Legendary restaurant serves up lots of ales, tales

By NEIL MUNRO
The Daily Oakland Press
Web-posted Sunday, April 11, 2004
Reprinted with permission

You know you're getting old when everything reminds you of something from your checkered past.

So it was last Sunday, when we published a story by our food writer Douglas Levy about Schuler's restaurant in Marshall. It is celebrating its 95th birthday.

The legend really began with Winston "Win" Schuler's stint at the helm, beginning in the late 1940s.

In my youthful years, that decade and the '50s, Schuler's probably was the most well-known restaurant in outstate Michigan. And Win, as he was universally known, was the quintessential host.

If you'd been anywhere near Marshall and hadn't had dinner at Schuler's, you clearly were not "with it."

Win Schuler's path and mine crossed in the '60s when I was a Grand Rapids Press reporter and he was chairman of Michigan Week. We met at the Schuler's restaurant in Grand Haven, where he prevailed on me to drink a "yard" of ale, and explained that the tall, boot-shaped glasses were designed to be easily passed up to thirsty stage drivers.

They hold a lot of ale, I'm here to tell you.

Schuler always told a good story and was as great a promoter of the state as of his restaurants.

A few years later, I found work at the Battle Creek Enquirer, whose offices were just five miles from Marshall. Once in a while, I'd drive there for lunch.

Schuler said the literary quotations I admired on the ceiling beams of the dining room were inspired by his early days as a school teacher. But the most unusual yarn concerning the restaurant is one he never knew about, or not all about.

While in Battle Creek, I assigned a story about an inmate in the Calhoun County jail who was there voluntarily. Unusual, wouldn't you say?

It seems he'd turned himself in to local authorities as one of two men who'd taken $20,000 from the safe at Schuler's at gunpoint. They were professionals who lived in nice homes in suburban Chicago, staged a couple of robberies a year and had been doing this for several years.

They weren't greedy. It was a nice, easy living. Their guns never were loaded, he said, to be on the safe side. Then our man fell in love. His bride-to-be said she didn't want to live with the possibility of his being arrested hanging over their heads. So, he dutifully made the rounds, confessing his crimes.

Calhoun County was the last. The authorities were grateful, bemused and happy to let him plead guilty to something that called for minimal jail time, if any.

After he was released, he did some writing for the Enquirer and was good at it. But he mainly sold carpets, and was good at that, too.

We both ended up being guests at a wedding reception for an assistant county prosecutor, of all people, at Schuler's. It only had been about two years since he'd robbed the place!

Only in America.

I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've dined at a Schuler restaurant throughout the years. There even were two in Oakland County in the '70s, on Rochester Road and on Maple Road.

Next time I'm near Marshall, we'll do it again, and lift a glass to my old friend the armed robber.

(Neil Munro is editor of The Daily Oakland Press.)

Return to Schuler's Ink Home