The Old Man had earned a reputation as a man who found answers and told stories. Reclusive and curious, he split his time between a small house in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and a rustic cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Two benefactors had asked him to investigate old mysteries; he did so, and then he wrote about them. In 2023, he published THE OUTHOUSE PAPERS, uncovering long hidden and uncomfortable truths about Rhinelander’s celebrated mascot. The following year, he unearthed a century-old murder while investigating the curious history of Harry Lester, Rhinelander’s celebrated 20th-century ventriloquist. He told Lester’s story in THE WOODENHEAD in 2024.

With mysteries solved and books written, the Old Man decided to revisit an abandoned project that had been bouncing around in the back of his mind for over a decade. The project was to tell Romaine “Mickey” Sadowski’s story. Mickey had grown up during the 1950s above Chicago’s Sadowski’s Funeral Home and had, in her later years, shared some fascinating memories with the Old Man. While combining notes from their conversations with letters provided by Mickey’s daughter, curiosities arose, and twists emerged. What began as a simple biography transformed into an intriguing story that connected foggy memories with mobsters, and Chicago with Rhinelander’s Birchwood Resort.

Like the previous two volumes in The Old Man series, the third installment, Caskets in the Basement, effortlessly blends yesterday with today and fact with fiction to tell another captivating story from the Northwoods.