I never knew Dorothy Molter, but I wish I could have. I would think that an ice cold home brewed root beer at the end of a 15 mile canoe trip would be quite a nice treat. One of my favorite trips I took as a boy scout was a 50 mile canoe trip on Yellowstone lake. Sure, it was only sunny the day we arrived and the day we left with every day in between being rainy, windy, and generally miserable, but the serenity of propelling yourself over a glassy lake in the middle of a national park wilderness even just for one day, made enduring the rest of the trip worth the effort.
It's memories of that trip that fuel my crazy desire to build my own cedar strip canoe someday, even though I've rarely been on the water since and my woodworking skills are mediocre at best.
So that's what makes this story all the more intriguing to me. I envy those canoers of four decades ago who had the pleasure of making this stop to take a breather and enjoy a root beer in the expansive lakeland wilderness of Minnesota.
And while you can still visit the Dorothy Molter museum (https://www.rootbeerlady.com/) and get yourself a root beer there, it seems like it wouldn't be quite the same.
The world needs more Dorothy Molters. I remember as a kid there was an older gentleman in our neighborhood that the kids ask knew as "the cookie man". He was a grandfatherly type that would always bring his cookie jar to the door when kids stopped by and knocked. With the world we live in, that would terrify parents today. It's sad to see what direction the world has gone. Would there be rooting in the streets if there were more of these type of people in the world? Would we be bitterly divided if this type of honest charitable giving were acceptable and not considered creepy? I don't mean to wax political over homemade root beer, but how do we get this back?
