Paul Bader was some sort of a creative and mechanical
genius, although he would never admit to that distinction. In discussions with him over the years about
his varied projects, he would invariably say to me somewhere during the talk,
“You know Brad, it’s not rocket science!”
Well, what he was working on may not have been ‘rocket science” to Paul,
but it was to many of the rest of us.
Paul came
to the Kickapoo Valley entirely by chance in 1970. He and a friend were looking to buy some land
in rural Wisconsin and took a trip to Bayfield County to look over a real
estate offer overlooking Lake Superior.
It was a gorgeous piece of land, but in the end a little pricey for
Paul’s wallet. On the drive back to
Milwaukee, they took a little detour down the Kickapoo Valley and found it
interesting.
Paul
stopped at a realty office in Richland Center, left his friend in the car, and
soon was riding with the realtor through La Farge to look at a parcel of land
on Green Hollow Road. The old farm
buildings were pretty well shot, but the view from the little ridge at the top
was great. And the price for the
property was right! By the time that
Paul and the realtor returned to Richland Center, a deal was struck.
Soon Paul
was dabbling with an old sawmill operation on his Green Hollow property, trying
to make it provide a living for he and his wife, Marcia. “But wood and I never got along”, said Paul,
so he switched his emphasis to metal and opened Green Hollow Enterprises – a
metal fabrication and welding shop. Paul
was always interested in working with metal and had started making his own
go-karts when he was only ten years old.
He enjoyed
using his hands working with metal and noted that a person gets a lot of
satisfaction from designing something; building it, and then watching it work
the way that it was intended to. (Parts
of this story are excerpted from an article written by Paul Beckstrand, writing
for the La Farge Epitaph – August 6,
1975 issue.)
Stove
making came about almost by accident for Paul.
In the fall of 1974, he got four unsolicited orders to make wood
stoves. Paul designed a wood stove,
which came to bear his name – the “Bader Burn Right” – BBR for short. It was a good design and burned wood for
maximum heat efficiency. According to
Paul, one of those stoves went into a new house that Orville Jenson was moving
into. Orville, then the manager of Nuzum’s
in La Farge, loved his new BBR stove and told everyone he saw about this new
stove being made out on Green Hollow.
Paul always contended that Orville’s testimonial created a demand to
build more stoves. In an interview a few
months before his passing in 2013, Paul told me, “Shoot I built four of those
stoves and then it just wouldn’t stop.
We ended building over 12,000 of those stoves and it still wasn’t
enough.”
The “Bader
Burn Right” was not envisioned as a permanent solution to the critical energy
shortage of the 1970s. “Wood heat is
only an interim solution”, said Paul.
Although he did point out that, according to recent statistics (from
1975), thirty-three million homes could be heated with the waste from logging
and sawmill operations. Over forty years
later, near the end of his days, Paul was still envisioning a way of using that
logging and sawmill waste to heat the homes and businesses of the Kickapoo
Valley.
When the
Kickapoo Stove Works began in the mid-1970s, Paul and his colleagues envisioned
solar and wind power as a more permanent answer to America’s energy problems,
and the group wanted to get into those areas of production also. Paul noted, however, that moving into solar
and wind power would take time since they would need to do most of their own
research, as little official research was being done in those areas.
After Paul
built those first four wood stoves in 1974, the demand for the very efficient
BBR called for an expanded operation so more could be produced. In 1975, the Kickapoo Stove Works Corporation
was formed to meet that need. Five people
worked on producing and selling the stoves in that first year of the Kickapoo
Stove Works operation. Paul and Marcia
Bader joined with Tom Betten & his wife Eva and George Wilbur to inaugurate
the little stove making company.
A goal was set to make 400 BBR
stoves in that first year. The stoves
continued to be assembled in Paul’s shop in Green Hollow, but a store building
(the old Martha’s Restaurant space) was rented on La Farge’s Main Street to
help with storage and shipping of the finished stoves and to provide space for
a showroom. George Wilbur headed up the
selling of the stove from that Main Street location; Marcia Bader kept books
for the fledgling company, while the Betten’s helped Paul with making the
stoves. Priced at $400 per stove, the Kickapoo
Stove Works BBR soon was a hot commodity as people sought alternate heating
options during the oil shortage of the mid-1970s. The little stove company could not build them
fast enough and expansion was needed.
Working with the Village of La
Farge and the newly created Economic Development Commission, the Kickapoo Stove
Works began to initiate a plan to expand its production capabilities. But it was a difficult time to start a new
project in La Farge. The community
seemed to be in a constant turmoil over the on again/off again dam project;
there was several major disputes with the state Department of Transportation
over the opening of the new State Highway 131 and the closing of the old state
highway; two new bridges were being built by DOT across the Kickapoo River at
Seelyburg and Andrews Flat and disputes arose over both projects, and lastly,
the village seemed to be in a weekly battle with the state DNR over zoning and
flood plain mapping. There was little
time or energy left to talk to these “Hippies” about their wood stove
production needs.
But the BBR stoves were being
ordered faster than they could be made and the space on Green Hollow was
overwhelmed with the orders. Seeking
help in the manufacturing end, the Kickapoo Stove Works rented space in a
building in Viroqua by the fall of 1976 and had hired an additional 10 people
to help with the production of the stoves.
At peak capacity in the new Viroqua assembly plant, 60 stoves could be
made in a week. With retail outlets
expanded to Viroqua and then Madison, the demand for stoves still overwhelmed
production capabilities.
Interestingly, an editorial written
by publisher Lonnie Muller in the September 22, 1976 issue of the La Farge Epitaph, lamented over the loss
of the KSW plant and jobs to Viroqua. Lonnie
listed all of the problems then currently facing La Farge and admonished the
village leaders to step up and draw the stove works company back to La
Farge. The editorial seemed to have an
effect because in the next week’s paper, Al Szepi responded with a letter
saying that Kickapoo Industrial Development, Ltd., La Farge’s fledgling attempt
at economic development, was entering into talks with KSW about locating in La
Farge.
In 1975, Paul & Marcia Bader, Tom & Eva Betten and
George Wilbur formed the Kickapoo Stove Works Company (KSW). The move was made to expand the possibilities
for the production of a wood stove (The Bader Burn Right – BBR for short)
designed and first built by Paul in the fall/winter of 1974/75. Paul had originally built four of the stoves
in his welding and machine shop located in Green Hollow a few miles west of La
Farge. In that energy-crisis time of the
mid-1970s, his efficient wood-burning stove was soon in great demand. For the first year of operation, the young
company set a goal to manufacture 300 stoves.
To make
that many stoves the fledgling wood stove company needed to expand their
operations beyond its Green Hollow beginnings.
First, KSW rented office, storage and display space on La Farge’s Main Street
in the former Martha’s Restaurant building.
The young company also looked for more space in La Farge to manufacture
and assemble the stoves, but none could be found. By the fall of 1976, space had been rented in
a building in Viroqua and five more workers were hired to help in assembling
the new stoves. With the added
manufacturing space and increased work force, up to sixty stoves a week could
be produced. Eventually, 495 new stoves
were produced in that first year of increased production in 1976-77. But more production space was still needed to
meet the demand for the popular new wood stove.
In the fall
of 1976, KSW began negotiations with the Village of La Farge and a new
industrial development effort in the village.
Al Szepi, President of La Farge’s new Kickapoo Industrial Development
Corporation (KID), wrote a letter to the La
Farge Epitaph newspaper in September that outlined preliminary efforts to
construct a new stove works manufacturing building in the village.
By November
of 1976, Paul Bader announced that KSW had plans to build a new manufacturing
facility to be located in one of a possible four locations - La Farge,
Readstown, Viola, or Viroqua. Intense
negotiations between KSW and the new La Farge industrial development
corporation and the village board followed with several meetings held in
December. By mid-January of 1977, the
industrial development group led by officers Al Szepi, Phil Stittleburg and
Kent Steinmetz announced that plans had been initiated to secure a federal
Small Business Administration (SBA) loan to pay for construction of a new
building to house the stove works manufacturing operation. In addition, the development corporation was
negotiating on the purchase of land in La Farge where the new manufacturing
plant could be built.
As those
plans for a new building in La Farge were being negotiated the wood stove
company moved forward with expansion on their own. In February 1977, KSW purchased the Chase
Mercantile Building from Finn Johannesen.
The large Main Street building, where KSW had been renting space
previously, greatly increased the space for offices and for storage and display
of completed stove units and other wood stove burning products that KSW was
then offering for sale.
Later in the month, KID President
Al Szepi announced that the Kickapoo Stove Works would be moving their
manufacturing works to La Farge by the summer of 1977! Szepi added that KSW would be moving into a
new $140,000 building located in La Farge that the industrial development group
would be constructing. KID had taken an
option to buy land in the northern part of La Farge for the building and an SBA
loan was being arranged to help pay for the project. At the same time Szepi announced that the
industrial corporation was raising $14,000 as a 10% match for the SBA loan by
selling $10 shares of stock in KID and offering $1,000 debentures on the building
project. KSW would lease the
manufacturing building from the development corporation and the lease payments
could be applied towards eventual purchase of the building.
The industrial development group
purchased four acres of property from Bill and Irma Gilman in May 1977. The parcel of property along Mill Street was
just north of the La Farge Co-op’s fertilizer storage facility and across the
street from Calhoun Park, La Farge’s baseball field. Besides raising the matching money ($14,000)
for the project, the industrial development group also secured a loan of
$77,000 from the La Farge State Bank in May to begin construction of the
building. In addition, an SBA loan of
$49,000 was used for the project.
As the financing for the new
manufacturing building was taking place, construction on the project had
already begun. Fill for the building
site was trucked in during late April and actual construction began shortly
after. A cement foundation and floor was
laid before a fabricated metal building was constructed on the site. The building was completed by the end of June
and featured space for construction of several different models of the BBR then
being produced. In addition, the
building had loading piers on both ends for bringing in parts needed for
manufacturing and sending out the finished stoves on semi-trailer trucks.
An open house was held at the new
stove works manufacturing facility on July 4, 1977. Over 200 people attended the open house that
featured lemonade on the warm summer day, tours of the new plant and music by a
band singing folk music.
By the end of the year, nearly 20
people were working at the manufacturing plant producing the standard BBR wood
stove, the original BBR parlor furnace, the BBR home furnace, and a cabin model
BBR. The stove was still being sold as
fast as it could be made from both the La Farge KSW store on Main Street and another
store on Madison’s Fish Hatchery Road along the capital city’s beltline.
In addition, KSW developed a
catalog that was mailed to potential customers.
The catalog featured photos and descriptions of all the different models
of BBR wood stoves and other items essential in burning wood for heat. The front cover of the KSW catalog featured a
color photo of a Kickapoo River scene.
On the inside of that cover of the initial KSW catalog, George Wilbur
wrote an introduction for the catalog titled “Heating With Wood”. In the introduction, Wilbur wrote, “ Wood
stoves and furnaces are the tools that give us access to the warmth-giving
energy of the sun that is locked inside of every tree. Because wood is economical, readily available
and renewable, it is fast regaining its old popularity as a heating fuel. If you now heat with gas, electricity or fuel
oil, a switch to wood heat may give you enough savings in fuel cost to pay for
your stove or furnace in one heating season.”
Paul Bader’s stove was a big hit
and eventually, the BBR would be sold at over 30 different locations around the
state of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest.
The workforce at the KSW facilities in La Farge eventually would grow to
nearly forty people with an annual payroll of three-quarters of a million
dollars. Nearly twelve thousand BBR wood
stoves were produced from that new factory building on the north side of La
Farge.
