It was 1983, and two teenagers excitedly hopped in a pickup truck and set off on what, at first blush, seems like the plot line of a movie adjacent to “Dazed and Confused” or “Superbad.”
The last Friday bell had just sounded at their high school in a rural region of the Ozarks in Southeast Missouri, and the teens were embarking on an adventure.
They were headed to Evanston, Ill., to party with one of their older brothers who was in a Northwestern University frat. With visions of college parties in their heads and hundreds of pounds of firewood in their pickup bed, they set off north on a seven-hour drive.
One of the teens, Kip Kirn, 17 at the time, sold firewood in his community for extra cash and planned to sell a batch to homeowners near the university for extra spending money.
He knocked on doors and sold out in hours. Not one to miss an opportunity, he left his phone number with each customer, even though he didn’t know if he’d ever be back in town.
He then went to a frat party and slept on a small corner of a couch in an off-campus apartment.
“About a year later someone calls my house in Missouri and I hear my confused mother asking ‘What? Firewood? Chicago?’ and I said ‘Mom! Give me that phone!’” recalled Kirn in a folksy accent.
He has returned every year since — this fall marks his 43rd year — delivering firewood to customers from Hyde Park to Lake Forest. “I just turned it into a business,” said Kirn, who’s now 60 and delivers and stacks wood, mostly oak and cherry, seven days a week from Labor Day to the end of February. In the summer months he hauls massive loads of wood with a semi-trailer truck to a storage space he uses on a farm in West Dundee. In the colder months he rents a place in the northwest suburbs.
He has more than 1,000 clients. Customers have included notable figures, like former Chicago mayors, Super Bowl winning Chicago Bears and other recognizable names.
“I can go on and on with stories, but I keep a tight lip” he said. “Some are like family now, I’ve been to their home for Thanksgiving and one family even visited my farm in Missouri.”
Kit Woods, a retired Screen Actors Guild employee from Evanston, has been a customer for nearly 30 years.
“In 2019, my husband was shot during a carjacking, and Kip went above and beyond to help us,” she said, noting that he made sure the wood was easily accessible as he recovered. “I trust him, I just can’t say enough good things about him. He is a delightful human being. Almost everybody on my street now uses Kip, and we all look forward to seeing him.”
Kirn runs a cattle farm with his two sons, Cole and Conner, who both compete in rodeos.
“Most people I deal with are really nice, good people. Then there is the occasional nice person who’s just nice in a different way,” he said with a smile (about as far as he’ll go in describing a difficult customer).
He charges $175 for a 4-by-4-foot stack and can get to 16 homes on a good day. Lunch is an apple, an orange, a leftover piece of meat or a protein bar. Old westerns keep him company in the evening. He spends as little money as possible while carrying out his winter gig and balks at the price of necessities.
“Getting your brakes fixed in Chicago costs you a fortune compared to what it costs you in the country,” he said.
Kirn spryly jumped down from the back of his trailer on a recent day between making deliveries in Evanston.
“I’m slowing down a little bit, but I still go hard,” he said.