The bullies who run Michigan’s Oakland Township don’t want you to know that the man they’ve hectored and portrayed as a wily scofflaw is in fact an honest businessman filling several important roles in his community.
Here, reprinted with permission of the Detroit Free Press, is the October 24, 2001 article I wrote about Tom Barkham when I was a Free Press reporter.
DOUBLE CAREERS
PRESSING BUSINESS
STAYING TRUE TO HIS EARLY ROOTS, VETERINARIAN ALSO RUNS A CIDER MILL
BY JOEL THURTELL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, 10/24/2001
The phone rang at the Rochester Cider Mill last Wednesday with an emergency that had nothing to do with apples.
Mill owner Tom Barkham was showing off his 1878 cider press when he grabbed the phone and listened as symptoms of illness in a guinea pig were described.
Diagnosis from pet owner: possible cyanide poisoning.
Barkham, no ordinary apple smasher, had to leave the apples and drive to the Paint Creek Animal Clinic in Goodison.
There he’s Tom Barkham, DVM, 50, a 1974 graduate of Michigan State University’s veterinary school.
Most of the year, his job is diagnosing and treating sick cows, horses, sheep, dogs, cats – and the occasional hamster or guinea pig.
Barkham took on cider-making 22 years ago by accident, though some might say he came to apple pressing the way he got into animal doctoring.
Naturally.
Barkham grew up near Goodison on his family’s 80-acre farm. His grandfather bred cattle and sheep and grew hay and corn. Barkham worked around livestock and came to love the animals.
As an MSU freshman, he already knew he’d be a vet.
But as a kid he also picked apples for a neighboring orchardman, and his Cub Scout den had a fund-raiser. “We’d pick up windfall apples, gleaning the orchards,” Barkham said. The scouts had the apples pressed into cider and sold it.
As a new vet in the mid-1970s, Barkham converted a Goodison barber shop into an animal hospital.
But across the street was the more spacious Goodison Cider Mill. Maybe he’d turn it into a clinic.
Mill owner Lloyd Blankenburg said, “Why don’t you try running the mill?”
So he tried it. That was 1979. And the mix worked. Spring is the busy time for a veterinarian, with heartworm testing and delivering lambs, foals and calves.
So when the fall cider season arrives, there’s time for less pressing matters – like apples.
“You don’t get three o’clock a.m. calls for an emergency gallon of cider,” he said.
In 1990, Barkham sold the Goodison mill.
He had expanded his cider empire in 1981 when he bought a Rochester cider business after its location had been zoned residential. Township officials refused to let the Barkhams reopen the mill. Barkham sued, and a judge eventually allowed Barkham to run the cider mill for five months a year. Any kind of year-round store, such as a restaurant, crafts or antiques, is banned in the area, said Oakland Township Supervisor Susan Hoffman.
The cider business has stresses, too. Apples were once grown in nearby orchards. Barkham even tended an orchard, trucking the apples to his mill.
One year, he couldn’t find pickers and lost the crop. He quit tending orchards. Adding to the difficulty, the land surrounding his mill, once thick with apple trees, has been turned into subdivisions. Barkham now trucks his apples from orchards in Lapeer County.
Barkham prides himself on making a sweet cider with lots of body. He filters his cider, so the liquid contains little pulp.
Oakland Township has never had problems with Barkham’s mill, said Hoffman, who thinks fondly of the vet.
“He was the only doc who would take care of my pet pig,” Hoffman said, “And they have great doughnuts!”
As a vet, Barkham is eager to talk about how he cured Krueger’s dog of mange or how the guinea pig – thought to have eaten poison – instead had overgrown teeth which, when filed, allowed the animal to eat.
But then the vet hat comes off.
Jonathans, northern spies, mackintoshes, galas, red delicious and golden delicious all are part of the Rochester mix.
Barkham refuses to say how much of each apple variety he uses to make his cider.
“It’s a secret,” he said, grinning.
