The Asbury Park Press, the sole remaining newspaper in this part of the state, published Hermann Winkelmann's Saga.

At age 65, Hermann Winkelmann is still a formidable character, bigger than life, from the top of his Stetson to the tips of his boots.

...

He was a big man in the community then. He owned Winkelmann's, a famous restaurant and banquet hall on Route 9. He also owned the butcher shop next door and a liquor store and a lot of land. His vision was to build an entire Bavarian village, a destination complete with hotel, microbrewery, bologna factory, the works. "Something like Busch Gardens,'' he says now.

Twenty-five years ago he belonged to various civic organizations. He gave to all sorts of charities. He sat on boards. He drove a nice car. He lived in a big house, with his wife and his two children.

Now he lives in the woods, with his dog.

On Thursday, Hermann Winkelmann moved into his new home, a tent in a clearing about 150 yards from a busy street. Steve Brigham, a local minister who cares for the homeless of Lakewood and Toms River, set him up with the tent and a cot and enough propane to run two small heaters and a stove.

...

He is in a highly emotional state, sitting in his new tent on the coldest day of the winter thus far, recounting the story of his life, as he remembers it. Sometimes he gets the years confused. Sometimes you wonder how good his memory really is. Not that it matters all that much.

The facts are simple enough: Once a poster boy for the American Dream, the man now sleeps in the woods, where people dump their bald tires.

He is living proof that the American Dream and the American Nightmare are at once separated and connected by a delicate thread.

We are only human, after all.

...

Hermann Winkelmann was born in Germany in 1942. His father was a butcher. The family had a farm 20 miles north of Hamburg. They were Jews, he says, but he was baptized Lutheran. In any event, "Hitler never bothered us,'' he says.

He came to Lakewood in 1961, by himself. He went to work for a man who knew his father in Germany, a man who had a septic tank business. "I worked on a honey wagon, 95 cents an hour,'' Winkelmann says. "That was my first job.''

His second job was in a butcher shop. "I loved it,'' he says. ""It was air-conditioned.'' But when he asked for a raise, to $1.10 an hour, his boss turned him down. Winkelmann decided it was time to go out on his own.

He bought his first acre of land when he was 21, he says. At 24, he had his first butcher shop. Two years later, he bought the liquor store next door. Meanwhile, he continued to invest in land. He had a vision.

In 1972, he opened his restaurant, 300 seats, with 40 stools at the bar. It became a popular place in town. Soon, he would expand. Eventually, he would need 185 employees to run this operation. "Mother's Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, never less than 1,400 people,'' he says.

...

[He had borrowed money from a local bank to expand his business.] The bank, the largest in Ocean County at the time, eventually was subjected to a federal investigation and seized by regulators in 1991. A lot of good this did Winkelmann. By 1991, he had lost his business.

"They threw me out, fired all my butchers, my bakers, 80 banquet waitresses, bartenders,'' he says. "We used to throw elegant parties, fit for a king, people said. Oysters Rockefeller, coho salmon, baby lamb chops...Now it was Chapter 13, and Chapter 7...''

Then, one cold morning in 1989, the police came to his home in Mantoloking and took him away in handcuffs. "I never felt so poor,'' he says. "People in our neighborhood must've thought I was Mafia.''

He was committed to the psychiatric ward at Lakewood's Kimball Medical Center, where he had once served on the board of directors. "I was willfully, deliberately and criminally declared manic-depressive by a shrink in Toms River,'' he says.

He bounced around from doctor to doctor over the next few months, from medication to medication, until "I was stuttering and drooling'' as he puts it. He wound up in Texas, at the Cooper Clinic, arriving in a wheelchair.

He had lost his business, he was losing his family, now they were telling him he had lost his mind as well. For Hermann Winkelmann, the American Dream apparently had run its course.

Fifteen years ago, he resurfaced. He had opened a new butcher shop in Lakewood. The Press ran a front-page story, on Oct. 10, 1993. "Starting Over'' was the headline. There was a big picture of him. "Bigger than Clinton,'' he says.

In 2002, he ran for Congress as an independent, with no success. He ran again in 2006. According to the Web sites that keep track of such things, he sank $10,462 of his own money into his last campaign, spent $9,697 of it, and came away $1,585 in the red, which sounds like the story of his life.

"I was a Republican, then I turned Democrat, then I got disenchanted with both of them,'' he says. ""I'm fed up with them. They're a bunch of crooks.

"I'm not a politician, I'm an honest man.''

This was true, some will tell you. He always trusted people, maybe too much, one of his former employees says. People used to take advantage of him.

He was also loyal. One time, in 1988, he told several people he was selling his Mercedes to meet that week's payroll.

The Bavarian village would never materialize. His wife would divorce him and get remarried and move away. The kids would side with their mother. "They got mad at me for some reason or another,'' he says.

This is how he sees it. It's not necessarily how things are.

There's no right or wrong in this story. No one is at fault. No one is judging anyone. Somewhere along the line, something went terribly wrong, and now a man who once had 185 people working for him is living out in the woods.

The other day this same man pushed a shopping cart from Point Pleasant to Lakewood, he says. ""Ten miles,'' he adds proudly.

Hermann Winkelmann is a smart guy. He's a guy who has been around, who speaks four languages fluently. He knew how to run a business. He knew how to make money. He knew how to spend it, too. He was generous. He could afford to be.

The man had it all.

Then, something happened.

Now he sits in a tent out in the woods. He still blusters at times in that thick German accent, and he still plays the part of the rugged individual, the cowboy. But the waves of emotion too often give him away.

Yet, he remains a proud man.

Asked if he thinks of himself as homeless, he doesn't hesitate.

"Absolutely not,'' he says.

Asked how long he figures he'll be here, he doesn't miss a beat.

"A week,'' he says, ""tops.

Hardly the image of the homeless usually offered by the media.