Mike Breneman, a larger-than-life personality who seemed to define the concept of the “colorful character” on the scene in Provincetown and Truro since the 60s, passed at his home early in the morning of January 21st, just days after his 80th birthday. The details of his unusual life, as pieced together from his own barroom storytelling and self-mythologizing, could barely fit in a novel but here we’ll try to get some of it down.
Michael Lloyd Breneman was born in Redding Pennsylvania in January of 1937 to Lloyd Breneman and Mary Kula. After his mother died of lung cancer and his father left Pennsylvania, he was raised solely by his widowed grandmother, an immigrant from Poland. He described these early years as hard times he spent mostly in the streets of Redding, which was still reeling from the Great Depression. He played sports and raised hell with other local kids, joining various street gangs and earning the nickname “Peanuts” for his small size.
After leaving school Mike ended up working in the coal mines, a typical trajectory in the area at the time. He hated the conditions but enjoyed the camaraderie of the miners, who would congregate in taverns after working long shifts and drink Rolling Rock beer mixed with tomato juice to help them cough up the coal soot. A tragic cave-in incident, which Michael narrowly avoided and which killed several of his colleagues, finally sent him out of the mines for good.
Michael served a brief stint in the Air Force during the Korean war, where, by his own description, he did little more than anger his commanding officers and play softball. In fact, Mike said that he had avoided dishonorable discharge several times only because the Air Force base softball team needed a shortstop.
Clandestine trips that Mike took into Philadelphia riding back and forth in empty boxcars opened his eyes to the cultural developments taking place in the city. He returned to Redding with an interest in jazz, the bohemian lifestyle and beat culture. Eventually he was able to open what he described as the first “beatnik coffee house” in Western Pennsylvania. This was a place where local young people would have had their first taste of espresso drinks and racially integrated socializing, to the consternation of the local parents and police. A moment of great pride for Mike was when the comedian Lenny Bruce visited his coffee house while in town for a show.
Eventually Michael drifted east, alighting for a time in Manhattan, where he worked as a waiter at Tavern on the Green and hung around the bohemian center of Greenwich Village. Around this time was when he claimed to have run-ins with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and other luminaries of the era.
Mike followed the hip set further out into New England, first wintering in Vermont and working at the legendary Chez Henri at Sugarbush, and then arriving on Cape Cod in the late 60s.
Mike’s arrival in Provincetown coincided with the countercultural explosion there. Hippies and freaks were streaming in and psychedelic and sexual experimentation was just beginning to ramp up. In his early days Mike was known locally as a barfly and a troublemaker, spending many nights in Provincetown jail and even earning the nickname “Cohab Mike” for being the last person in Massachusetts ever charged with the antiquated law of Cohabitation. Mike made many dear friends in Provincetown in the local countercultural, art and culinary communities. He worked in kitchens at Pepe’s and Ciro and Sal’s under the great Howard Mitcham who would become lifelong a friend. He rubbed elbows with painters, poets, Norman Mailer, John Waters, freaks, fishermen, and many other memorable characters.
Eventually Michael met his future wife Patricia McManus at the Old Colony where she had just arrived from Pennsylvania herself. They would go on to have two sons, Willy and Emerson. They built a house in Truro and Mike began his beach concession businesses, selling hot dogs and snacks from trucks. The best known of these, an red antique Chevy food truck named “Memories”, operated at Head of the Meadow beach for close to 20 years. “Little Mike” battled with the local government over and over during these years regarding these businesses and his other entrepreneurial endeavors. He relished the role of the rebel and outlaw.
Mike traveled extensively, returning many times in particular to Thailand to which he felt a special connection. He was a lover of sports of all kinds, music and movies, food and drink, women and good times. He excelled at games like pool, ping pong and poker. He was schemer, an entrepreneur, a radical anti-authoritarian and lover of the poor, the disenfranchised and the offbeat. His house in Truro became a kind of haven for a vast roster of renters over the years, and the site of many an epic party. In his later years his health declined, but he managed to stay in his beloved house until his last day through the work of his sons, whom he had exhorted “Never send me to an old folks home!”
He leaves behind many who will miss and remember him fondly, but goes on to join so many of his friends and contemporaries who left before him, local legends in their own right who made up the last of the bohemian wave on the outer cape.
Friends and relatives are invited to a Celebration of Mike’s Life from 1:00 to 3:00 pm, on Saturday, February 4th at the Governor Bradford Restaurant, Commercial St, Provincetown.