Like history? A lot of people do. How about Upper Peninsula history, with a focus on the cherished activity of deer hunting?

“I’ve been trying to find a way to capture and preserve my family’s hunting history because it has been a really big part of our family for generations,” said George Twardzik, a Copper Country outdoorsman, business owner and host of the Bucks & Booze podcast, for a recent Mining Journal story. “Last year I bought a voice recorder to record the stories that my family tells gathered around a coffee or a beer.”

The Bucks & Booze podcast was developed after a fire last fall razed his family’s hunting camp, and with it, the invaluable journals the family had kept over the years.

“We had kept those journals for years and we ended up losing all of that,” Twardzik said. “I had been listening to more and more podcasts so I wanted to do this to capture the things we had lost as best we could. I thought, there are so many other people and other families that hunt and that it would be fun to create a podcast, put it out there and just see how it goes.”

Twardzik says that hunting stories are not only a great way to be entertained, but can also be a way to capture precious oral histories of the U.P.

“When you get someone to talk about something in their comfort zone, whether that’s hunting, sports, reading or whatever, you will have other things creep in and pretty soon you are getting a history of the area,” Twardzik said.

Twardzik says the goal is for the podcast to come out weekly, with three episodes already published, he said for the Journal story.

Podcasts are a very old format that has, for reasons unclear, found favor in the digital age. We recommend people look his up and see how it is.

Bucks & Booze can be found on most major podcast platforms, such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

— The Mining Journal, Marquette