But in that particular, in that particular exchange that we talk about, we go into that and in a way that is kind of poignant. I think.

the test. So I you know, he you know, he he talks about what passes for love, and and he talks that's kind of an illusory kind of term to me, that that he he he thinks he's been in love or at least what passes for love. And I begin to use that same sort of phraseology as I go through this book. Uh, and it pops up here and there in unexpected places, you know what passes for love or what passes for drunk, or you know what for adventure.

And he gave me some of the really you know, I think interesting parts of this story.

graduated journalism school. And it seemed that you didn't find out, and you explained in this book Final two years later, that you didn't realize that that's what it was. It seemed to be a disappointment in your choice of career and profession. And and you don't sum up how important that was or how profound that was an effect on you. But how of what what did that do to you when you your choice of profession. Instead of the parents being real proud, they seem to not, you know, not

be in contact for a while. Please explain that.

I would say, lower middle class family. And and they didn't have the wherewithal to send me to college. So it became the easiest thing in the world for them to say, well, you know, you're not going to go to college unless you can pay for it yourself. Ultimately I did. I didn't do that exactly. And and I am to this day, the only the only one in my family of five kids and and their kids except

for my own children who went to college. Now my both of my children have gone to college too, but you know, that's a reality that a lot of people live with. My mother in particular, saw saw me at as too dreamy. When I remember her asking me one time, you know, what is it you want to do with your life? And she sort of put it in that kind of in that kind of cant, you know, she's what is it you want to do with your life? And when I said, you know, I'd like to become

a reporter. Someday, I'd like to run my own newspaper, she was dismissive of that because she saw not because she thought I was an idiot, but because she thought I was kidding myself right, and that I wasn't being realistic, and that I was only setting myself up for disappointment, probably a lot like the disappointments that she had felt in her own young life, and she knew the pain of that. So I think that that's where it comes from.

And she she I have no greater supporter now that I'm a you know, an accomplished journalist, that I'm a best selling author and that I'm telling stories like this one. I have no greater fan than my mother, But in those early days, I think her hyper sense of reality and my dreamy qualities, my fantasies about becoming a writer, really bothered her and it did work on me, but it probably made me all the more interested in succeeding as a writer and a journalist.

on the twenty fifth and everything has changed. That suddenly doors are locked and night falls and you're in the house and porch lights are on, and there's a fear that has absorbed the community. So in some senses, it was on a very very microcosmic scale, a kind of nine to eleven for me and for other kids who knew these two girls who were abducted and terrorized through the night and monstrously thrown off of a very high bridge.

They lived next door to us. They were neighborhood kids, and in a neighborhood where there were many kids, and where we saw each other more as brothers and sisters of different mothers than just neighbors. We played together, we experimented in forts and digging and army men together. You know. It was that kind of a relationship with everybody in the neighborhood again, brothers and sisters, and it was no

different for these two girls. So the effect on the kids of our neighborhood and in in in the larger town was profound. And I wanted not only to explore this crime, but I wanted to explore how nearly at that time, thirty years later, this this remained a fresh wound, that the memory was still vivid and absorbing. So it was it was not I didn't set out to write

a true crime. I wanted to tell a true story about how, you know, one moment of unrestrained barbarity could poison a whole community's memory and could you know, cast this dark, dark shadow across generations. So it was a true story. It was about a crime, but to me, it was bigger than true crime, right, and so what came of that was of course the Darkest Night, and it was embraced as that kind of a story. Now you even mentioned that it has been compared to in

Cold Blood. I think the reason it was is that it happened. It's a it's a monstrous crime that happens in a small town, much like Capodi explains in in in the book with the Clutter. You know, the Clutter

family being massacred in Holcombe, Kansas. And it was an attempt at doing it in a literary way, which is what Capodi did and which is different than the typical true crime that you see on today's supermarket shelves, you know, which tends to be more reported, more a leaning work towards the lurid and the grotesque, and a lot of blood and that sort of thing. I wanted this to be something bigger, something that went deeper, and it was much more complex. So that's the book that came out of that.

my very first novel. He was a young boy. He was eleven or twelve, I think, And actually when my first novel came out, he was, I guess twelve or thirteen, and I remember him reading that.

a voracious reader. And as as we do in sour Toow, we we're often stuck in these sort of literary conversations, Yes, where I think you get to see very starkly two different minds at work.

interpretations about the books that he's reading. And he and he's passionate about maybe to himself, because it seems like he almost he thought you were dragging it out of him or making fun of him when you did discuss the fight club and Chuck vaholmik and anyway, uh now, tell us just before we start this the journey with Matt and we when you first spoke about this, when you first the idea was hatched in your mind, or at least the germ of the idea was when he

was thirteen, he's now finally nineteen, when you actually decide to embark on this trip to the Yukon, what is Matt like? Tell us about the character of Matt, your son, and over that six year period you said you had a fair amount of time because you were on the road, that you would go and watch his baseball games and be involved in his life, even though you have to

travel into your former town that you lived in. But tell us what was the relationship, like, how strong was the relationship during that six year period and at that age when you're just about to embark on this trip, what is your relationship like?

to college. So all of a sudden, he's home all the time with his mother and she's living the life of a single mother, and he's got a lot of anger about that. And I definitely saw some changes in his personality. I think this sunny, bright, always laughing, always joking little kid became a little darker and a little more nicol and uh uh. To me, he would have been justified and and probably did hold some against me as well as his mother, for for putting him in

this position. Uh And and I think any parent that's that's a horrible feeling to have, that that you're being blamed for your child's pain. And so I I I wanted to do anything I could, uh to not make him feel that way. I wanted to do everything I could to to have the reassurance that I was relevant uh, and that I was loved. But most of all, I wanted him to make sure. I wanted to make sure that he knew he was loved and and in and all of that kind of goes into the concept behind this.

But as I say in the book, once I decided we were going to take this trip, the first thing I did was go to Panama to see my own biological father and to begin to sort through some of the issues that might shed light on my relationship with my son, and in so far as I could, to maybe begin to nudge the future a little bit more in a direction that I could live with.

was out there, came across a small monument. There was a chair, there was a little table. Somebody had put rocks around some of the greasewood shrub, you know, the scrub that was out there in the desert, and a little a sort of own fireplace, and and somebody had obviously lived in this area. But there was there was a sign that was posted there and it it it it it basically described that the man who had lived

there had just died about a month before. Uh, and he had no one and and uh, I thought, you know, some who lives out in the desert and and under these circumstances, and who puts rocks around you know, these scrub plants in the desert like it's a home. And I became fascinated with this, and I wanted to know more. And when I investigated a little bit further, I found out that that Julius ag The had been a Czechoslovakian immigrant and and had himself had had died of a

heart attack out in out there in the desert. He was a prospector and a desert rat, and he had no money, so he was buried in a pauper's grave in Courtzite, Arizona. During my research, I found that simultaneously that there was a son that he had abandoned decades before who was looking for him. And suddenly I felt that I was the only person in the world, and I think it's true. I was the only person in the world who knew that Julius Age was dead and

that his son was looking for him. And it became a kind of obsession of mine to let this son know that his father that he was seeking had died. But none of the old message board posts by the son had good had good email addresses anymore. So the son was lost too now, and I began to put all those research skills to work, but unfortunately came up empty.

And the one thing I did do, though, was leave a message with the county coroner in Quartzite, Arizona, and said, if this man ever contacts you, please tell him that I was trying to find him. It's maybe a year later when I get a call from the son and he had found his father's he had found out what happened to his father, and this coroner had told him

that I had been trying to find him. So he called me and we talked, and I suddenly felt better that here was another son who had been seeking a father, and I didn't want that father to go unfound. What I find, well, what the son's reaction is is in the book.

actual road trip. What did you actually think would be had would be gotten from going on a road trip with your son? What would you what would he get out of it? What would you get out of it?

And I wanted, you know, before I came to the end of my own life, I wanted to be able to give him the most precious thing I've got, and that's my own time, because it was the thing that I missed the most in that period when after my between the divorce and this trip, it was the one thing that was missing.

sounds and the experience itself. Did you, in your mind, in your in your in your literary imaginary mind, did you envision that Formatt?

come true. I didn't really entertain that it would have been unwise, but I did hope that along the way that that whether it was just an alignment of stars or something that I would say, or something that would be said to him, or maybe something that he just saw a fleeting past past as we were driving, would stick, and that it would that it would make sense to him, and that that maybe in some way he'd say, hey, Dad,

I get it now, and it's okay now. That never happened, really, not at least in so many words.

I do that might break that rhythm, that might break that cycle while I have him? What can I say? What can I do? What can happen that we maximize the chances that someday he won't leave his own son or daughter, and that we will have we will have stomped that that terrible cycle out. And so those two

things began to boil around together for me. Meanwhile, he's watching Scrubs re runs on his you know, portable DVD and listening to heavy metal and flirting with the girls, or at least having the girls flirt with him, and giving me these occasional glimpses into him that were surprising, uh and challenging and again, and of course that's all described there, but I would say it would be safe to say I think that what I had hoped for and what I had expected probably didn't happen. But what

did happen was even more surprising. And so I think that it's a good example of, you know, being focused on one thing while something else wonderful is happening.

I know. The one moment I thought was quite humorous is that in the as you mentioned, the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Maintenance, there is a moment where they see a red winged blackbird and along the way, lo and behold there's a red winged blackbird and much to your dismay, Matt could care less, probably or it

does not get and so you explain it. Please tell us a little bit about that interaction there, and then tell us about one where you were surprised, where you did something profound did happen again to your surprise, maybe was uninspected.

I mean, is a very deep book. It goes into philosophy in these sort of complex turn but but it revolves around he and around him and his son making a run from I think the Dakota's across Montana to California on motorcycle, and the sun is much younger, I think about ten or eleven years old at the time of the trip, and Perzig, who had and it's a true story, persick had had a nervous breakdown in his life, and he he was he was concerned that that his insanity would be passed on to his child, and he

didn't want his child to go through that insanity. So there's a kind of a parallel there. Well, we're traveling across Montana on you know, sort of the beginning leg of this trip, and we do we see in in in you know, the middle of nowhere, here's a winged blackbird, a red wing blackbird, much like Persig had contemplated on his own trip and talked about his son, and it became one of the symbols of the story. So I

mentioned it to my son. He never heard of the book, didn't much care, if you know, if such a book existed, you know, And suddenly his writer father it becomes father again and wants to to tell the story and and for him to understand and to see the parallels, but he's kind of uninterested in that. And it's it. I think it's a nice little vignette of that every father feels at some point where he's trying to get something important to cross to a teenage a teenager and it's just not going to happen.

felt something. And there I remember in particular that one night he was he had a duffel bag and and I was moving it or something, and when something fell out of it, and I think, I say in the book that I would have been less surprised if it had been a bag of marijuana. Instead, it was a copy of a book by a guy, a writer named Brian Green, called The Elegant Universe, super Strings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.

pondering issues that are beyond his father. So again it's a little illumination of the difference between these two characters. And I think that ultimately the book kind of explores how men, even you know, fathers and sons, can be both comrades and competitors in the wilderness. Now maybe that's a physical wilderness, geographic wilderness. Maybe it's an emotional wilderness, so you get you, you know, just because we're father

and son, it doesn't mean necessarily that we're always comrades. Yeah, uh, sometimes we're competing. And I think those two those two moments show.

toes became frostbitten. They get home, his brother chops off the frostbitten toe, puts it in a jar of whiskey or rum, and they put it because it's winter, they put it under the floorboards of the cabin, where it stays for decades. This Dick Stevens is it buys that cabin from the elderly surviving brother who tells him the story, and indeed, as he's refurbishing the cabin, he finds that tow in the jar. He takes it back to his bar and it's it's it's just a conversation piece everybody's

talking about. They're joking around, and then and then somebody puts it in somebody's drink as a joke, and it dawns on him that this is a little bit like Robert serves his poem the ice Worm Cocktail, where they put a piece of spaghetti and a you know, tenderfoots drink and it makes him sick because he thinks it's an ice worm. And it became a thing, you know, that you could test your metal by by raising a glass I had this mummified human toe in it and

drinking the drink. Well, now they've made it into a tourist thing, although not every tourist who goes there is going to do it. So uh, it has become famous, or at least at least in the right circles. If you travel in the perverse grotesque circles that crime writers like I do, yeh, then then you know you hear about it. But so that I don't really even recall

how I've found out about it originally. And just like I say, it became a shared fantasy that we had that we were going to do this, and indeed we did.

is no darkness. And you know, it's a it is just a beautiful poetic thing, but it's it's absolutely true. And that's what we did. We we were in a camper van, uh, which we then did a little damage to because the Dempster Highway is is a bitch of a.

And but the the Toe Captain is sort of the MC, and he's the guy that keeps everything running and and takes your money and and gives you issues your certificate that that represents your your membership in the Sour Toe

Cocktail Club. Uh and uh, I'm proud to say my son and I are both members, which I think only means that we can we can always go back to the Sour Dough Saloon and drink the Sour Toe cocktail without paying the extra five dollars or something that it costs to have the toe put in your glass there. So it's a great money saver.

hurt that goes with it. Of course, at that point, I knew the hurt that went with it, and I was reluctant to take that risk again. So, you know, I think that the biggest thing was this epiphany that I had about the nature of risk and how I was perfectly willing to do some of the most risky things that humans do, and then perfectly frightened of risking

things that ordinary people do every day. So there was that I think that you know, uh, the book talks about in it in its way that reassures us that we don't need to repeat the sins of our fathers and then we can we can navigate our own paths quite well. And and that that, uh, there there are ways we we we're not we're not hostage to our history. So I think those are the two the two things.

You know, it's sometimes it just takes extraordinary courage to come out on the other side of a great sadness and to accept your flaws and to find love. And really, once you do that, putting a corpse toe in your mouth is pretty damny.

going to be mad because I don't get Pantera. Gon to be mad, be it.

you run and talking about your personal life. I think it's personal, poignant, humorous and profound, and I think it was a very enjoyable read and of course the follow up I get to enjoy having an interview with you, So thank you very much. Ron.