I learned this morning that singer/songwriter Richie Havens passed away yesterday. There was a short excerpt about him on the news, during which they played a recording of his opening set at Woodstock in Bethel, NY, in 1969. (Coincidentally, I’m heading to Bethel Woods tonight for another venue. Bethel is only a 25-minute drive from Beach Lake.) Although I was too young to attend that concert, I did, in fact, have two opportunities to see Richie Havens perform live. While att

Many of you reading my blog may not know that in the period between selling Beach Lake Bread in 2007 and resurrecting it as Beach Lake Bakery in 2012, we were living in Montclair, New Jersey. (Brian still spends most of the week there, where he works at his other business, selling bakery equipment.) Montclair is not the kind of sprawling, suburban strip-mall town one typically associates with New Jersey. Sometimes referred to as the town with two zip codes, it is essentially

Running your own business can be rewarding for a number of reasons. First, you’re creating a product or service that someone presumably has a need for. Second, being your own boss means that you’re the one in control, and you alone make and are responsible for all the decisions, whether they be good ones or bad ones. Third—and this pertains to our business in particular—when you’re in the market for someone else’s product or service, you can sometimes barter your own product