for the love of betty

Lika-Krbava County Coat of Arms

The two most commonly asked questions I get from customers is where and how did I ever learn to bake such a nice pie.  The short answers to both is that baking is in my blood.  This familial baking tradition was born in the Croatian mountain town of Lika, where my great grandmother first plied her craft before moving with her family to the United States and passing down her knowledge to her eldest daughter Mary.  Mary was my Baba (Croatian for grandmother) and she passed her knowledge on to my own mother.  There is also commercial historical precedent here - Baba sold lemon meringue and coconut cream pies to her brother-in-law Paul's ice cream parlor in Gary, Indiana back in the 1950's.  I grew up thirty years later loving pie because of my mother's and Baba's incredible efforts and numerous offerings.  Yet this response remains one-sided and insufficient. Please accept the following lengthy digression as my official response. 

During the winter and spring months of 2009 before I became the Pie Guy I was just another dude struggling to make ends meet.  I had started dating a girl earlier in that summer of '08 and was desperate to impress her.  I was living on Missoula wages, which is to say I couldn't afford much in the way of formal entertaining so I decided the most economical and thoughtful approach would be to develop my cooking and baking skills.  So I cobbled together a chicken pot pie with help from my coworker Sandy and her perfect pie crust recipe.  Fortunately, the girlfriend loved it and a month later I baked her another and it turned out even better.  Yet despite this tangible culinary progress our relationship was reaching its terminal limit.  She would soon be graduating in May and was destined to move on to bigger and better things as I was left to myself, struggling to finish my own degree work and mired in a less-than-rewarding job with a newly sick dog.  

Betty Lou Vilnius came into my life in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2004.  At that time I was living in Kaunas, with another ex of mine, teaching English as a second language.  I taught most of my classes at night while she (the ex) worked the day shift which meant she came home each night by herself in the pitch black darkness of a Lithuanian winter to an empty flat.  It was only after a few weeks of this set up before I became convinced having a dog for her to come home to would be best.  Besides, she and I talked of getting a dog from the outset of our relationship.  We even went so far as to buy a collar and a leash and have a name ready, Betty, months before we would even meet her.  As fate would have it, a coworker tipped us off to her neighbor's litter of purebred American Pit Bull Terriers that were available up the road just a hundred kilometers in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital.  

I liked the idea of having a domineering animal presence in our home and out around the block yet she was open to the idea of adopting a Pit Bull more than I was.  I grew up with two Labrador retrievers, Clifford and Domino, while she grew up with a Shih Tzu named Mitzy.  Admittedly, I‘d been scared off by the media and its many representations of all things savage and deadly when it came to the breed so we both did a lot of research online and consulted with more than a few of our animal-loving friends.  We came away from the fact-finding process confident these dogs were not preternatural assassins as well as confident in our mutual ability to raise one properly having raised dogs of our own before.  The most interesting fact we learned about the breed was that its biggest purebred defect was its notoriously bad skin.  Undeterred and with no small amount of preparation, we took a bus to Vilnius and found our Betty.  Having long ago deferred naming rights to my ex for the first name, I chose Lou for her middle name in honor of the great baseball player, Lou Gehrig.  

Betty Lou Vilnius from the jump

We brought Betty Lou Vilnius home at six weeks old on October 30th and rather than hyphenating surnames we bestowed upon her 'Vilnius' to honor the city of her birth.  She was the tiniest and sweetest thing I’d ever seen and I was impressed by how close she clung to my side at all times.  From that day forward, when the ex was at work it was my job to raise and train our precocious pittie.  I was living the dream in a foreign country in love with a beautiful woman, happily teaching English to Lithuanian adults, with a puppy that adored us both all the while kicking it in a relatively posh flat in the Old Town neighborhood of Kaunas.  

The dream would be short-lived for as far as me and the lady friend went, despite having met on Valentine’s Day, our charmed and newly international relationship was slowly trending downward.  As things deteriorated interpersonally between the two of us, my bond with Betty became my saving grace (along with my newfound inclination to log all of my experiences abroad in a journal).  Roughly one year later when it all went down between me and my ex, she told me that Betty was mine to keep.  I certainly understood why she offered her to me in the custody battle (I did all of the dirty work) but I couldn’t understand how she could possibly give her up.  As it stood, I was the only person in the world responsible for that sweet little pit bull puppy cuddle attack and needless to say I felt beyond obligated to care for her.  

A large part of that care entailed tremendous vigilance and dedication as Betty developed horrible allergies over the course of the first year of her life.  It turned out she was allergic to dust mites, most trees and most grasses.  As a child I, too, was riddled with allergies and my unique ability to empathize with her plight was just another loving harpoon sunk into my heart reeling me in further towards endearment and devotion.  

When I first brought her to an American veterinarian more than a few of the technicians thanked me profusely for not giving her up for adoption.  Agape, I asked how they could even say such a thing.  The vet techs all stated plainly how most people give up dogs with allergies because of the time and money involved.  They suggested these families only wanted the “perfect” pet, not one with such obvious flaws as allergies that would, as in Betty's case, sometimes cause her to chew on her toes until they bled, scratch the fur off her ears and face, leaving her neurotic, sometimes angst-ridden and always totally dependent upon me to relieve her stress and suffering.  

Betty sparring with my foot

Suffice it to say, she’s been by my side ever since.  Having traversed back across the Atlantic, she was there as I studied for my graduate school entrance exam and she was there when I got my acceptance letter into the University of Montana’s Graduate Literature program.  She was there riding shotgun as we set our course for Missoula and she was there as I adapted back into academic life and she was there as I labored through drafting my Master’s Thesis in those dark and lonely winter months of 2008.  

Then sometime in April she got sick.  Despite seeming fine overall - we would go on our usual morning walks, our usual after work hikes and our usual late evening bike rides - she had been vomiting once a week for three or four weeks.  By Memorial Day weekend, I made up my mind if she were to vomit again I would have no choice but to take her to the vet.  Sure enough she threw up again that weekend and upon professional examination they discovered she ingested a rubber chew toy that was small enough to be eaten yet large enough to fail passing from her stomach to her small intestine.  This indigestible object dramatically increased her body’s white blood cell production thus causing the intermittent vomiting.  She had surgery immediately and was home within two long days.  On her first night home she was noticeably uncomfortable and the following morning she was lethargic and her stomach was distended.  Cash poor as I was then, I didn't want to take her back to the vet unless I absolutely had to.  

I had to.  I remember it all quite vividly.  It was a gorgeous spring day laden with spectacular sunshine.  Betty was lying sullenly in the grass in front of our house and I sat in a lawn chair beside her reading Chekhov's The Seagull aloud.  Reading Chekhov always makes me feel better so I figured it was worth a shot.  I don't know if Betty was upset more with anticipating another one of Anton’s classically morbid and tragic endings or with my hesitation to seek further medical attention but it wasn't long into Act III when she began throwing up what looked to be water – turns out it was bile.  With that I whisked her away to the emergency vet clinic where they told me the sutures from the first surgery had ruptured and bile was pouring out from her stomach and into her abdominal cavity.  The doc told me her prognosis for survival was 50/50 and I became an emotional trainwreck.  Fortunately, she came through the second and final surgery fairly well.  Of course fairly well still meant she was emaciated with yellowed eyes and you could see her spine and tailbone clearly defined under her loose skin.  Nonetheless, I brought her home on June 2 which was significant to me because that was the birthday of my first dog, the chocolate lab Clifford.  I like to think Cliff was looking out for us that day.  

Betty home from the vet (2009)

About a week prior to the first surgery, I was attempting to make career moves.  I submitted my two weeks/resignation letter to my longtime employer and was setting out to take a job with a political organization that offered a higher hourly wage, health insurance and most importantly, room for professional growth.  It was much to my dismay then when the director of the program did not allow me to go canvass because I opted to ad-lib my lines rather than stick to the script.  To me it was important to be honest and genuine and not robotic.  Yet the director wanted robotic and my career in politics was over before it began.  As it was, I then had to stare down the thought of calling back the owner of the company I had just unsuccessfully tried to quit.

This was also the day before I was to pick up Betty from the vet so I decided before calling the owner to plead for my old job back that I needed to go for a long walk to mull over what the hell exactly was going on.  I chose to hike out in the North Hills just north of Missoula and about two miles in along the Waterworks ridge and no closer to making sense of anything, I came upon a raven flapping its impressively large wings close above me.  It was almost directly on top of me some fifteen feet, soaring higher then lower then higher again against a forty or fifty mile an hour wind gust.  It rolled its shoulder, bowed its left wing down while the right wing went up and then the left wing went up as the right wing dipped down and so on maintaining its glide gracefully all the while facing the westerly gusting breeze.  At that moment I thought how I had never hiked against such a strong wind in my life and I stopped to take in the scene incredulously.  The raven did this for probably only a minute or two but it seemed much longer to me being transfixed as I was on its every movement.  

After this enormous blackbird flew away and thinking about it as I made my way down the hill headed home I came to the conclusion that this jet black feathered messenger was demonstrating to me how to hold firm in the face of such strong resistance and turmoil.  It signaled to me to simply go with the flow, to not only face the resistance but to thrive in it and conquer it.  I’d never been good at (and still struggle mightily with) accepting things in my life beyond my control and this was another such occasion but after witnessing that awesome raven I was determined then more than ever to refuse to succumb to the emotional weight life was heaping upon me. 

When I got home I called the old boss lady and she was gracious enough to accept me back without me begging.  The next day Betty came home and while she was a shell of herself she was most importantly put back together by the vet soundly (minus twelve inches of small intestine) and she was finally back on the long road to recovery.  Adding financial injury to karmic insult, I was left to foot the bill for the two surgeries which totaled approximately $1,200 dollars.  Being the man of few means that I was, my friends suggested holding a fundraiser for Betty (for me).  Offended, I immediately refused the idea.  Five minutes later I flipped my stance and decided I had no pride left to protect and I needed to pay off the bill.  

raven totem

In certain native cultures of the pacific northwest, sighting a raven signifies transformational change in one’s life.  Ravens have a versatile and complicated reputation for creating life yet also feeding off of death.  Ravens play the role of tricksters, shifting shape and going between the human and the spirit worlds.  I wasn't sure whether this bird was showing off or instead illuminating matters for me when I was up in the North Hills that day but one thing was for certain: my life was about to change transformationally.

One June 13, 2009 the Official Betty Lou Vilnius Benefit Fundraiser was held at my home, "the Church" of Missoula's north side of town.  The Church, as its colloquially known, has been strictly secular since the 1960's after having served as the original home for the Foursquare Baptist Church of Missoula.  With the help from my brother from another mother/roommate/landlord-Church owner and abstract painter extraordinaire B Stew, we rolled out the red carpet for the community and they turned out for us.  The Benefit was comprised of a keg of beer, a cake walk and a silent art auction featuring thirty-five pieces of art supplied almost exclusively from my fellow starving artist friends, some of whom I’d been living with at the commune-like Church (like B Stew).  

I was in charge of running the fourth and final fundraising component, the bake sale.  For my part I baked five pies to be introduced for public consumption for the first time.  It was only just a few days prior I made my first fruit pie comprised of my two favorite kinds of fruit – blueberries and raspberries – for Sandy’s birthday (my coworker who shared with me her pie crust recipe).  It was the hit of the office birthday party and I began to suspect I might be on to something.  On the eve of the Benefit as I was baking the five Blueberry-Raspberry pies I had an aha! moment which was to market them as The Betty Lou-Berry Pie. Thankfully, the pies turned out great and were most importantly well-received.  Nearly $1,200 was raised and for more reasons than the monies raised alone, it was that day when I realized how great and caring the community of Missoula is and how at home I felt in it.  

Short on cash as I was and with a nifty name for my latest and greatest creation, I decided the next step would be trying to sell them at Missoula's #1 Farmer's Market - the Clark Fork River Market.  The rest, as they often say, is history.  On July 4, 2009 I began by selling three – I believe I came to the market with two Betty Lou-Berry’s and one Strawberry pie.  They didn’t look all that hot but they tasted great and the crust held up perfectly as advertised.  Three weeks later, I successfully defended my thesis thus completing my Master’s Degree in Literature at the University of Montana and closing out a very important chapter of my life.  

Back on the pie end of things, over the course of that summer I expanded the menu to include Huckleberry (the local northern Rocky Mountain mountain delicacy), Flathead Cherry, Peach, Apple and Strawberry-Rhubarb.  By the end of that first market season I was selling out of five or six pies and today I sell out of a dozen or more each weekend at the peak of the summer season. Never intent to rest on my laurels, the following summer I began experimenting with gluten-free flours because my dear friend, Maureen, has Celiac disease and sadly up to that point could never try any of my pies.  A few weeks later after some more customer feedback, I began trying vegan pie crust recipes so that my pies could reach across all dietary and lifestyle boundaries.  I was soon selling gluten-free and vegan varieties of the Perfect Pie Crust and the crust in all forms remains my number one selling point.

A healthy Betty and me (2012)

Over these past four years I have baked well over 1,000 pies and there are a legion of Missoulians and Montanans who only know me as the Pie Guy.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being the Pie Guy.  It offers me the ability to interact with the lovely people of this gorgeous mountain town community and it also provides me with a nifty sobriquet to help frame some of my own fictional writing/storytelling.  But in the end, I wouldn't be here without my Betty Lou.  I certainly wouldn't have become the Pie Guy if she hadn't gotten sick and I am eternally grateful for her bequeathing to me the PPG franchise.

So let it be said that Peter the Pie Guy was founded on and continues to run on the love of Betty.  In fact, my marketing slogan for the Betty Lou-Berry is that it's made with blueberries, raspberries and lots of love.  Truth is, all of the pies I produce come from my heart.  A true Pie Guy can’t just fake his way through a laborious and tedious process such as crafting a pie dough.  Whether it’s for Betty's (sometimes numerous) vet bill(s), Maureen's own health, or my vegan friends health and good consciences, every pie I make is unique in its inability to be replicated exactly.

pie = love

Yes I do feel it more for my family and my friends.  Baking for them is one of the highest forms of love I can express to them.  Now I know how my mother and my Baba must've felt baking for the masses of Cvitkovich's and Clavin's back when I was just a child desperate to get that first or final slice of Cherry Pie.  This is not to say the pies my customers experience during the market season are any less special.  On the contrary, I believe that is what sets my pies apart from all others, I use the same ingredients (although selling point number two is dramatically reduced sugar) more or less but the quality of my work and the emotional sincerity I imbue them with shines through on each bite.  Seeing a customer swing from cynic to believer in the first bite is a prideful moment that cannot be simulated any other way.  Lastly, to be able to engage the community, to be a part of and support the local economy of market customers and fellow vendors is just one of the many sweet byproducts of the pie biz.

So on this Valentine’s Day, I think it is important to remember that sometimes you can’t choose who you love, sometimes they just come to you and you have no choice other than to embrace them with open arms and do everything within your god-given abilities to help them.  Such was the case with me, as guided by the raven of the North Hills, when it came to baking and to my shamanic Lithuanian Pit Bull (and Fizzgig too).

Happy Valentine’s Day everybody.  I’ll leave you with a song from one of my favorite artists who just so happens to be one of the greatest guitarists, singers and songwriters around.  I feel its appropriate for the holiday, for me and my dog, my business and all of my family and friends who continually bless me with their love.  Right back atcha.

Thank you for reading.

-Peter the Pie Guy