Rod Eglash was always a man who neither stood still nor satisfied himself with doing just one thing. And so throughout his life he kept on moving and doing many things. But there was a consistency throughout his life, grounded in family and community while spurred by the nagging idea that our broken world could be repaired.
Eglash taught adults at the University of Wisconsin-Extension and children at the Golda Meir School, worked as program director at the Jewish Community Center and owned one of Milwaukee’s last standing locally owned video stores until 2008. But he’s best remembered for running one of the city’s beloved folk clubs from the 1970s, the Id & Eggo Coffehouse. It was where Larry Penn, one of the city’s prominent folk singers, found a home. At the Id & Eggo, Eglash discovered his own love for writing poetry. He published a chapbook in 1973 and immediately planned a sequel. He finally published it this fall, along with his memoir, as The Ego of Eggo.
“I started hearing, ‘Rod, you’ve got a book,’” he says, recalling the audience response for his impromptu Id & Eggo readings. “I had no training. I never studied poetry. I was in social work, but by 1973 I had a lot of poems.” But afterward writing sat on the back burner for many years. “I was immersed in my life, my children, my grandchildren, my jobs—I always had several!” Retirement after the closing of his video store, plus badgering from his son Joel, an editor by trade, gave him the time and the impetus for The Ego of Eggo, which looks back on growing up on Milwaukee’s West Side (where anti-Semitism was often undisguised), his wife Helen (who arrived from Europe’s displaced persons camps after World War II), fatherhood (“I have excessive demands and expectations of my own children”) and the ’60s-’70s folk music scene—among many other thoughts.
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“Everything I did was interconnected,” Eglash says. “I followed the mission of making a mark—of contributing to my family and friends but also to my community and to society.” He remains an unapologetic refusenik from the ’60s, “I was always anti this and anti that. I never wanted to trim my values, which amounted to giving back to the world, to contribute to the betterment of the world.”
The Ego of Eggo is on sale at Woodland Pattern Book Center, Boswell Book Co. and—of course—Amazon.
