Impressing Ghosts^™

Impressing Ghosts™ is a deeply personal memoir about family legacy, entrepreneurial obsession, and the dangerous belief that persistence can redeem the past.

For more than a century, the Dorn and Kilburn families were connected to Vermont's beverage industry. My great-great-grandfather, Michael C. Dorn, built a business that eventually became part of Coca-Cola Bottlers of Vermont. Generations later, I inherited no factory, formula, or fortune. Only photographs, family stories, forgotten bottles, and the nagging feeling that something important had been abandoned.

I decided to bring it back.

Synopsis

Impressing Ghosts follows my decade-long attempt to revive a forgotten family beverage legacy.

Dorn's Venetian Beverages, Burlington VT

Working from fragments of history, I recreated Venetian Ginger Ale, brought the brand back into production, built an audience through festivals and unconventional marketing, and opened the Venetian Soda Lounge in Burlington, Vermont. Along the way, the project consumed money, time, relationships, and more of my family's life than I understood while I was living it.

The book moves between two timelines: the history of the Dorn and Kilburn families and the modern effort to resurrect their legacy. Old factory photographs, Coca-Cola memorabilia, cemetery visits, family stories, and archival discoveries collide with the less romantic realities of manufacturing, distribution, debt, marriage, parenthood, and operating a hospitality business.

My wife, Anna, and other members of my family contribute their own perspectives, sometimes correcting or rejecting my interpretation of events. Their voices reveal the distance between the heroic story an entrepreneur tells himself and the life experienced by everyone standing beside him.

This is not a prosecution or a tidy victory lap. It is an attempt to understand what I believed I was building, why I could not let it go, and what that determination cost the people who were still alive.

The ghosts were never asking to be impressed.

The Story Behind the Book

The project combines memoir, business history, archival research, and family testimony. It documents both the romance and the wreckage of entrepreneurship: the exhilaration of reviving something forgotten, the community that forms around a meaningful idea, and the moment when perseverance quietly becomes a refusal to face reality.

M. & F.C. Dorn Bottlers, 260 Pine Street

The book works through:

• The Dorn and Kilburn beverage businesses in Vermont
• The family's connection to Coca-Cola Bottlers of Vermont
• The rediscovery and revival of Venetian Ginger Ale
• The creation of the Burlington Soda Plant and Venetian Soda Lounge
• The financial and emotional consequences of an undercapitalized dream
• The experience of the family living beside the business
• Grief, legacy, and the death of my father
• The difference between perseverance and sunk-cost thinking
• The question of who a legacy is actually meant to serve

Manuscript in Development

Impressing Ghosts is undergoing continued editing, fact-checking, archival research, family review, and legal review before publication.