Ed Janus

Who is Ed Janus?

Ed Janus is a writer, independent audio journalist and oral historian. He has lived in Madison, Wisconsin for over 40 years where he is well known for having brought baseball and world-renowned beers to that city.

Janus was born in Washington, D.C. in 1945 and was graduated from Lake Forest College in 1968 with honors for his thesis on the dramaturgy of political demonstrations. He worked for a year as a community organizer with The West Side Organization and the Southern Christian Leadership Council in Chicago in 1966-67, where he was deeply influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eschewing an academic career, Janus became a city bus driver in Evanston, Illinois and later a dairy farmer in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin where he and his partners milked 30 cows and plowed, planted and harvested 250 acres. As he writes in his book, Creating Dairyland :

Janus was a member of the Phoenix Fellowship, a group whose members were well known in Madison as the creators of the Ovens of Brittany and Bakers Rooms, restaurants that changed the landscape of food in Madison.

In the early 1980s Janus led a group that brought professional, small town baseball back to Madison after an absence of 40 years. Madison Muskies Baseball became more than a game; it became a summertime outlet for community-based zaniness. So popular were the games and the zaniness, that CBS Nightly News, CNN and National Public Radio reported on them.