Self-disclosure: I’m writing this column late at night, in my home, where I’m drinking a beer from an Old Depot Restaurant and Pub stein. It’s a good, full-bodied beer, but I’ve had better. The ale we toasted with a couple of weeks before my friend Kevin Rice’s Adel brewpub closed in 1996 springs to mind. Kevin died May 12, and tonight’s beer is hoisted in his honor.

I didn’t know Kevin as long, or perhaps even as well, as some of his colleagues at Heritage Cablevision, where he was a senior vice president until its sale in 1991. I knew him as an entrepreneur who gambled his Heritage severance package that as he played out his dreams in Adel, other businesses would prosper and residents would eagerly support his venture. Some did, but many couldn’t get past the “village idiot” remark.

The words fell out of his mouth in frustration during one of many ridiculously long city council meetings on a tax increment financing district to assist in the rehabilitation of a couple of historic but neglected buildings for his brewpub. It reinforced the worst fears of the people targeted in the remark: This guy was not only threatening Adel’s wholesome existence with his “big city” ways (for the love of Mike, he was a farm boy from tiny Lodi, Ohio), but he also thought he was quite a bit smarter.

In the deafening silence that followed came the sure knowledge that the village idiots, or whatever one might choose to call the critics of brewpub plan, would never forgive him. He could sink a couple of million dollars into the meticulous restorations, execute extravagant Oktoberfest and brewpub festivals, stage a “draught” poll to measure candidate strength in the 1996 presidential caucuses and otherwise sponsor activities that would reverse the tide of traffic from the metro area to Adel, and the “village idiot” remark would follow him – I say this only because I think it would amuse Kevin, who liked gallows humor as well as the next person – to his grave.

It was a fabulous time. The Old Depot, a symbol of what could be achieved by thinking big, was where we gathered to discuss the important milestones and inconsequential events that shaped our lives. It was there that I said the newspaper I worked for had won the state newspaper association’s highest honor, and, a year later, that it had been sold, and there that we toasted the new owners. A couple of years later, it was where I announced that I’d quit my job and, a year after that, that – no joke – I was moving to Fairfield.

The Old Depot was where we pooled our money to buy the Madonna “Sex” book. It was a huge disappointment. The last I heard, it had a therapeutic purpose at an area nursing home, where some of the residents were having sexuality issues – that donation deemed more appropriate than giving the book to the public library in the name of a local citizen activist group. That’s where we aided and abetted Kevin in his plan to save the USS Iowa with a commemorative beer known as “S.O.S. (Save Our Ship) Amber Ale.” It was a grand idea and evidence that Kevin’s mind soared to heights many people don’t even know exist. The plan should’ve succeeded, but Kevin’s own ship was taking on water.

The whole thing – the restaurant, the brewery, the USS Iowa project – ended badly, in bankruptcy, sweet revenge for some of the people he had called village idiots. Perhaps they’ll forgive him now. He tried, something naysayers rarely do, and it was a fantastic ride while it lasted.