We went to Webster School and got to ride the school bus. The stop was right in front of Leonard Schaeffer’s house. At least the stop I went to. My sisters went the other way on Auer up to 105th street. That was good. We shared different friends. I was in 5th grade when we started. I got beat up a lot and learned to run real fast.
From grade school, we went to the brand new junior high, Longfellow. Then the old high school, and finally the new high school. I had girl friends from Janice to Mary Ann. Really only two. In high school, I had a few others and returned to Mary Ann in my senior year.
My senior year, second semester was in 1961 and 1962. Different Pages.
In the middle of my freshman year at UWM, my parents moved to Boston and I moved into the dorm.
This history is most of what I remember growing up. I have added a neighborhood map to help with the visualization. It is how I remember it although the left-right scale is a bit elongated and North is to the right.
Caveat: I have written down what I remember but I do not always have the chronology straight. It is 50 years later and my memory does strange things.
We moved into the house and our first job was to lay the lawn. We all worked at this but it really was easy: we unrolled sod. The sod people had even included a golf ball for people who like to think their lawn came from and abandoned golf course. Fat chance.
Remember also in those days, fences were almost unknown. The closest we had to a fence was out neighbor to the south who had a privet hedge around his yard. This made retrieving baseballs (Whiffle Balls) difficult.
So. Now we have a nice green lawn. Elm trees, two
per front yard, line the street. In our back yard we have a
garden centered at the back of the
yard. My mother really wanted a garden.
Right behind us are the Godwins. You cannot tell from the map but the yards are not split equally. Imagine an alley running down the length of the block. There is an easement for the alley but there is no alley. The entire back is grassed. The alley easement belongs to the 105th street owners giving them an expansive back yard whereas we have a back yard about the size of the front yard. We have the garden. We also have a row of rose bushes along the back of the house. There is a well cap in the middle near the garden.
Well? We did have city sewers. We had power lines coming from the poles running down the alley easement. Same for the telephone line. We had our own water. There was no city water. The cost of the house included a typical well and the contract permitted additional cost if the well were a problem. It was not: we had a good well. These were called Artesian wells. The house had a basement. There was a pump in the basement. This meant the well was shallow. Deep wells require the pump be in the well. Everyone’s water was a little different. We liked our water. At some point in the future, after we left, the area got city water and the wells were closed. This was necessary as the water table then dropped and the water became contaminated.
We really liked this house. It had a green roof and the artificial rock was a sort of grey/salmon color. The two-car garage was on the north side – to the left as you looked at it from the street. That put the driveway on the left. The mailboxes were to the left of the driveway. The Hilty couple and their noisy Pomeranian dog lived next door. We never put two cars in the garage. The space was used for bicycles, lawn mower, junk.
There is what we called a breezeway to the right of the garage and the house to the right of that. These houses had basements with casement windows on each side and the back. The breezeway had a door on each wall. The front and back walls had windows on each side of their doors. There was a sidewalk that went from the drive to the front door and a sidewalk spur from that to the breezeway door. There are rain gutters around the roof. Windows in those days are wood framed. These frames have a separate window frame containing screens and another frame for the winter containing storm windows. One set on the other off -- taking a lot of room in the garage.
There is a small step up from the garage into the breezeway, which has linoleum tile on its floor. I do not remember the pattern. There is another step up from the breezeway into the house. The breezeway is good when you have children and you have a climate with winters and rain. This is where the boots and rubbers and other clothes to be changed get left.
As you entered the house from the breezeway, you entered the dining room. We had the same cherry table that we had had in Ypsilanti. Why not? It is a really nice table with folding sections on front and back. I think that my father’s mother gave it to us as a present. Cherry is really nice wood. There were matching chairs. Since there were five in our family and we all had chairs, I presume we had six chairs. I forget.
To the right of the dining room at the front of the house is the carpeted living room. This is the only room with a carpet. There is a front closet by the front door. If the closet had a back door, you would fall into the basement from the stairs. As it is, you enter the stairs to the basement from the kitchen. The front door is bleached oak with three circular windows in it. The door is to the left of the main picture window overlooking the front yard. There is a window on the near side of the room so that you can see people at the side door (breezeway). The TV is in the front corner. The sofa is on the wall to the left and a comfortable chair is to the right as you enter.
The dining room has windows to the back yard. Just past the dining room is the kitchen with a snack bar separating the two rooms. We have a phone on the snack bar. Spring 4-0593. No area code. The kitchen has a window over the sink looking into the back yard. The stove is on the right as you enter. The refrigerator is the first thing you see when you walk into the kitchen. It is the same refrigerator that we have had for as long as I can remember. The refrigerator has a door that opens to the right. Round corners. There is the freezer box at eye level. Eye level if you are an adult. The freezer box keeps the entire refrigerator cold and collects ice, which must be defrosted periodically. There is a bin at the bottom of the refrigerator that keeps the potatoes. Behind the bin is the compressor and lots of dust.
Just past the range is the door to the basement. After that is the hall. The bathroom is on the left followed by the girls’ room also on the left. At the end of the hall on the right is the door to my room facing the front of the house. The door at the end of the hall and slightly to the right being my parents’ bedroom.
These days houses have at least two bathrooms and probably another bedroom. In those days, this was a pretty nice house. We thought it was a great house.
There is a milk box to the right of the front door of the breezeway. These are sort of neat. They are about 18 inches square with a door leading to the front and another door leading to the inside. They each have a latch to prevent burglars from crawling through. This is not such a problem in those days as it is today. But then there are no milkmen today. There was a green rubber mat on the bottom of the milk box. Under the mat was the door key. Security in spades. My sisters were small enough to crawl through. You could fox the inside door latch.
My father and I built a rec room in the basement. It was a really nice room. We first added a good wall for the length of the house for the front half or maybe a little better than half. In the rear were the laundry and the incinerator. Ahhh. We burned our own trash those days. This was a luxury. It was my chore to maintain the incinerator. I was not good at chores.
With the completion of the rec-room wall, we got a second phone on the garage end of the rec room. The wall was really a nice wall. Half way up was made of finished pine boards, varnished and fitted. At the top of that was a ‘drink rail’. Above the rail was plasterboard with a repeated mural of the Grand Teton Mountain range in Wyoming. We added outlets along the wall. My father was really good at this work. I helped. I learned enough that at a much later date, I made a couple of these for myself. The really hard part was using the star drill to insert the lead anchors in the concrete floor. I learned enough to use masonry drills the next time.
My major contribution was the ceiling: 12” square acoustic tiles. This was a major effort for me. I had to place furring strips for the length of the basement. Then I had to place and staple the squares. These had to be perfectly aligned, row after row. I discovered that the front basement wall was not straight: it bowed outward in the middle. I originally used the wall as a rule and the squares ran into each other after about three rows. I had to remove these rows and do them over. When I was finished I was really proud of my part of the rec room. My father removed that pride in one easy step: he stuffed $40 into my pocket thereby making it his wall and not mine. He stuffed it in my pocket because I refused to accept it any other way.
While installing the ceiling, I added some wiring into the heating vent into my bedroom. From my room, I could ring the doorbell, listen to a microphone above the telephone area of the rec room, or listen to the phone itself. These all worked except that when I connected to the phone line, it generated a hum so that people could know when I was on the line.
I had a radio: a typical RCA AM radio. RCA radios had a plug on the back for auxiliary input. The microphone came through my radio. So did the phone. This was fun for a while but I soon lost interest. I mean, who wants to listen to their sisters when their sisters suspect they are being overheard.
On the long side of the rec room we had a ping-pong table. Chuck Krueger and I got really good at ping-pong. The only problem was the ceiling: it was less than seven feet high. There were no overhead shots. One time Chuck brought Ron Bitner over to play me. I thought I was really great. Chuck bragged about me. I beat Ron 21-0. He said I was good but not great. Chuck told him that I had beat him right-handed and that I was left-handed. I did not make any friends that day. Sad. Ron had a twin sister with a crush on me. I liked her also but I never knew how to show it.
The phone was a party line. Parties came and went. Our party for a while was a girl that we did not like very much. Using the phone after school became a contest. It did not improve our relationship.
You have to understand how phones work. The connection is on the red and green wires. This is for voice. For a party line, the yellow line is used for ground. Usually the black and yellow were tied off together. The cable has 4 wires: twisted two-pair if you really want to know. On a multi-party line, the ring determines for whom the call is intended. We were beyond that. We had a two-party line. On this type of line, the ring voltage came in on the red or the green and left through the yellow ground. One party had their phone wired straight. That is, wall-red to phone-red and wall-green to phone-green. The other parties phone was wired wall-red to phone-green and vice-versa. When the ring signal came in on the wall-red, one phone rang. When the ring-signal came in on the wall-green, the other party rang. One day I reversed our downstairs phone wires so that it rang on the party line. This way we could aggravate the girl. This was funny until one day we were upstairs and the downstairs phone rang. Mother ran downstairs to answer it and we rolled over laughing. When she came back up we asked her why she went downstairs to answer the phone rather than picking up the kitchen phone. She answered: “because that was the phone that was ringing”. I fixed the wiring fast. My father would never appreciate the joke. I had enough of a problem choking on my food one night at dinner when he asked my what the cable was that ran into the ceiling on the phone side of the room. I wonder what the next owners ever thought of the wiring into the bedroom register.
My bedroom was in the front between my parent’s room and the stairway to the basement. When we moved into the Wauwatosa house, I got a pine bedroom set and no longer had the green metal bed. My new bed was at the house front parallel to the stair wall. To the left was my bookcase (the one the neighbor made in Buffalo).
For quite a while I had tropical fish. I had two aquariums. The larger had my fish. Typical tropical fish: neons, angels, cats, etc. The smaller had my Siamese Fighting Fish (Beta Splendens). I was never successful breeding them although I tried. I had a good friend who raised fish and he got beautiful specimens for me. I had problems, money problems. I could only afford one air pump. I hooked an air line to the second tank from the first. This worked fine until one day, the water pressure from the higher tank overwhelmed the air pressure and siphoned water into the lower tank, One tank was on my dresser and the other on the bookcase. This was a disaster. The lower tank overflowed onto the floor, onto my acoustic ceiling in the basement and onto the ping-pong table. I cleaned it all up. I learned a little about physics that week.
You can find the people under friends or later in this page. I went to the school bus stop at Auer and Knoll Boulevard. My sisters went to the stop at Auer and 105th. My friends were generally to the west whereas my sisters’ friends were generally to the east.
If you look at a current map, you will see that 108th Street is no longer US 41. There is a freeway further west now that houses that highway. Next to Schaeffer’s stores on the corner, is the Shell station. By the time we left, there was another gas station across the street. Last I saw there was also a McDonald’s next to that. In general, the entire west side of 108th street has been developed since we left. The east side in our area is not because there are homes north of the stores and south of Burleigh is the Country Club.
When we moved into the neighborhood, there was a family grocery on the south end of Schaeffer’s stores. Remember there were no Circle K or 7-11 stores in those days. Shoot. There were no McDonald’s in those days. Schaeffer’s stores had a problem. 108th street was a three-lane highway. There was little parking for these stores and those passing through would pass the stores before they knew they existed. Most of the store traffic came from the neighborhood through the rear entrance.
Three-lane highways in those days used the middle lane for passing – in either direction. Obviously as cars became more numerous and faster, this type of highway became suicidal and therefore eliminated. I also remember from my early driving lessons that a flashing blue light on a vehicle meant that it was an emergency vehicle traveling the wrong way on the street. This was most likely a utility vehicle (power company). I learned that this was a Wisconsin thing. State laws were not so consistent in the 50’s. It took me years to figure out that those reflectors on the highways that now and then have an oddball blue one meant that that reflector was across from a fire hydrant. Well. Not quite. A kid had to tell me. This is beside the point since road reflectors are 40 years in the future from this narrative.
This is our immediate neighborhood. You can find it on any mapping software program. But we need the big picture here. In Milwaukee, there are 10 city blocks in a mile. Therefore, we are around 10 miles west of Milwaukee and 3 miles north of the city center. The next arterial street south is North Avenue, followed by Wisconsin Avenue and then Bluemound. To the north the next arterials are: Capitol, Hampton, and the Silver Spring. To the west, the next arterial is 124th Street. That is the end of the world when we moved here. The Briggs and Stratton plant is on the northeast corner of Burleigh and 124th Street. Briggs and Stratton make most of the lawn mower engines at this time. I hated them. They start so hard and, if you flooded them, you had to wait for them to dry out before trying again. Honda changed all that. To the east, the next arterial is 92nd Street, then 76th, followed by Sherman (approximately 43rd Street).
There are some zingers in here. The Menominee River runs from the northwest to the southeast and not in a straight line. The river crosses Burleigh at about 100th Street. It crosses Highway 100 just north of Keefe. You can think of it as a quarter circle bounding our neighborhood on the east and north sides. South of Burleigh it goes almost south for a few miles and then wonders east again as it passes through the downtown Wauwatosa. From Highway 100 to downtown on the east side of the river is the Menominee River Parkway. This is an arterial but it meanders a bit. There is a big green college campus on the south side of Burleigh from the parkway to 92nd Street. This is Mount Mary College. A Catholic girls school. We shall get there. Between the parkway and the river is park. Green, grass, trees, picnic tables, park. From Keefe to Burleigh on the west side is undeveloped. It is trees, and undergrowth and paths and hiding places. Sometimes we would see bow hunters in here. I think they should not have been here. Keefe would have been a semi-arterial if the river not cut it off. Our quadrant neighborhood was square streets with the exception of Knoll Boulevard, which would have been 107th by us but wondered around to cross 106th about 3 blocks north. From Auer to where it rounded east, there was a grass boulevard in the middle. Just as it turned, another road split off and went up the hill and then back down to Keefe where it ended facing the woods. The Menominee River Woods just ‘the woods’ to us.
I hope you have the picture here. It was a nice neighborhood. All single-story, ranch-type homes of limestone, lannon stone, or artificial rock, with little setback from the street. No sidewalks. No curbs. Mailboxes were on posts by the street. Our house was artificial rock with salmon and green speckles in it. The entire neighborhood was less than five years old except for the homes along Highway 100 -- they were not too much older. In fact, the neighborhood was under construction for most of the time we lived there. Ours was the last home on our block to be built. It cost $22,500. The original price was $21,500 but I think some extras raised the price. Down by the river were two-story homes and east of 105th street there were other builders with varying styles of Homes.
The Desoto was quickly replaced with a 1955 green and white Super 88 Oldsmobile from Renner Oldsmobile at 68th and Milwaukee. Like our other cars, it was a 4-door sedan. In those days, you ordered a car from the factory built to your specifications. New at this time was a choice of models that included ‘hardtop convertible’. My father considered these unsafe so we did not get one. A hardtop was different from a sedan. On a hardtop, when you rolled the windows down, there was no frame around the top of the door: like a convertible. Also remember there were no seat belts. My father worked for General Motors. You did not drive the competition.
So, now you know where our world was in respect to downtown, Milwaukee. You know the size of our world and I hope can picture this 1950’s yuppie community. South of Burleigh was the Bluemound Country Club which was a private golf course as opposed to the public, county park, Curry. We never ventured onto Bluemound. We spent a lot of time in Curry. South of Bluemound Country Club was what should have been Center Street. Center did not cross the Parkway. South of that became Mayfair Shopping Center. At the time, the biggest shopping center in the Milwaukee area. You really must picture the geometry here because this is where it all happened.
My father takes up hunting and fishing. He decides I should do this also. Back on Pewaukee Lake I had enough of fishing. I mean, the concept of trying to outwit a hungry fish and losing makes me feel really more stupid than I have been brought up to believe that I am. Trying to outwit rabbits, squirrels, pheasants, and foxes is not much better. I get a 16-guage, single-shot shotgun. My father has a 12-gauge that his friends refer to as a blunderbuss. I think my father enjoys this. I enjoy the walking outdoors but not the hunting. Obviously we start hunting not in 1954 but a few years later.
One time we are out hunting foxes with my father’s friend, Doctor Blanchard. I manage to shoot at a pheasant up hill. This is bad. Doctor Blanchard is coming up the hill on the other side. He gets pelted with shotgun pellets on the other side of the hill. Rule: Never shoot a shotgun into the sky unless the ground is level. Doctor Blanchard is not hurt but worried. This is fall in Wisconsin. He smokes. I am in the back seat. He lights up. I open the window. He stops smoking and puts on his jacket. I close the window. He get warm. He takes off the jacket. He warms up, lights another cigarette and the cycle repeats. My father tells me when we get home tha the almost laughed about the cycle. I did not think it was funny.
We went up to Doctor Bell’s cabin near Eagle River. This was deer hunting season. I really enjoyed walking in the woods. I stayed with my father most of the time. Doctor Bell loaned me his Winchester 30-30: the cowboy rifle. Relatively a 30-30 is a varmint rifle and a bit weak for deer. My father has a Remington 30-06. This is relatively overpowered for squirrels. At the end of the day my father starts popping squirrels on the way home. He has worked hard to sight his rifle precisely. He can get a squirrel sitting at the top of a tree. I try it. I hit the squirrel and it falls out of the tree. Ooops. It is still alive and very angry. It runs right at me. I can not shoot the rifle into the ground without endangering the whole group. We manage to kill it on the ground. The poor squirrel has been de-furred: the entire underside of the squirrel is bald. I came close but no banana.
The next day was worse. My father and I sat on a log. Wearing bright red. Sitting three feet apart. We see an otter playing on the lake in front of us. It runs off. We hear a rifle shot and the slug hits the log between the two of us. We dive behind the log and pep over the top. We do not see anyone but a few more bullets hit the log. The first one may have been aimed at the otter but only if the shooter is drunk. We wait for a pause in the bullets and high-tail it back over the hill. When we meet Doctor Bell, I go back to camp. This is the end of hunting for me on this trip. I have decided that being shot at ruins my day.
My father shot a deer. His friends did not but they call him “doe slayer” for the rest of the trip. We had a permit for a doe.
We do this again the next year. My father and I and Doctor Bell and someone else go deer hunting at his cabin in Eagle River. We hunt in pairs but my father lets me walk around because he likes to wait for a deer and I enjoy walking in the woods.
Suddenly I hear them yell and a deer comes bounding over the hill right at me. I shoot from the hip as it is sudden and I am afraid he will run over me. I dive under a log as he jumps over the log. I shoot after it. The 30-30 is empty. I missed at a distance of 3 feet. Not quite. There is blood in the snow. The others come up and are all laughing. They think it is funny that I missed a deer because I thought it would run over me. Because I injured it, I take off after it: you do not leave an injured animal. After a few miles, I give up. The deer will die. I still feel bad about this. We try again the next day.
I am a couple of hundred yards up the road over the hill from the rest of the party. I see another hunter and he shoots at me. I mean, he just stops, aims, shots, and hits the tree right next to me. I duck behind the tree as he fires a few more shoots into the tree. I yell. I mean like this guy is about 200 feet from me and is shooting at me. The tree is smaller than me. I shoot back. I aim at the branch above his head and it drops down on him. He yells and comes running at me. I keep my rifle aimed at him as my father and the others top the hill. I know about hunters found dead in the woods in the Spring. I do not want to be one of them. The others aim their rifles at the man as they approach. He claims that there had been a deer between us and he was shooting at it. Fat chance. The first shot would have bolted the deer into the next county. Sorry, but being shot at ruins my day. We already did this. This incident ends my hunting career forever.
The C&NW tracks almost paralleled highway 100 about a quarter mile to the west. They crossed under Bluemound at Highway 100 with a job in the road causing highway 100 south of Bluemound to be 110th Street. The tracks crossed Capitol at about 116th Street and then Hampton at 124th Street. At Capital the tracks expand into the major west side freight yards for the C&NW. I spent many happy hours down at the tracks and in the yards. No. I had nothing to do with the fire that burned down the roundhouse. That was before I ever got close to Butler. Oh. Butler was the city west of 124th at Hampton that was the base for the yards. Crossing the tracks on Hampton took you over a set of very ugly bridges. We all thought of Butler as dirty but mostly that attitude was left over from the steam engine days. The last steam engines went through shortly after we moved to Wauwatosa. By the way, the C&NW trains go on the opposite side of the tracks from other trains in the country. I wouldn’t know, I just always watch my back.
The Milwaukee road tracks sort of followed Bluemound Road from downtown. Here is sort of a conundrum. Freight tracks are clean. Passenger tracks, like the Milwaukee Road, are dirty. The difference? Freight just generates loose dirt, rust, and grease. Passenger train toilets emptied onto the tracks. Not any more. But it did then. The tracks not only smelled but you could see the shit and the toilet papers. Disgusting. We did not go there. As you can see, the intersection of Bluemound and Highway 100 was also the intersection of the Milwaukee Road and the C&NW. Several bridges. Jogs in the road. Traffic delays. It got stranger when they built the freeway from Milwaukee to Madison next to Bluemound Road.
Wow. So much geography. That was pretty much it when we moved in. Open fields on the west side of Highway 100 from at least North avenue to Capitol except for Curry Golf Course from the river to Capitol. On the West side of the tracks from Center to Capitol was a rapidly developing warehouse district. Penney’s Catalog warehouse sprung up there. There were a couple of railroad sidings along here and a dirt road from Burleigh north for a city block or so. There was a typical C&NW railroad semaphore right here as the tracks gently curved to the west as I mentioned above.
Typical? The C&NW semaphores were steel towers crossing over the tracks with a green-yellow-red signal for each direction. Some railroads only have posts. C&NW had steel structures with ladders up the sides and a walkway along the top. We did not go up there. We did have use for the signal lantern on the siding switch just north of the semaphore tower. My favorite song in those days was “The Wayward Wind” by Gogi Grant. If you remember the song, you know why.
From Burleigh on the east side of the tracks to the semaphore was a dirt track. There was no siding here but the access dirt track meant that the railroad could leave freight here for a while to be picked up later. I never knew how and when but there were occasionally hundreds of ceramic tube tiles left here. They would last for some months and then just as mysteriously disappear. These tiles are sort of a yellow-brown-orange. Two different sized: a 1x2 tube with the tubes about 4 inches square. There was a 3x2 making it three times as big. The tubes were about five feet long. When delivered, they were stacked about four feet high with grape stake slats between the layers. Grape stakes are about 1/4th inch by 1 inch by 5 feet long.
When a shipment of these came in, we would go up to the tracks and reorganize the stacks. We would make a covered fort with a tunnel to it. The open end of the tunnel ended in another fort, which had no roof. Its walls on the railroad side had vertical tubes. The open fort had a single entrance on the field side. We removed the grape-stake slats and put them into the tubes on the train side. When we were finished, the total combination of forts and walls were approximately the same size as the original stacks. Unless you were close, you did not see our entrance on the field side. The other three sides were walls of tiles. From inside our fort, we could see out. From inside, we could close the tube into the fort and be self-contained. This seemed like a good idea until the bad guys tried to destroy the walls.
At the intersection with Burleigh, the tracks took a bend to the west. We already described that the tracks at Capital were heading west of north. This meant that trains coming north into the yards had their engines hidden just after they passed the fort: the engineers could not see us.
We would hide in our fort, the open fort -- until a train came. We had the closed fort stocked with water and comic books. Sometimes fruit. When a train came, we would bombard it with the sticks. This damaged nothing except the sticks. When the train was gone, we would collect the usable sticks and return them to the tiles. This was an interesting lesson in aerodynamics. The train creates a backdraft around it making it somewhat difficult to hit with one of the slats. You could hit the train. Hitting where you aimed was the problem. Occasionally a police car would sneak up on us while we were occupied with sticks. In this case, we would duck into our covered cave and be quiet. The cops never found us. Once the bad guys did. They figured we were still inside – unlike the cops who had thought we had escaped into the field. The bad guys then would start smashing tiles until they got to us. They never got that far but they came close enough once to scare us. They damaged enough tiles that we worried that if the authorities caught us, they would blame the damage on us. We never knew where the bad guys came from or where they went. They were not from our neighborhood. That meant that they either came from west of Highway 100 and north of Center or north of Capital: Butler. Either was a substantial distance from home. Sometimes even the girls came to the fort. Janice and Candy. I think even Jeanne came once or twice but this was not really her domain.
Scott Jordan figured out one time that throwing golf balls at the train was not healthy. One bounced off of the incoming train at a speed much greater than he threw it and it hit him in the stomach. Golf balls were readily available,
We all learned, even Scott Towle, to jump freights. Scotty just needed slower trains. Skip learned to run until he found us. Sometimes a mile away. I never let him out of sight but then I had good eyes in those days.
It took a while but the train yards finally seduced me. At first they were too far away and then I was afraid of the hobos and then I was afraid of the bad guys. I always thought that Scott Jordan and Dennis Hughes knew who the bad guys were as Scott and Dennis were more into malicious things than Chuck, Scotty Towle, and myself. In any case, the initial draw for me to the yards was the challenge of all of those train cars and the sheds. There were sheds along and into the yards. The first shed was near the Curry pond woods. These sheds had relic telephones. If I had been smarter, we would have stolen the entire phone. These were the wood frame phones with the attached, black mouthpiece and the earpiece on a cord. Only seen in the movies now. What intrigued me was that each phone had a generator. You have to be at least as old as me to appreciate these generators. They were composed of a hand crank to a coil surrounded by 4 or 5 large steel, u-shaped magnets. We ultimately took about four of these. I took about four of these. I kept one at home. Chuck had at least one. I think the two Scotts each had one. I always thought of them as all mine but if I had more than one at home, my father would ask questions. Questions to which I had no answers. No good answers. Since the others had them also, my having one would not arouse too many questions. The railroad replaced these antiquated phones with Electro-Voice microphone/speakers.
The roundhouse was burned down the first time I saw it. I wish that I had seen it before it burned. It must have been beautiful.
Right by our semaphore by Burleigh is a siding that goes to the warehouse to the west. There is a lantern at this siding. Lanterns are kerosene-lit and refilled periodically. The lights are green in two directions and red in the other two. The idea is that the engineer seeing the red side knows that the siding switch is in the wrong direction and it is time to panic. The switch is always green unless the warehouse is getting a new load of freight cars. No. We do not play games with the colors: that could kill people.
The lantern top flips open to reveal a glass chimney to protect the flame. The chimney is about 3 inches tall and an inch in diameter. We steal it. I buy some screen. Window screen is steel in these days – not nylon like today. I cut the screen into the shape of a ‘+’. I fold the sides down leaving a cube with one side open. The cube is about one-inch square and fits tightly into the glass chimney. We go back to the switch and again take out the new chimney that the railroad people have nicely supplied. This time we put our screen-fitted chimney in its place. I also steal a bunch of my father’s shotgun shells and a roll of electrical tape.
We wrap the tape around the barrel of a shotgun shell and wait for the train. As the train comes around the curve at Burleigh, I step up the lantern post (it has a step) and slip the tape-wrapped shell into the lantern leaving the top open. Just as the train passes the lantern, the shell primer explodes from the lantern flame, propels the shell into the air about 3 feet and then the rest of the shell explodes into a big orange torch straight up. The look of terror on the engineers face sets us laughing for an hour. This is great fun. We wait a week for them to clean up the lantern: the black smoke has sort messed it up but nothing is damaged. We take our new chimney and fit it with another screen square. We do this several times with some variants. For example, If we tape the top over as well as the sides we have a whole new thing. The train comes around the corner and instead of an exploding orange torch, the engineer watcher the orange flame erupt from just above the lantern to about the height of the semaphore, very slowly and very bright and then just turn off. Same reaction from the engineer: pure fright. Same reaction from us: we die laughing. When my mother tells me that my father knows that his shells are missing, we give up the game. I can still to this day see the engineers face lit up by the orange flames.
You have to understand the evolution of trains – especially in light of the Eisenhower Conspiracy. When we moved there, the last of the steam engines were occasionally seen. The freight trains, the only trains on the C&NW tracks here, contained freight. Yes, there were some semi-trailers being hauled but mostly the cars were flat cars with things on them; box cars loaded with things, gondola cars; tanker cars; and hopper cars. If you go anywhere near freight trains now you see flat cars loaded with container boxes intended for local delivery by a truck. Some of these are stacked piggyback. The new trains have no caboose. The old trains always had a caboose. The old way required the box cars to be unloaded by the customer. This meant that the warehouse district had railroad tracks with a series of sidings going to the side of the warehouses. The local freight would leave off cars to be loaded or unloaded and replaced with more cars. This generally took about a week when I saw it happening. With container boxes there is no need for sidings: just a place in the local yards where the containers can be transferred to wheel sets and attached to a tractor.
The old way is what we had. On the west side of the tracks and south and north of Burleigh were warehouses with sidings. Not too many. Since vandalism and graffiti were unheard of in the suburbs in those days, the warehouses left their doors on the docks open. Often there was a night watchman somewhere snoozing. We were not vandals. We were just kids with the need for an energy outlet and a warped sense of humor. We already talked about the shop-supply swapping. We did this on a larger scale at the warehouses.
Skip was essential in these forays. He would roam the warehouse and when he found a guard would return letting us know that it was time to leave. Skip was phenomenal. He learned, as we said before, how to climb ladders: Steel ladders, aluminum ladders, wood ladders: any ladders. He also learned to walk on steel grids. Warehouses have lots of these. They stairs have steel grates. The floors have steel grates for drainage. Skip gingerly handled all of these. He was amazing to watch. I think he thought it was fun, a nuisance, but fun. He always wanted to be rewarded when he got to the other side. At least we always wanted to reqard him for figuring out a way to get to us. Sometimes he found ways in and out that we never figured out – or we would have used them.
Why did we go to the warehouses? We were overwhelmed by them. Penney’s Corporation was one. Halan’s Foods was there (they worked around the clock). We learned how to drive the equipment. One of our favorites was to reload a box car that had been off-loaded onto the dock during the day. Do you think this is easy? This is a real talent. Fitting the stuff back in as well as it was originally there was a great exercise. Breaking things was not an option. We were not vandals. We never got to see the results of our handy-work. I wish we had. When we graduated high school, Chuck got a job driving a forklift. He was a natural.
Unlike Bluemound Country Club, Curry is a county park. Thus it had no fences and it seemed like the entire world of grass and hills. The primary concern was that the management had Cushmans. Bluemound did too but we never went there. We called all golf carts Cushmans. In those days, golfers walked. Management rode.
North of our semaphore and fort there was more field with a stream from the tracks to Auer. North of the stream, the golf course came right up to the tracks. There was a tee here with the fairway running almost parallel to the tracks but away as the fairway went north. The gap was filled with woods. This triangular gap extended all the way to Capital. Although the tracks were fairly level, the fairway dipped down and then back up to the green. On the far side of the green was a pond. We named this Curry Pond. We had a fort in the woods behind Curry Pond. Not much of a fort. Just some place to hide when the train people or police were chasing us. I hid my white pants and red jacket in this fort. They were only worn when we went near the tracks.
The interesting part of this fairway was that from the top of the tee-off, you could see the hole but not the fairway in the middle. We had taught Skip to fetch things he could not see. Huh? We would sit in the woods where we could see the players tee-off and see the length of the fairway. Players are polite. When one tees off, the others remain behind him until all have played. Then they all go fetch their balls. When we would see a player about to tee off, we would send Skip out to fetch. He ran in the pointed direction until he found something to fetch. The ball showed up shortly. He would grab it and immediately return. We were long gone by the time they teed off their second set of balls. I know we never got caught. I do not think we were even suspected. I wonder what they thought happened to their golf balls. I think Scott Jordan had enough nerve to sell them at the clubhouse. I did not.
We also fished balls out of the pond. But the pond was messy and muddy and dirty and we did not like to get wet from it. The pond had a better use.
We bought boats. These were about 18” long about 8” wide with a Baby Bee .049 gas engine mounted on the back. They were made to look like the Florida Swamp Buggies. We outfitted them with flashlight batteries and lights so that we could see them at night. We added auxiliary gas tanks and were really proud of our contraptions. Sending them back and forth across the pond soon got boring. We found with a little better balancing, on nights with a heavy dew, the swamp buggies ran forever along the golf greens. That is why we added the lights. The buggies would get so far away we spent half our time looking for them rather than playing with them. We kept string in the fort to snag the buggies when they stalled in the middle of the pond.
Later in life, Chuck and I would go up on Capital to the driving range and buy a 50-cent bucket of balls. We got so that we could consistently hit the targets. Any of the targets. I do not think that they liked us doing that.
We head north. At Capitol and Highway 100, there is a Pate gas station on the southeast corner. This later becomes Enco and then Exxon. On the northwest corner is the Halan’s grocery store where we get most of our food and a drug store, I forget its name. West of this is the overpass where the C&NW tracks cross into the start of the Hampton yards. North of this is another neighborhood somewhat older than ours. In the middle of this is our grade school, Webster. This is where I spent fifth and sixth grades. Between this neighborhood and the train tracks is a strip of woods. The hobo jungle is in this woods. We stayed away from the hobo jungle. It was common knowledge that hobos hurt kids. Hmmm.
Further north at Hampton and east of the highway was the local small airport. On the south side in the same neighborhood (Hampton Heights) was Ziebel’s store. Mike was a classmate.
I had several friends in Hampton Heights beside Mike Ziebel: Danny Deuster, John Reuter, Jimmy Lohmueller, and as I later discovered, Gary Leive. My Hampton Heights friends at that time were all Dodger fans: the Brooklyn Dodgers.
This was unusual. Maybe reactive. You see, the Milwaukee County Stadium had just been completed. The county had just stolen the Boston Braves and had renamed them the Milwaukee Braves. They were doing well in 1954. Hank Aaron in Center. Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, and the other pitchers. Johnny Logan, Andy Pafco, Del Crandall. Yeah, I knew them all. I watched them play. By the time Red Shoendinst from St. Louis showed up, I no longer was interested enough to go to the games.
In the summer, the City of Wauwatosa sponsored
buses to the
Braves games. You signed up and
then got postcards indicating the games to which you were invited.
I have no idea who created the
invitation list. I just know that
most kids got more invitations than I got. I
figured this out and just started showing up on home game
days and went more frequently than I got cards. It
cost 35-cents to get bleacher seats including the bus
ride each way to the city athletic center. With
my income, a hotdog was a rare luxury. I
loved the Braves Games as they got me
out of the house. I learned to
hate baseball: the objective of the game is to get to the end of the
game by
minimizing the activity of the opponent.
The objective of football, on the other hand, is to minimize
travel
across the field by the opponent by strategic use of insufficient
resources to
accomplish this. TV really lost it
when they started televising bowling, pool, and golf.
I know people who think tennis falls into the same
category. I enjoy watching women’s
tennis. Yes, I am a sexist; but women
use more strategy than men. Men
will attempt to overpower their opponent with serves that have actually
embedded the ball into the red clay court. Women,
on the other hand, find methods to overcome the skill
set of their opponents. Skill is more interesting than power.
The three of us kids got an allowance. It was connected to chores. We got docked for not doing chores. My mother was good at not docking unless chore abuse was flagrant. The allowance went from a quarter to 35 cents. Seriously less than my friends got. This was a problem. There was never enough money. I found ways to make up the difference.
Stealing money from my mother’s coin purse was not
a good
idea. I remember doing it just
once. I may have done it more but
my mother was good at counting and knew when anything was missing.
Also you remember that I grew up there
were many things which could be bought for a penny.
Any candy bar was available for a nickel. A
box of Cracker Jacks was a
nickel. I did not buy Cracker
Jack’s much. I loved the caramel
corn. There were just too many
times that I got the box that did not have the toy in it. This
was so true that I believed that having a toy was a random occurance --
like gambling. I was surprised later in life when I discovered
that all boxes were supposed to have toys.
I worked in the school kitchen from fifth grade through high school. In grade school, this got me free lunches so that I could keep the weekly dollar given for lunch. This increased to almost two dollars by the time I graduated. The high school also paid $1.50 per day so that I got an additional $14.10 each two weeks. I never thought about it until now but I never claimed a refund for the tax withheld.
The next income was absolutely dishonest. The rowe of storees on Highway 100 had a small grocery store in it. The couple that ran the store had a large paper cup with coins in it on a shelf next to the register. Like the Ypsilanti Handy Store, this little store in the Shaeffer’s stores was the local supplier of forgotten items. Unlike the Handy store, this store had frontage on Highway 100 but only local customers because of the parking situation. We kids usually went in and out the back door. I resented that the other kids often got free things from the man and woman. My friends got free candies and things. I never did. I started sneaking in the front door and taking coins from the cup. Yes, this is stealing. I think of myself as honest and never understood vandalism and so on. I looked at this as a sort of necessity. My friends could buy things. I did not have enough money to buy things. This evened the playing field. Sort of. I hated this. One day, I was running back home when the owner yelled for me to return from the back door. I figured I had been caught so I tripped on the road gravel, left the coins in a pile, and returned to my master. He hauled me up front with his wife and they both accused me of stealing their money. They claimed to have seen me come back in and take it. They claimed the coins were marked. I denied having them. She wanted to call the police. I kept wiping my scraped hands as a diversion. They let me go. I picked up the coins on the way home. I never stole again. The store went out of business shortly after that. A chinchilla farm moved in in its place.
The city of Milwaukee had two daily newspapers. The primary paper was the Milwaukee Journal was the afternoon paper. I bought a morning route: the Milwaukee Sentinel. This earned me about $5 per week. The tips brought this to about $8 total. I had good tippers. I was a good paperboy. The rule was that the customer was to get his paper by 6:00am. I delivered, rain, slush, snow, and cold. Whatever the weather. The customer got the paper delivered to their box or door as they wished. I never missed. I never got slips for missed deliveries. This solved the money problem. I now had as much as my friends.
There was a problem with the weather. The papers were so small that they fit in my Boy Scout backpack. This would keep them dry except on Sundays but then there were fewer Sunday papers. The real problem was the cold. When it was cold, my parents would drive me. Cold was defined as more than ten degrees below zero.
When I was sick, my sisters got driven around to deliver the papers. They also got the money, including the tips. They got rides and they got all the money. I did not think this fair but there were no choices. If I could get Scotty as a substitute, he was good. Jeff was not so good and he moved in the middle of things anyway. Scott Jordan, stole the papers and cost me. Chuck could not sub. I forget why.
There was another side benefit of the route:
I got all of the Pepsi I wanted for
free. It cost $1.50 per case.
The $1.50 was the bottle deposit. I
kept a couple cases in the
garage. These were generally reserved
for selling extra papers on holidays.
My route man appreciated my performance and permitted me this
benefit. These days there is no
bottle deposit for reuse. There is
a can deposit for the ecology in some places. There is a tax on
cans in Claifornia.
There was another advantage to the paper route. I would get up early and go out to play. Early? Like 2:00am. I would stay out until 5:00, deliver my papers, get home for a short nap before school started and then get up for the day. This gave me three hours to go down to the yards, play on the golf course, walk in the woods, whatever. I enjoyed baiting the cops. I would make sure that when they were patrolling the neighborhood that they would see me skulking about. I would then take off in another direction. When my papers showed up and I started my deliveries, I would watch the police cars circling the neighborhood seeking the prowler.
A couple of times when I walked down by the woods and circled back, I noticed other footprints in the snow. I always worried about these. I did not like the woods at night after seeing prints a few times. When you live on the edge it does not take much to frighten you.
About half way through, the Jordans moved from the big white house to a couple blocks behind the high school. Scott was not reliable but he would still sub. I found out later that he just discarded the papers sometimes. I would have to loan him my bike. It was 5 miles from his house to mine. I would ride to his house, run back while he rode, show him the route, and let him ride back on my bike. The process was reversed when we returned home. This was done a couple times when we went on vacation.
Camping
Laake’s
Snake
Oldsmobile
Trailer
Florida
This year was a busy one. We moved from Ypsilanti, to Pewaukee, and into our new house. I have said that our area was new. The houses on Highway 100 itself were not so new but anything to the west of the river and to the north of Capital was new. The city of Wauwatosa had recently annexed the entire area. The City of Milwaukee was circumscribed. This meant that our elementary school was recently annexed and became Wauwatosa’s second Webster school. This was confusing and they later renamed it Winston -- now it is closed.
All three of us kids were in school. My fifth grade teacher was Miss McDermott. She assigned one of the girls to introduce me to the class and the school. I instantly had a crush on Karlyn Schmitt. I guess she got used to the problem of boys having crushes on her: by high school, most boys in the class had had such a crush at one time or another.
I do not remember saying much about it before. My father smoked. He smoked Camels and Lucky Strike. Think that kids don’t know the ads? I still remember from grade school that the packs of Luck Strikes have ‘L.S.M.F.T.’ on the bottom of the packs. Everyone knew smoking was a bad habit. In those days, most men smoked. Some women. There was not the health scare then although everyone suspected it was harmful.
I had serious problems with the smoke. It made me sick. While in the car, I would roll the window down. Cars did not have air conditioning then so windows were always open in the summer. I would crack the window in the middle of winter – below zero during Wisconsin winters. I really hated the smoke. Now that I am older and there is less smoke, I am even more aware of it. If I am in the RV in the middle of the night and someone walks past smoking, I will wake up.
My father quit a couple of times while I was a teenager with the thought of being a good example to his teenage kids. It made no difference. I would not smoke until 1967.
My father always had some liquor in the house. I think he liked Manhattans. I think he drank too much but then I would not know. The only evidence of excess is the drunk driving thing and that could happen to anyone.
Now I have a serious fear of heights. I am surprised that the RV steering wheel does not have engraved fingerprints after I go over a long bridge with no side rails. These bridges include freeway ramps that only go a coup0le of hundred feet off the ground. An airplane is a tin can exploding across the sky. Terrifying. I try to be asleep by the end of the runway or the handrails may get those engraved fingerprints. It was not always this way.
At the northeast corner of the Menominee River Parkway and Burleigh is a giant limestone quarry. The walls are vertical cliffs for about 200 feet. The quarry hole is about a block square. At the top is a standard 4-foot, wire fence. Rusty. There is about 3 feet on the quarry side of the fence that is grass and then drop off. Enough to walk on and hold to the fence in case of your foot slipping. At the bottom is a giant conveyor with a sand hill under it. A couple of trucks and a roadway to the top. Things were not so secure and guarded in those days. No guards. No dogs. No 10-foot fences with razor wire on top. Common sense: don’t go there, you will get hurt.
But I was 11 years old and immortal. All eleven year olds are immortal. We would climb the conveyor and dive into the sand cone. We rode the slope all the way to the bottom. Great fun until you got bored or got buried. I got buried. It is frightening. This sand is not really sand. It is much finer than sand. It gets everywhere. Shoes. Shirts. Shorts. Eyes. But mostly it is not packed like beach sand. You can sink in it. This is the thrill. You jump off the conveyor such that you slide down the wall of the sand. Not into it. Not above it. I jumped into it. I was lucky there was someone there to pull me out. It did not scare us but we stopped doing it. Besides while you were at the bottom, there was no escape if someone comes. The police would occasionally drive down and up.
One day Chuck, Scott, and I were walking around the outside. I was inside the fence. I slipped and fell off the cliff. Just like the cartoons, I grabbed a weed. The alternative was 200 feet straight down. My feet were holding but the weed was pulling out. I called to Chuck who looked over the edge. I convinced him to extend himself. Not enough. I convinced Scott to hold ont