Jerry Minnich
July 6, 1933 – March 27, 2020
Obituary
Writer, Publisher, and lover of Wisconsin, Jerry Minnich died in his Madison home on March 27, 2020.
Though born in Allentown, PA in 1933, he considered Wisconsin home from the year he arrived in 1965 to work as journals manager at the University of Wisconsin Press. He was a graduate of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he met and married Julia Cole, the mother of his two children. His prolific writing career began at Rodale Press where he worked as an editor and writer for Organic Gardening and Prevention magazines in the early 1960s.
While raising a family in Madison in the midst of the protests and upheaval on campus during the Vietnam War, Jerry worked with dozens of writers at the UW press, shepherding new books into publication. Both he and his wife Julia were deeply involved in the peace movement, the presidential campaign of George McGovern in 1972, and those of progressive city and state leaders from Rep. Bob Kastenmeier to Mayor Paul Soglin. He wrote and published six books on gardening and plant care, none more successful than The Wisconsin Garden Guide, a mainstay for Wisconsin gardeners and an inspiration for dozens of other regionally-based gardening books that have since been published coast to coast.
Longtime Madison residents might recognize Jerry’s name from the many reviews he published as restaurant critic for Isthmus from 1983 to 2004. His dining tastes ranged widely - from a deep appreciation of the Wisconsin supper club tradition (it was often said he never met a fish fry he didn’t like) to his celebration of the family-run Southeast Asian eateries that transformed Madison’s restaurant landscape in the 80’s and 90’s. As his friends and family can attest, eating out with Jerry was rarely a quiet or intimate affair, as he was continually chatted up by restaurant owners, wait staff, bar tenders, and apron-clad chefs who would introduce themselves and bring him a continual stream of delicacies from the kitchen, to which he never said no.
One of his greatest gifts was nurturing new writing talent, coaxing dozens of books from previously unpublished authors and discovering new Wisconsin voices. In 1990, he launched the Wisconsin regional publishing house, Prairie Oak Press, which he ran in conjunction with his third wife and love of his life, Kristin Visser. The two shared a love of literature, Italian opera, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the rural and woodland haunts of Wisconsin. Together they researched and wrote the regional travel guide, Wisconsin with Kids. Jerry and Kris also became key supporters of the Seth Peterson Cottage Conservancy and the Olbrich Botanical Society.
His many friends will remember him as a warm, generous, funny man, a loving father, and an abundant talent. He was preceded in death by his parents, his wife Kristin Visser (d. 1998), and his brother S. William Minnich (d. 2015). He is survived by a son, John C. Minnich, of Madison, and a daughter, Rebecca R. Minnich, of Brooklyn, NY; their mother, Julia R. (Cole) Morse died in 1999.