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Our website address is: http://montrosebeerandgunclub.com – Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/groups/49706224726
Three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year, the Montrose Beer and Gun Club is a gag. Like all great organizations, the beer and gun club started with T-shirts. Sort of.
Stories from the late ‘80s and the early days of the club are somewhat unfocused. Jim Sherman, a freelance writer and professional gardener living in the Fifth Ward, thinks he named the group. Certainly, a red-headed girlfriend was involved, as was Turton, who also was redheaded and a bartender at Rudyard’s. He remembers that Sherman’s girlfriend made the first batch of shirts and presented them at the bar with a short speech that went something like, “All you guys ever talk about is beer and guns, so, here.”The club was nothing but a joke, a belly laugh until Turton felt inspired one day and proposed the fundraising party. This was in 2000, and the first cook-off was held that June. The folks from Rudyard’s spread flyers around the neighborhood, and Turton promoted the party in his weekly column in a small alternative paper.
Turton being Turton, he didn’t simply mention the party and say, “Ya’ll come. Please.” Instead, he invented Helga Biermeister, supposedly the secretary for the beer and gun club. Week after week Biermeister spun interesting stories about the goings-on of various club members and why they couldn’t get together for meetings. Before long, Biermeister — and Turton — developed a following. Unfortunately, right before the first cook-off, the paper folded. And the club’s Web site went kaput. Not desperate but concerned, Turton approached Jerry Sumrall, the man behind KPFT’s Larry Winters show on Saturday afternoons (1 p.m. on 90.1 FM).
Perhaps, Turton suggested, Drew Bradford — yet another fictional member of the club — could read Biermeister’s club news on the air?
The idea was so crazy Sumrall went for it. Seven years later, the weekly reports might be compared to Garrison Keillor’s News from Lake Woebegone, but they are Texas-centric and five or six beats from mainstream. The first party raised $2,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of the Texas Gulf Coast and Louisiana.
“It was ungodly hot,” Turton remembers, “but somehow everything clicked. People loved it. It was a real, honest, grassroots expression of social consciousness. It was giving back.” Turton and his troops hope to raise more than $10,000 this year for the Make-A-Wish kids.
That would grant two wishes for children with life-threatening medical conditions, says Teri Andrepont, president and CEO. “We just think the beer and gun club is awesome.” The feeling is mutual. Turton tries not to get hung up on the amount raised every year, but he and the beer and gun gang — about 15 strong on the day of the party — love to hear about wishes granted. The New Jersey native has lived in Houston since 1969. These days he lives in a modest — “that’s an upscale word for it” — garage apartment. He rides his bike almost everywhere he goes, and he likes it when friends, neighbors, even strangers wave to him as he glides by. It’s fun to be Helga and Drew, Turton says, but it’s harder than it might seem to produce the weekly radio report. He writes it out in longhand, in pencil (“pencils are so expressive”), then he types and records it. Once Turton couldn’t think of anything to say and had to write that Drew ran to Helga’s house to get the minutes of the meeting, but Helga was out. When a maid answered the door, she said a dog ate her boss’ report.
Imagine that.
claudia.feldman@chron.com
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