Will Guthrie

William Guthrie grew up in the suburbs near Chicago as Brad Morgan. His middle-class life included a few oddities such as his psychic mother escaping marriage to a foreign CIA operative, his stepfather presiding over the Theosophical Society, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek (the U.S. Air Force’s UFO expert from Project Bluebook) regularly coming to dinner. But it was a fairly ordinary life until the streets exploded with the '60s cultural revolution. Peace, love and rock-n-roll were a lot more interesting than what was happening in the classroom.

Hoping to direct his creative energies towards art, his mother, Jo Anna, enrolled young Brad in the prestigious Francis Parker School in the big city, but it just brought him closer to the Chicago underground where the action was.

From dealing his old man's prescription drugs to scoring mysterious packages of hallucinogens through a mail slot at a Northside address, Brad ran wild and ran away, and after a classic fight with his stepfather, he hitchhiked across America to new and different experiences such as Albuquerque and peyote.

In the '60s, this type of scenario would end with a police officer retrieving the errant child and toting him or her back home at the request of the parents. But Jo Anna helped him when he got in trouble and let him run.

 As the summer of '68 faded into the winter of '69, Brad went home feeling like a very old teenager. Things were changing--not just for him--but for America.                                                                                                           ‎ Jo Anna was creating something America had never seen before. She purchased a 900-acre, spring-fed farm in Wisconsin, and was planning America's first authentic farm-to-table restaurant. It was a huge undertaking, but she was determined to bring the European dining experience to America. As she put the finishing touches on her Ovens of Brittany restaurant that utilized locally sourced ingredients, Alice Waters, with the same idea, opened Chez Panisse two thousand miles away in Berkley.  

  With lines around the block, Brad was thrown into a major overnight success story. The new restaurant captured him. In the midst of it all, Jo Anna insisted he change his name to William Guthrie, keeping her family name, and she would become JoAnnae, in deference to Scotland that inspired the creation of the restaurant. So it was; and the newly anointed William was married at 18.                                                                                                                                                                                                             ‎ Intrigue and treachery undermined the restaurant and eventually shut it down. Young William jettisoned to the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva where he began experiencing the intense, unpredictable life in America's high-end restaurant kitchens. Working his way up the ladder put him on the road to being threatened by crazy French chefs brandishing flaming hot pans in the dens of haute cuisine. But his street smarts landed him his own restaurants, and eventually his own novel idea. This is the story.