Hassling the cider man

By Joel Thurtell

It’s hard to imagine how a little cider mill operating in a rural setting in northern Oakland County, Michigan, could threaten the elected officials of Oakland Township.

Yet the township board of Oakland Township has dragged Rochester Cider Mill owner Tom Barkham into court, charging him with criminal activity for —

Are you ready for this?

For selling Christmas trees.

Somehow, Tom Barkham has threatened the august authorities in Oakland Township by selling yuletide decorations.

What could be more American and, yes, more Christian, than retailing Christmas trees, and yet the powers-that-be in Oakland Township have cost Barkham, a veterinarian and master cider-maker, thousands of dollars in legal costs for, of all things, selling Christmas trees.

Selling Christmas trees at a little cider mill in the boondocks north of Rochester, Michigan.

Somehow, the sale of Christmas trees at a cider mill founded long before this township became a bedroom community has become a fly in the ointment for local government martinets.

Today, in Oakland County Circuit Court, Tom Barkham could be fined $7,500 for criminal contempt.

Oh yes, he’s also charged with selling firewood and tickets to a corn maze.

The man is a real danger to the community: Christmas trees, firewood and corn maze tickets.

At the very tail end of a Detroit Free Press article about Barkham’s troubles with Oakland Township, Barkham is allowed to have a word or two.

“Sometimes, like someone once told me, if someone has a little power, they like to use it,” said Barkham.

In this case, some penny-ante township officials have the power not only to railroad a small business operator into expensive litigation, but they also know how to bully their way into newspaper columns.

This is America, after all, a country where journalists habitually see the world through government-tinted eyeglasses, where reporters and their puppet-master editors swallow government spin and wantonly pillory private people who have somehow stumbled into the crosshairs of officialdom.

Spoonfed journalists will lecture you about their reverence for “balance,” and then to demonstrate their “fairness,” consign the flimsy pretence of “balance” to the final two paragraphs of a pro-government story. Which is exactly what the Free Press did with the Barkham story.

But let me ask: What the hell difference does it make to Oakland Township whether Tom Barkham sells Christmas trees at his cider mill?

Or firewood.

Or tickets to a corn maze.

Who cares?

And by the way, are Christmas trees so far unrelated to apple cider that they should be banned from sale in the yard of this business that has operated, with minor interruption, since 1947?

I’ll tell you who cares: pettifogging government bureaucrats with a control fetish. Township muckamucks who’d rather see their landscape littered with tract houses and big box stores than pay homage to a traditional business like pressing apples into cider. Government toadies who can’t see that a little family-run cider mill is a positive attraction in their increasingly yuppified and uglified bedroom community.

I’ve seen the same bullshit in Canton Township. In the 1960s, Canton Township was still known as the “sweet corn capital” of Michigan. Today, Canton is a mind-boggling mess of tract houses and commercial development where one family still manages to raise corn. The Hauks have Mary’s farm market at Ford and Beck that has suffered harassment from township zoning officials simply for being what they are — a roadside store that sells fruit and vegetables, including sweet corn they raise thesmelves.

I should note, though, that the Hauks cultivate their sweet corn in Washtenaw County, outside the jurisdiction of Canton Township.

For some reason, people who move from cities into the country don’t like to see vestiges of the agricultural economy and culture that once ruled their area.

And so, like Mary’s Market, the Rochester Cider Mill is having troubles with government factotums who’d rather homogenize their landscape into single-family homes and jettison all signs of the rural past.

Now, I’ll tell you flat out: I like Tom Barkham. And I like his family. They work hard running the Paint Creek Animal Clinic and the Rochester Cider Mill. As a Detroit Free Press reporter some 10 years ago, I wrote articles about their cider business.

The Barkhams make the best apple cider in the world. I still have gallon jugs of their holiday cider in my freezer, and I’ll be sad when we’ve drunk the last drop.

I’d be even sadder if the township government, aided and abetted by the Oakland County Circuit Court, achieved what Tom Barkham suspects is their ultimate goal, as he stated in the next-to-last paragraph of the Free Press article: driving him out of business with their incessant and petty  legal nitpicking.

I have a question for the power brokers in Oakland Township:

What’s wrong with selling Christmas trees at a cider mill?