Anthony Williams is a bit of a celebrity. But probably not the kind you think. His fame comes from fungi.
Back in the 1970s, the morel mushroom was becoming popular in the gourmet restaurant scene in the U.S., and Tony knew where to find them. He was an expert hunter and picker. When Tony won national mushroom competitions, places like Sports Illustrated wrote that he “galloped the ridges like a maddened bull.” The Petoskey News Review said he "hunts morels like a bird dog stalked birds."
Today, Tony gives talks across the Midwest, openly sharing what he knows about morels — how to look for them and how to collect and store them. But there’s one thing he absolutely will not share: his spots. These are places in the woods he returns to year after year where he finds morels regularly.
So, why won't Tony show anyone his spots except his closest family?
Credits:
Host: Dan Wanschura
Producer: Maxwell Howard
Editor: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Peter Payette, Dan Wanschura
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: Tony Williams is a bit of a celebrity. But probably not the kind you’d think. His fame comes from fungi. Back in the 70s, the morel mushroom was becoming popular in the gourmet restaurant scene in the U.S… and Tony happened to be a guy who knew where to find them.
WILLIAMS: I was starting to getting calls from Seattle and New Orleans and New York. I was getting calls from cooking shows.
WANSCHURA: When he won national mushroom competitions, places like Sports Illustrated wrote about him quote “galloped the ridges like a maddened bull.” The Petoskey News Review said he hunted morels quote “like a bird dog stalked birds”.
WILLIAMS: And it kind of dawned on me, well, this is a big deal, man.
WANSCHURA: Tony goes on speaking tours across the Midwest. And he shares what he knows openly … how to look for morels… and how to collect and store them.
But there’s one thing he absolutely will not share: his spots. These places in the woods he returns to year after year where he finds morels regularly.
HOWARD: Would you take me to one of your spots?
WANSCHURA: That’s our producer Maxwell Howard.
WILLIAMS: I can't… I think I’ve told you before, I would never take you to one of my spots. No, I just don't do it.
HOWARD: Not even if you blindfold me and take me?
WILLIAMS: No. I have kind of gone through a procedure similar to that where I drive around in circles doing interviews… just so they wouldn't be able to remember it.
WANSCHURA: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura. Today, why Tony won’t show anyone his spots – except his closest family. Maxwell takes it from here.
MAXWELL HOWARD, BYLINE: Tony’s spots go way, way back – over 130 years – to Tony’s grandpa Homer.
HOWARD: Could you tell me a little bit about your grandfather Homer? What was he like and what was your relationship?
ANTHONY WILLIAMS: Grandfather Homer was the legend of the family. He's a family legend. My grandpa was six eight. He played for the Detroit Tigers in the 1890s. When he was 13 years old, he ran away with a circus and was gone for two years, and his parents never heard a word from him, and then he brought morel picking into the family.
HOWARD: Back in the 1890’s, Homer moved to Boyne City, Michigan. The place is a tourist town now – but when Homer arrived, it was a lumber boomtown. Lumberjacks flocked there for work and the county’s population doubled from five to 10,000. There was just one problem.
WILLIAMS: All of them were all men.
HOWARD: Tony says just a few women would come to town. And they wouldn’t stay long.
WILLIAMS: There was two ships that were boats of prostitution. ... And there were two floating bordellos that went around the tip of Michigan, and they would pull into port and drop anchor, and the loggers would row out. And my grandfather met a woman on this boat, and her name was Minnie Wilds, and she worked on this boat… and he got her to shore and married her.
HOWARD: Once they were married, Homer and Minnie started exploring the woods. Minnie knew how to forage for morel mushrooms. And she started teaching Homer.
WILLIAMS: She drew my Grandpa Homer into it. They were only married for about six or eight years, and she left him, but she- what she brought to my family is indelible.
HOWARD: Even after Minnie left Grandpa Homer, he kept morel hunting. He was hooked. As Homer logged deeper into the woods for his day job, he started collecting spots too – places he came back to for decades to harvest morels. Eventually, he remarried and had children. He took Tony’s father foraging. And then, Tony’s father took him.
WILLIAMS: The first time I went with morel picking was when my mother was pregnant with me, and the next year I was on my dad's shoulders.
HOWARD: Tony was the youngest of six – and his parents would take them all out together. The kids would race around the woods looking for these unique looking mushrooms.
WILLIAMS: Yeah, what does a morel look like? Well, actually they, you know, (sigh)
HOWARD: They’re not the classic umbrella shape. They’re small – a few inches tall.
WILLIAMS: Five inches is a big morel.
HOWARD: Shaped more like a pinecone.
WILLIAMS: Cone shape comes to a peak.
HOWARD: But textured like a honeycomb. They come in a range of colors, but in northern Michigan the most popular ones are blacks and blondes.
WILLIAMS: And as a family, we would go take a picnic, spend the morning picnic picking morels, ... and then pick all afternoon, and then go home and prepare it as a family in the kitchen.
HOWARD: They’d wipe the mushrooms of any stray dirt, chop them up. And soon, the smell of morels sautéed in butter would drift out of the kitchen.
WILLIAMS: In my family, it was morels and butter period. We ate them like crazy. We ate them in piles, you know. … It was a ritual that we had to live every spring.
HOWARD: That’s because morels only come to specific places, deep in the woods in the spring. They only pop up for a few weeks, and only when the conditions are just right.
WILLIAMS: It has to be really wet. So if we have a dry spring, it'll be a terrible morel picking season.
HOWARD: Morel mushrooms are part of an underground root-like system called mycelium. And the morels that pop to the surface are the system’s fruit.
WILLIAMS: Once I see a morel, I'll start searching out that mycelium patch… and I'll spend maybe 10 minutes there, maybe two hours, if the picking is really good.
HOWARD: Morels can be found across the world, but in the U.S., they’re especially concentrated in the Midwest and the northern part of both coasts. When you’re looking for a morel, first you look for the trees. Trees like poplars, elm, ash, and apple. Morels often grow near these.
WILLIAMS: It's a treasure hunt. Sometimes you don't find any treasure, which is okay. It's great to be in the woods.
HOWARD: Tony was still a kid when his Grandpa Homer gave him one of his morel spots. His grandpa was 91, and he knew he was dying.
WILLIAMS: The spring before his death…my older brother got his first car, and my grandpa said, “Hey, boys, let's go for a ride.”
HOWARD: While Tony’s older brother drove, Grandpa Homer gave directions – leading them out of Boyne City to Chandler Hill, this place he logged as a young man.
WILLIAMS: And we went in the woods with our bags, and we came out with each a bag and a half. So we took three bags of morels out of this place in about an hour.
HOWARD: It was a decent haul to walk out with. And since then, Tony has held onto that spot.
When Tony grew up, he stayed in Boyne City and started different businesses. He ran a restaurant with his sister for a time. He built log homes and furniture. He started an art gallery – which is where you can still find him today, standing behind the counter. Tony is 75 now, with gray hair and a beard, and he’s often smiling like someone just told a great joke.
Tony kept hunting morels and got really good at it. There was a National Morel Mushroom Festival in Boyne City. It’s the most famous morel festival in the U.S.
WILLIAMS: So I joined it and won.
HOWARD: He won five years in a row.
WILLIAMS: After five years, the organizers asked me if I would quit. They said, “Would you mind retiring from this? You're discouraging a lot of people.”
HOWARD: Years later, in 2005, a documentary crew came to the festival and highlighted Tony. Even then, he was talking about keeping his spots secret.
WILLIAMS, DOC AUDIO: And the system I use is when people are in my secret spots, I keep myself hidden and make large gruntal animal noises to scare them. Many occasions I've scared people out of the woods.They don't know the hell it is. They just know it’s some animal, that they don't know what it is, and they leave.
(Williams grunts)
You know?
HOWARD: Like his Grandpa Homer, Tony collected his own spots over the years. One way he’d do this was by driving around northern Michigan and finding old apple orchards. He was sure to get a decent haul of morels this way. And then, one year, what he found was almost unbelievable. It was cloudy and threatening to rain as he went out to an orchard. He had just a few bags in his pocket.
WILLIAMS: And I didn't even realize I was in the motherlode until both my paper bags were full…and then I'm filling the next white plastic bag. … And it dawned on me the morels were still everywhere. And it was like, “Oh my god, I’m in the motherlode.”
HOWARD: The motherlode is like pitching a no-hitter or getting a hole in one. You might find it once in a lifetime of morel hunting.
WILLIAMS: And I ended up taking off a long sleeve t-shirt and tying knots in the sleeves and filling a t-shirt – all the arms. And then I took off my pants and tied knots in the bottom of my legs– my pant legs, and filled my pants with morels.
HOWARD: Wait, so are you in your underwear then? Is that what you’re saying?
WILLIAMS: Yeah, and I came out, and it was raining, and I came out of the woods in my underwear doing everything I could. … I had four bags full of morels, a pants full of morels and a shirt full of morels. I mean, it was all I could do to carry this stuff. ... But it was incredible. It was a spiritual thing for me.
HOWARD: That’s when Tony started talking to his grandfather – who had died 20 years ago.
WILLIAMS: About finding the mother lode and about loving him. And, “Thank you so much. I had no idea, Grandpa. I’d forgotten what the motherlode really was.” ... And got emotional. I was literally crying in the woods in my underwear in the rain with more morels than I could carry. ... I know it's kind of funny. People are like, “Yeah, you're picking mushrooms,” you know, but when it goes deep into your family like that, it can have a lot of emotional ties.
HOWARD: For Tony, this is a big reason why he keeps his spots secret – the emotional ties from a lifetime hunting morels with his family in the woods. But the truth is, Tony wasn’t always so secretive. He got burned.
That’s after the break.
(Points North Fan Club invitation)
HOWARD: Tony Williams has always held his spots close to his chest. But one time, he let his guard down, which is where he learned his lesson.
WILLIAMS: I had a girlfriend 45 years ago, and I took her out to one of my spots, and we picked morels, and she… you know, I thought I was going to marry this girl. I was in love with her, but she was on the catch and release program. She released me, got a new boyfriend. Then she released him, and her new boyfriend got married and had two kids. And ten years after I had broken up with this girl, I was out in this spot that I had showed her, and there was her ex-boyfriend with his two kids, and his wife picking my morels. So I just keep my mouth shut. … Once you tell somebody, it's over, because they- next year, two years from now, somebody goes, “Hey, you want to go morel picking? Where do we go?” “Oh, I know a place.” And that's a place that you showed them. And then those people that they're showing will show their friends, and it just becomes overrun. And that's the secrecy of it.
HOWARD: So that’s why Tony won’t share his spots with hardly anyone. Not even his wife knows some of them. He’s given some to his children, but others are still secret.
HOWARD: Why wait any longer to show some of these last spots to your family?
WILLIAMS: That's part of the culture of it. You know, that it's a secret… And when I do pass these off, I don't expect them to tell anyone. I expect them to hold them close to their vest. I expect, in 50 years, they'll be doing a radio interview, and they'll go, “Yeah, I've got some spots I've never told my kids,” you know? And it's just part of the mystique of it.
HOWARD: It's almost like the longer you hold on to it, and the more of you that you put into the spot, it becomes more special, it kind of feels like.
WILLIAMS: Exactly, that's what makes it magical and sacred.
HOWARD: One spot has been especially important to pass on. That same spot Homer passed to Tony, Tony passed it to his son, who he named after his grandfather.
WILLIAMS: And it's spring, and something came over me, and I said, “Hey, Homer, turn left, turn right,” and I took him down. I go- I got him out of the truck, and I go, “What's-” he says, “What's going on?” I go, “Check this out.” I grabbed some paper bags, we go into that spot, and I showed it to him. … He said, “Dad, I can't believe you're even taking me here, because I know you have these spots that mean so much.” And I said, “Well, this is probably my – the closest one to my heart.” And my son started tearing up. He started crying. I could tell he was crying. And I patted him on the back, and I started crying. He was crying because I showed it to him. I was crying because I'm thinking, “Maybe I should have waited till I was 91 to pass this place off.”
And he looked up at me, and he said, “Dad, you're not going to tell the rest of the kids, are you?” He didn't want me telling his brothers and sisters, and I still haven't told them. I'm 75 years old now, but I know it's in safe hands.
HOWARD: These spots are gifts. They’re heirlooms – something as tangible as a grandmother’s diamond ring. Except that Tony’s children will get to experience that gift again and again as they go out each spring. And one day, they may even share that gift with their own children.
