Hang on,
and we are rolling.
Back in the
1940s, when we were in
the midst of World War II,
and I was all eight,
nine years old, we
always hired a
man to work with us during the
summer.
And these young men, I don't know
why they weren't in the army,
because most young men were.
But every summer, some
young man would stop by.
And this particular year,
the fellow that stopped by, he must
have been 18, 19 years old,
he came driving into the yard
with a Model T Ford
Touring car.
Now most people know what a
Model T Ford touring car is all
about. Today we would call it a
convertible.
It had a soft top that you could
put up.
But this old Model T,
and people who remember the Model T
it has just this wonderful chug,
chug chug sound.
And he come chugging into the yard
looking for work.
And this had been in April.
My dad hired him.
And he proved, his name was Henry
Lackold, and he proved to
be a really good
fellow.
His Model T just,
well, it was something that my
brothers and I thought was just
amazing because he would give us a
ride in this thing once in a while.
And as the summer went on and
it got hot in July and
we were in the midst of haying
season and all those sorts of
things, Henry would
say, how'd you
guys like to go swimming?
Because the lake, there was a
lake just a mile and a half or so
from our farm, and
well sure, we would like to swim,
but maybe we can go fishing as well,
so I found
the fork and went out back
of the hen house and dug some
worms and put them in a can.
Found the 16-foot long
cane poles that we had tucked under
the corn crib heaves and
tied them to the side of the Model T
Ford and we all piled in and
went chugging down the dirt road
toward the lake.
How could we do this so it would
really work well?
And Hank said, well, why don't I
just back my car right into the
lake?
And so he did.
He backed it in so that
we could stand in the back of
this touring car, and we could fish
right off the back.
And I tell you, it was wonderful,
but the fish weren't biting.
But we did bring our breathing suits
along.
So we put the
fish poles aside.
We pulled on our bathing suits and
we began leaping off the back
of this touring car
into the lake.
I mean, it was fantastically
fun.
And then as the sun began setting
and Hank said, well, we probably
ought to be getting on home.
He said, I will crank up
the T, the model
T, and get us going.
And of course, there wasn't any
electric start or any of that sort
of thing. He hand cranked it.
You got it started.
Chug, chug, almost had the exhaust
pipe in the water and...
My brothers and I got behind it
and we pushed it out of the lake
and we went chug
chug chugging home just
as it was the most wonderful
thing the sun was setting
and we could hear
when we were down by the lake
the whippoorwill was calling off
in the distance and
the bullfrogs and
the lake, of course, giving us
their bullfrog tune.
So it's one of those memories that
I've never forgotten and how much
I appreciated Henry Lackold
and his Model T Ford,
who allowed us to ride in the back
and to jump off the back
of a car into the lake.
Who would ever dream of backing
their car in the lakes?
You could jump off of the back.
And we arrived at home,
tired from the experience,
crawled into bed, and 5.30
the next morning it all started over
again.
That water feels pretty good after
a day in the hayfield.
Oh, yeah.
That would be one of my shorter
tails.
So tell me about the big fishing
trip.
Well the big fishing trip,
now this would
also have been during haying
season, a different year.
And it started to rain that
morning when we were supposed to be
finishing up hang.
What we ordinarily did on a
rainy day would crawl up into the
barn and
listen to the rain drum on
the barn roof.
Wonderful sound, never forgotten
it.
The smell of sweet clover and
drying alfalfa.
The sound of the raindrops on the
roof.
I was afraid Pa was going to say,
let's go hole the potatoes
that stopped raining
just a little drizzle.
But he didn't. He said, you know,
this might be a day to go fishing.
He didn't say that very often in the
summertime.
We fished a lot in the winter, but
in the summer time, there was work
to be done. Always work to done.
There was nothing else. We were
hoeing potatoes and hoeing cucumbers
and hoing beans and fixing fence.
And all of a sudden he said, let us
go fishing, so again, back of the
hen We dug up a bunch of
worms. Got the cane
poles, tied them across
the top of the 36th Plymouth,
piled in the Plymonth, and drove
over to Norwegian Lake,
which is sort of halfway between
Wildrose and Wautoma.
And Pa knew the Andersons, who lived
at a farm right by the lake,
and they rented boats.
And Pa stopped to check
with Millie Anderson, who was
in charge of the rentals.
And the boat rental was
a dollar a day.
And a day was an hour or
12 hours, whatever you wanted to
call it. It was one dollar.
And so Paul went in the shed and
picked up a pair of oars.
We drove on down to the lake and
here were these, these were all
wooden boats.
They were, I don't know, somebody
made them, I suspect.
And they were sort of half sunk in
the lake and we looked around
to see one that looked like it would
be halfway decent.
Pulled it out, tipped it over,
dumped the water out.
All crawled in and we,
I've got our fish poles in line
and our worms and everything in
order and we we rode out
to where the Marl Hole
was.
Now a little side explanation.
In this part of the country, central
Wisconsin, many of the lakes had
Marl bottoms.
Marl is calcium carbonate.
Thousands of years old
from various seashells
that have accumulated there.
And it was dug out.
Farmers used it to fertilize
to change the acid level,
acidity level of their fields.
So there's a big hole in Norwegian
Lake, probably 40 feet deep.
And the idea was, no anchor
was big enough, long enough to
change a rope to drop down
40 feet.
So the idea is to row right
up to the edge of
this mile hole, because on a hot
day in summer,
the big bluegills and the big
northerns are down deep
where it's cool.
And Pa knew this lake better than we
did. And we're rowing, he's rowing
and we're looking.
And we see this,
the bottom disappear.
And Pa says, that's it, we're over
the marl hole.
Now we've got to back off just a
little bit. We backed off a little
but we dropped the anchor.
And we started tossing our
poles, our bobbers into
this deep hole in
the marr hole.
And we hit it.
This was the day to catch fish.
Soon the bluegills were biting.
I mean, my brother Donald's
bobber went under and up came a big
bull gill. My dad's bobbers went
under another big bull, mine,
Darrell's, and soon the
bull gills were accumulating.
What we did not pay attention to
was that there was water
accumulating in the floor
of the boat. The thing leaked like a
sieve. We didn't realize that.
And I said to Pye, I said, Pye I
think this boat's leaking.
And he kind of looked down and he
said, yeah but the fish are biting
pretty, pretty well.
Maybe one of you or both of you,
we had a little pale along, you
could dump some of the water out as
it accumulated.
And so we're dumping water and
catching fish and just
continuing to do that for about an
hour, but we could not keep ahead
of the water
that was accumulating now up
to our shoes and covering our
shoes. And I said, Pa, this boat's
gonna sink. We had no life
preservers, there wasn't anything
like that.
And Pa didn't seem to mind that
the boat might sink because the fish
were really biting.
I mean, we'd had 25, 30, 40
bluegills. I'm not exaggerating.
Their bluegill were just big around.
I mean they were just wonderful.
I mean there's, Pa said there's just
nothing better eating than a good
bluegil and he was right about that.
But if the boat sank,
well, what difference would it make?
And we're quite a ways from shore.
We're a good 100 yards, maybe more
than that.
And we're bailing and
still fishing and Paz finally
says, I think we probably oughta
hang it up for the day.
We got enough fish and now
the boat's got, I don't know,
probably that much water in it.
We just couldn't bail fast enough.
We got the boat up to shore.
We were there safe and sound.
Got home, cleaned the fish.
One of the things we had learned
early in all of these adventures,
never tell Ma any
details of what went on.
Because she would have chewed out
my dad like you can't imagine.
So we're all smirking as we're
cleaning these bluegills and
Ma's prepared with the great big
old cast iron skillet on the wood
stove, put in a big hunk
of lard and put these fish in
there and fry them up and crisp.
And again, my dad said, there's
nothing sweeter than bluegill
caught in cold water.
And we had a wonderful fish
dinner and a memory.
Are we going back to Norwegian
Lake? And if we do,
let's remember the boat that we were
in and not select that one again.
I mean, that's
a hard balance to pick.
I mean...
Well, it's one of those times
when you've really got to decide,
is my life versus...
And none of us could swim with a
hoop. It was terrible.
You know that reminds me, didn't
you have a story about Daryl
catching a turtle?
Well, didn't we do that one?
I don't think we used it.
Because it's a great story.
I mean, I can give you, that's.
That was Norwegian.
That was a different
day, when the boat wasn't
leaking.
I mean, I'm happy to.
I don't think we would outdo...
I mean, we wouldn't tell two
stories, but I remember you
telling it. Yeah, yep.
Yeah, it was, and what's so
funny, I've
probably 150 of these stories
published,
and one of the things,
especially when your brothers are
involved, I always share
the story with them and say,
what do you think about this?
And the moral of the story is never,
ever be in a family with
an even number of siblings.
You always need an odd number.
Because somebody always disagrees.
And in the case of the
big turtle, the snapping turtle, my
brother Darryl, who I made the hero
of the story, and my brother Donald
agreed that he was a hero,
I wasn't even there.
Oh.
But I published the story because
two out of three is
how you do it.
If there were four of you, there was
an even split.
Well, that's why you never want a
family with two and two or three
and three, if you're
sharing stories.
So talk
about the big storm coming.
In the 1930s,
in central Wisconsin, especially in
other parts of the country as well,
we were suffering from a severe
drought.
And we were fortunate
enough by then to have a
gasoline engine
that pumped our water, so we
always had water.
But the crops were drying up,
the year would have been about 1941,
toward the end of the
drought.
The crops by July
were drying up, the pastures
were slim, the old crop was
not much of anything, the corn
was withered, and it
was really a terrible time.
And every afternoon,
evening when the chores were done,
my Pa and I, we'd stand
out by the barn and we'd look to
the west to see if the weather had
any hope of
a rainstorm.
And my dad was very good at
predicting the weather. By looking
at the western sky in the
weathervane, wind direction
in the cloud formations, he could
predict the weather." Well, this
particular afternoon, after night
after, evening after evening, and
not seeing any sign of a storm,
he saw something I
couldn't see. He said, see those
clouds on the horizon?
I could barely see them.
He said I think we're gonna have a,
it's gonna rain tonight.
And we didn't say a thing.
We don't argue with.
Your father.
I came into the house,
lit the lamp on the table.
It was just getting dark.
We were all sitting around,
Dad reading the newspaper,
and my brothers and I fooling around
with something or other.
About nine o'clock, my mother said,
well, it's time to go to bed.
And so when we went to bed, we
generally blew out the lamp and
went up, took my lamp went up to
bed and my little room was on the
end of it. Of the house.
Blew out the lamp, went to bed, the
two windows in the bedroom
were open, one to
the south and one to east.
Stifling hot in the bed room,
I could hardly, nobody had any air
conditioning, never heard of air
conditioning.
But I had hoped that
Pa was right, that it might rain.
And it must have been about
midnight, and I didn't have a
watch, I didn t know that for sure.
But it must have been at midnight, I
heard this growl, this
thunder in the distance,
that wonderful sound when
it's dry weather, you listen for
the growl of the thunder in
distance.
And then I got
up and looked out the window and
I saw a flash of lightning and
another louder
clap of thunder.
And the sky was
a menacing
conglomeration of clouds
rolling and tumbling
and fighting with each
other, which I could see with each
flash of lightning.
And then Pa called up the stairs,
he said, boys wake up,
wake up and come downstairs.
He did that maybe once or twice
a year when there was
a bad storm coming because
he wanted everybody dressed.
In case the wind did something
to the barn,
lightning struck something,
or if there was a terrific hailstorm
tearing up everything, he wanted
everybody dressed.
And so we're all in the dining room.
Watching out the window this
storm this menacing storm and
why in heaven's sake did the
storm have to be so mean why
couldn't it just rain
My mother would ask that question.
The storm got closer and
as these storms were, there were
three things we worried about.
The wind and the hail and
the lightning, those are the three
things.
And usually the wind was what
you experience and the hailstorm
first.
And this gust of wind came
and it shook the
windows a little bit but it wasn't
that severe.
And immediately...
The temperature dropped probably 20
degrees, at least 10.
From 90 or what, 80
to 75.
I mean, it's nice, it was
comfortable.
And there wasn't any hail,
and there wasn't any lightning.
The rain came down and
we, if you ever
saw a family happy
with an event that was as natural
as rain, it was
at that time,
because farmers, if they had nothing
else going for them, they
always had hope,
and the hope was, in this instance,
was for some rain,
because it would save the crops,
it would saved the garden, we would
have something to eat during the
winter, the cows would have some
feed again.
And Pa said, you can go back up to
bed now.
He looked at his watch, it's three
o'clock.
You've got a couple of hours yet
before you have to get up.
And I went up to my room,
and the most wonderful sound
was the sound of
rain splashing on
the windows when I went to sleep.
And sometimes today, people...
Well they take that for granted or
they ignore it or they find that
something that's getting in the way
of what they ordinarily would like
to do.
But for farmers in our community
at that time that rainstorm
was a lifesaver in more
ways than not.
And it answered the question of hope
because most of
all we were all hoping
that times might get
better.
Times were tough in 1941
in many ways.
But this rainstorm,
this heavy rainstorm without wind
and without hail,
gave us one more instance of
hope.
How bad was that?
Did they catch a big fish or
what? I don't know.
Did you hear the people fight
getting all animated over
there? But I listened to just
the live mic and I couldn't
hear them at all.
Are we still rolling?
Why was your dad so concerned about
the lightning?
In 1941,
and way up into the 1950s,
the Wildrose Fire Department
remained in Wildrose.
And if there ever was a fire, and
a lightning fire was not uncommon,
we were on our own.
And the worst possible thing that
could happen to a farmer in
late summer, when the barn
was full of hay,
we had to have lightning strike it
and destroy.
The year's supply, the winter's
supply of hay.
So he was deathly afraid of
fire.
And lightning was one
form of it, of course.
We were fortunate, I don't recall in
the years that I lived at home that
the lightning struck anything.
We had lightning rods on the
barn, which helped.
And the windmill occasionally was
struck by lightning, but that was
grounded, it didn't really hurt
anything.
But lightning was to be feared, and
there was no way to handle it other
than to.
To call the neighbors on the general
ring telephone to come and help.
But if your barn caught on fire, it
was gone. There was no way of
saving it.
So that's why he was so
afraid of light.
He was afraid of all fire.
He wouldn't allow a candle in the
house.
And of course we have wood stoves.
We had a lot of fire anyway,
but no candles.
Nothing that could
in any way cause something
to catch on fire.
Yeah, and I
was struck when you were
talking about how
wonderful the rain sounded and
how much that meant to you.
People who aren't
depending on the rain
for their food or for their
living don't have that.
But except they are.
The irony of all of this
is that somehow,
a couple of generations away
from the land has allowed people
to not
realize how dependent they
are on something like
a rainfall.
They are.
It determines, and
of course a lot of food these days,
crops are irrigated, but still
so much of what
our lives depend on today.
For our animals and for our
ourselves is dependent on rain.
And again, for too many people it's
an annoyance.
They complain about it.
My father is afraid, never curse
the rain. I've never forgotten that.
I applaud it and
celebrate it when it rains, which
is what we did.
Perfect.
I wouldn't go that far, but...
Alright, I am rolling.
Okay, let's do the
first hunt.
First hunt?
Well,
in the fall of that
I turned 12 years old,
I was able to get a
hunting license, legally, for
the first time.
Farm kids were hunting, of course,
as soon as they could, were big
enough to handle a rifle.
But we couldn't deer hunt.
Pa said, I don't want you deer
hunting, especially in Adams
County, because we didn't have any
deer and we're share a colony in
those days.
So I'm 12 years old, and
my dad and Bill Miller, the neighbor
half mile away, had been going
to Adams County for several years,
because that's where there were
deer.
And they would come home, generally,
with a pretty decent deer.
And that was kind of amazing to all
of us.
But now, now, I
had the opportunity to go
along. But what am I going to use
for a weapon?
And Pa had, from a
widow woman who's Husband
had died, she'd put an
ad in the paper for sale,
30-30 Savage deer rifle,
20 bucks I think,
and he bought that,
the poor woman didn't know what it
was worth, but he had this
wonderful deer rifle.
What was left for Jerry?
Well, there was a 12 gage
double barrel shotgun that
weighed about,
well it weighed a lot.
Hahahaha
and so i'm to use this
it was a blunder buster thing
i mean it had a barrel
you did never quit you could hardly
see the end of it well this is a bit
of an exaggeration and we had slugs
anybody that knows about deer
hunting knows that when you deer
hunt you don't use fine shot to use
slugs well when
that shotgun went off i mean
it if you're standing up out in the
open it would drive you back two I
mean it was wicked It was
very much like a horse kicking you
on the shoulder when the thing went
off. So I was a little fearful of
this big old shotgun.
We drive to Adams County.
It's a beautiful day in late
November, the Saturday
before Thanksgiving, which has been
the tradition for deer hunting for
years.
And Pa says, Pa grew up
in Adams County area.
And he...
Adams County.
My father grew
up in Adams County.
He was born there.
He went to school, went to
elementary school there.
So he knew the area.
And he knew that the
Russia Cree River, which ran
through that part of Adams
County, was a good place to hunt
because that's where he and Bill
Miller had come previous
years.
But he also knew, and I didn't
realize this, but to make the
hunt really work.
It was good to have somebody walking
through the woods to scare
out the deer.
Towards those who were standing on
the other end of this big
woods.
And my dad had selected
me as the novice
to perform that role,
he didn't tell me that,
to drive out the deer.
And so he dumps me off
and he says, Bill
and I are going to go on the
other end on the woods about a mile
away.
And he said, now you won't get lost,
all you have to do is walk along the
river, way, which is true.
So the Rancho Cree River is
a beautiful, it was, it's
a big lake
now, tourist area,
but it was a wonderful river.
And I'm walking along the river
and then I...
Big blunder bus of a 12
gage got so heavy
and I said dang
jeez I can't hear anything
can't see anything I don't know
where Pi is and I'm
tired and it's we
had to get up at 430 to milk the
cows in order to get there and I've
tired got this big old gun so
I lean it up against a tree and I
sit down I look at the river well
lo and behold as I'm looking
at the river here comes
what Looks like a dog.
Swimming along, just his head
sticking out,
and this creature sees me
and it's, my
gosh, I about jumped
out of my skin,
there was this slap on the water
as loud as a rifle shot.
Well, it was a beaver, of course,
and his big old beaver
pounded his tail on the water, which
is the common way that beavers told
the rest of the beaver that there is
trouble ahead.
And uh...
Little did they know that the
trouble was not any trouble at all
because the gun was leaning against
the post the tree and I'm not about
to shoot at a beaver anyway.
I'd never seen a beavers first time
I'd ever seen a Beaver and I thought
well you know Pa's not gonna
care if I spend a little time here
watching these beaver's I didn't
think and I look
upstream and I can see the Beaver
Dam it's kind of a
cloudy day the beaers are
nocturnal they're generally No, I
don't watch the daytime.
It was a cloudy day and this old
beaver was out and they're building
this dam and I walked
a little further upstream and I'm
watching these beavers now work
at this dam.
It was this fantastic thing to
see. I mean, it almost
was better than hunting deer to
be able to watch these beaver
put together this wonderful
beaver dam.
And then I thought,
I better get on
doing what I'm supposed to do.
So I picked up my old blunderbuss
and I wandered on through the woods
and after a half an hour or so I
come upon Pa and he said,
Where have you been?
And I said, Well, I've just been
taking my time. I would not admit
that I was sitting there on the
river bank watching the beavers and
having a wonderful time.
Pa said, You should
walk a little faster if we're going
to get any deer this year.
And I have not forgotten
ever that experience on the
river.
The first day of deer season,
where I saw an area deer,
but I did watch beavers build
a dam.
How many people get to do that
anymore?
That's the truth.
That's a truth.
My brother Darryl, when he was
introduced to hunting, chose to use
the old double barrel.
And we were out hunting squirrels.
And my brother, Dylans says, there's
one right up there, Murph
was his nickname, Murphe, there's on
right up here.
And Murph takes that big old
double-barrel and he points it at
the squirrel and Ka-Boom!
Darryle steps back two steps and
falls on his back.
Never let him forget that either.
Did he get the squirrel?
What? Did he got the squirrel.
Oh, get the squirrel, the squirrel
couldn't be found, they're little,
little pieces.
Ha, ha, ha.
Hit it with a 12 gage and there was
nothing left.
Oh boy.
So.
The lake freezes
when you go fishing.
Yes, one of the things that we
always look forward to uh...
Right around Thanksgiving time
was the lakes would freeze over
and of course the fall work was
pretty much done
and Paul would say I think we
should go ice fishing
he loved fishing and ofcourse we
didn't have much time to do it in
the summer and
I think this year we're going
to work on Mount Morris
Lake.
Which is about halfway between
Wildrose and Wautoma.
It's a kind of a chain of lakes.
And so we go over to Mount Morris
Lake and discover
that some of the rest of our friends
and neighbors are there as well.
Jim Kolka, whom I
knew from my days at
the country school, he was there and
his brother Dave was there and
the Nelson boys were there.
They lived just down the road and
we.
Greeted them and we went to work
to the shore of the lake and in
those days you could do what I'm
about to tell you about.
We built a really nice little
campfire right on the shore.
And my uncle Wilbur, I noticed he
was there and Wilbur was one of the
best storytellers that ever came
down the street. My mother claimed
that he was more of a liar than a
storyteller but that's something
else to be discussed.
And so Uncle Wilber came over and he
sat down on a log by the fire
and Jim Coke is there on the log by
the fire, and Dave is there, and
we're, Dad is there and
we put a little more wood on it and
it's just really nice.
And we're looking out on the lake
and we've got tip-ups set up.
Little wooden devices that have a
flag that goes up if
a northern pike takes the bait.
But in the winter time everything
slows down.
People slow down, the
fish slow down.
And it's a good thing, because when
you're ice fishing, you don't have
to be in any hurry to do
anything. You can spend a lot of
time just thinking about the life
you're living or
not.
You can swap some stories with your
friends.
But then every so often a flag
will go up.
And everybody runs out
on the lake
to watch, whomever it
is. They were so fortunate to
have a northern pike take the bait.
And then the advice,
the advice comes from every
direction.
Let him take line,
pull him in.
Contradictory to be sure.
The poor guy doing the
fishing has got this heavy green
line that's half frozen as
are his fingers and he doesn't
know what he should do.
Should he let this northern pike
have more line because
it maybe hasn't swallowed the minnow
yet in his hook? Or should he yank
it and set the hook?
And maybe not catch anything
at all.
And finally, finally he
uses his own good knowledge
and he yokes it and yes the
fish is on and he starts pulling.
Everybody is now all excited and
they're standing around and is
it a big one or is it little one?
Northern pike could get to be 20
pounds, 40 inches
long.
Does he have one like that or does
he have a little two pounder?
What has he got on?
It's a big on I can feel it.
And the line is shaking like
that, and we're all looking, we're
all standing around, and he's
pulling it in one
foot after the other, and the line
almost freezes as soon as
it hits the ice, and he's putting it
in, one after the others, and then
we're all looking down in this fish
hole, which is about this big
around, he looks down, and here's
here's this enormous,
they all look that way,
enormous northern pike, its mouth is
wide open, and it nearly,
the mouth nearly fills the hole.
The fish hole.
And what's going to happen?
One of the guys said, I'll help you,
and he's got a gaff hook.
A gaff is a device where you can
hook it into the fish's mouth, yank
it out of the water, fish it, yanks
it out of water.
Oh my gosh, it's probably five
pounds, which is about 28 inches
long, a very nice fish.
Everybody slaps him on the
back. Oh, good job,
Joe, you did it just fine.
And Joe is now the hero of the day,
and we all walk back and sit
down around the
fire.
And retell the story
of Joe's fish and
retel it again.
Joe tells it and somebody else tells
it. I mean, there aren't that
many fish caught.
You got to work the story
as well as you can.
And then Jim says,
I think I'm going to go exploring
a bit.
And Pa says, well, you be careful.
There's a river that runs into
the lake right over there.
And if you get too close to where
the river runs in, the ice is thin
and you're going to fall through and
you'll probably drown." And
Jim said, I haven't drowned yet and
I've been doing this sort of thing
for years.
So Jim heads off toward the
direction of where the river
is running into the lake.
The tip-ups are still out there,
kind of ignored now.
All attention focuses on Jim
because the truth be known, this
is a stupid thing that he's doing
just now.
Most of us know that.
Jim doesn't care.
Jim is someone who wants
to do something that no one else
will do because it'll make a
good story and how right he is.
He's getting closer and closer and
then there's a big crack and
a yell and Jim is
falling through the ice.
I mean, how deep is the water
there? We are all concerned.
This might be the end of poor Jim.
Well, the water was only
about waist deep.
There stands Jim.
Cold.
It's colder than blue blazes.
I mean, it's zero.
And Jim is standing in the water.
And Pa yells, crawl out of the
ice.
Crawl back on.
He tries, and the ice keeps breaking
off.
Somehow, Pa knew what to do.
There was an aspen tree, a
popple tree growing nearby.
And we had an ax along because
we were always keeping our
campfire going.
You pop quick chops off the trees,
about 20 feet long, and a couple
of us go out onto the
lake with this
long pole, which we pushed
toward Jim and
had said, grab the bit.
He's already experiencing
hypothermia.
We didn't know what the heck that
was in the day.
We thought you'd just freeze to
death.
We push the pole, he grabs hold of
the pole. We pull him up on the
water, pull him toward us.
Take him over to the campfire
and say, and Jim
is just shivering like everything.
I mean, he's got hypothermia
big time.
We take him over the fire and
thankfully, I guess thankfully,
there are no women around.
We say, Jim, you've got to take
off all your clothes.
I'm not going to do it!
Well, he did.
He hung his clothes all around the
fire, and there he stands bare naked
trying to warm up.
Jim is still alive today,
interestingly enough, and does
not like and will not like to
hear the report of this
story that goes way back
when he was this adventurous
young pup trying to show off
to the rest of us when the fish
weren't biting that maybe he
could do something of interest and
brag about it.
He didn't want to brag about what
happened that day.
You know, the contradiction
in these stories is
so
thought provoking,
the fact that water is
essential to life,
and pleasurable, and yet
it's not to be taken lightly.
It'll kill you.
Yeah,
the sinking boat has the
same message.
I guess all elements are like that
to some degree. Yeah.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Fire up especially, you know.
No, that
story has remained in
the group forever.
We remind Jim of it often.
He's not in very good shape these
days. He's six months younger than
I am, but he's in terrible shape.
So what was the story before the
dance hall?
I'm missing one.
I don't have it.
I don't have the script.
People say to me often, how do you
memorize all that stuff?
Cool.
Oh, what?
The flood.
The same story we
were just talking about.
Well,
yeah.
This must have been, this
must have happened in about
1946.
No, I'm wrong.
It's about 1948.
I was in high school and
Wild Rose is about
four and a half miles from our farm.
That's, you have to know that for
the story to work.
And it had been an interesting
winter, a lot of snow.
And come spring of
that year,
it warmed up in
March up to, I don't know,
that's been in the 70s.
And the snow melted fiercely,
and our country where I grew up has
a lot of hills and valleys,
and the valleys quickly filled with
water,
including the roads that
were in the little dips were
flooded. And so the school
was.
Nor could the milkman, nor could
anybody, just like a winter storm.
And so what about school?
No school bus.
Well, again, Jim Koca and Dave
Koca, we
walked to high school,
four and a half miles, one way.
And it was wonderful.
I mean, it was such fun to
brag to the town kids, who were a
bunch of wimps, anyway, that we just
walked four and half miles to get to
school. We impressed our teachers
unbelievably how we would
do that. My uncle, my
uncle Wilbur, the storyteller,
he had just bought a new
V8 Ford milk
truck.
He said my Ford truck
will go.
Well, what happened was when
all these valleys froze over,
the water didn't disappear, but
there was about two inches of ice on
them. And so County Highway A,
right by Nord El's farm,
was a valley that was flooded.
And Wilbur said, well, I can drive
my truck across there, nothing to
it. He drove onto that
pond on the road and he broke
through and he smashed a grill and
his brand new truck and nobody ever
let him forget.
How his truck was not as great as
he thought it was.
So it took another two, three weeks
before the water receded enough
so that the school bus could
come by and the milk truck could
come buy and things would
return back to normal and
we didn't have to walk
nine miles round
trip to school for heaven's
sake. But that's what kids did in
the early days my dad reminded me,
you shouldn't brag about that.
If you're gonna get to school,
sometimes you have to walk, and four
and a half miles,
well, that's what it takes.
And that must have been a
fun walk, because there's something
really impressive about nature.
Well, see that?
There was the unexpected.
It's the unexpected in nature that
I have always found fascinating.
Whether it's a fierce storm
or a flood, it's
what you don't expect to happen.
Especially in our area, the
idea of a flood was unknown.
It was sand country.
The ground was frozen.
That's why the water didn't
recede.
And so it was unexpected
and so when the unexpected
happens And my
dad was good at this.
His comment was, well, you got to
make do.
You take what's
given to you.
And rather than sit back and say,
oh my, you boys don't have to go to
school now and I don't know what
we're going to do and the milkman
can't come by and we're gonna
do all the milk and all that.
He said, well you guys can walk to
school. I used to walk a long ways.
What, four miles, that's maybe a
little longer than I had to walk,
but it'd be good for you.
It was.
It was great,
and people who
know my background
and know the walking was not great
for me because I was still getting
over having had polio,
but as it turned out,
it really was the other way around.
That kind of exercise just helped
strengthen my bad leg.
So it had a lot going
for it.
But this community of kids,
there must have been a half a dozen
of us walking
of school.
I mean we just thought that was the
greatest thing in the world, and to
get there and be able to brag,
oh man, I mean, we country
kids were short on bragging rights
anyway, the town kids had all the
advantages, we thought, we didn't
have electricity or anything,
and now we can brag.
By golly, we're in school,
even though the school bus didn't
make it.
Okay, so now,
you're old enough to drink beer and
go to the dam.
Oh good golly,
Miss Molly.
When I turned 18 years
old,
there was still on the books of law
in Wisconsin that said you could
drink beer but not liquor or
wine.
And so there were beer bars all
over the place just for 18
year olds.
And Lakeside Lodge in Hancock,
Wisconsin, now gone,
had such a beer bar.
And they also had this wonderful
dance hall.
And every Saturday night,
all year round, I don't think
they missed a Saturday night.
Maybe it was Christmas Eve, they
didn't perform.
But they invited
in a polka band, and there were a
series of polka bands.
And how I love to,
finally, I love
the polka. It took me a long time to
learn how to do it.
But here, here we would
all show up.
And the polka bands would,
it was 50 cents is what it cost
to get into the dance hall.
It started at 9 o'clock, it went to
1 o' clock, 9 to
1.
And they would play all
these wonderful polkas, the beer
barrel polka.
We call it the butcher polka,
butcher arms around me honey,
hold me tight.
We do all the words
to these songs.
And then they would do the old time
waltzes, the Tennessee waltz.
I was waltzing with my
darling to the Tennessee
Waltz.
You probably want to take that part
out.
I mean, it was just fantastic.
And of course, we were there with
our girlfriends, showing off
our dance steps.
None of us could dance with a hoop.
The girls all knew how to dance.
But the big deal was going
into the 18-year-old
bar. Where you could get, I think,
five, seven-ounce bottles of
Blatz beer for a dollar, something
like that. I mean, it was absurd.
But we tried, the guy who was
driving the car, we always slacked
off on him, he had to take it easy.
The rest of us, well, we didn't have
any money either, so we'd get our
dollars worth of beer, and that was
about it.
But the thing that I remember most
is the Lakeside Lodge is right on
this wonderful lake.
And there was often a full moon
when we're trying to
impress our dates, and we would take
them down to the beach.
And with the moon rising,
and the bullfrogs, har-oomp,
haroomp.
I mean, why wouldn't that impress a
girl to hear that wonderful sound
of a bullfrock?
While we're walking along the beach,
and in the background, the butcher
song. Butcher arms around
me, honey, hold me tight.
Is playing.
I mean it was the best,
absolutely the best.
And of course the band every so
often would take a break and then a
bunch of us would walk along the
beach.
And then they would, you would hear
the announcers say, we're now
going to do a shottish.
One two three hop, one two
three, hop hop hop.
I could do that.
I knew how to do the shottush.
And we'd do the circle two step.
I meant, and then they would play
some drag along.
Dance, some of us who didn't
dance very well, we could cuddle up
a little closer to our dates.
But it was the
beach and the lake made
it what it was, because the
moonlight on the lake,
I mean, who couldn't be impressed?
And we, of course, after a couple
of these cheap beers, were trying
our darndest to impress our dates,
which, as it turned So we're
not impressed.
So was Ruth a part of this?
No.
No, Evans de Bressy don't even
tell don't mention to her that I
talked about this.
She'll never know
I have long forgotten who
these girls were, but we did
almost a different one every
Saturday night.
But these dances were absolutely
fantastic.
Harry Banks had been
our neighbor. He was an Englishman
who played the violin with
a finger missing.
He got caught in a moor, so he's
playing the violin finger
missing, and Pinky
Ezerhut, he was the banjo
player, he was German,
and Frank Kolka.
He was a bohemian
guy who played the concertina.
They were sort of the nucleus of
the band that became enlarged
when the kids learned how to play
trumpets in high school and
piano and all these fancy
instruments like who could play the
trumpet in those days.
And so the bands got really got
better and Harry Banks' son
uh... And now his grandson still
has a band that plays in
that area going back to
the days of Lakeside Lodge
18 18-year
law and the cheap beer and
walking on the beach with
the moon coming up in the
bullfrogs in the background.
I can't understand why you have a
fondness for water.
Well,
it hits one's
life in a variety of ways.
If you pay attention.
You know, as long as we're here,
and I know you don't have a story
about this, but you
talked about the importance of these
lakes that are in their
somewhat wild form.
Yeah, one of the things that I
have been impressed with and
encouraged and
some days very disappointed
to see a
natural lake with
somebody deciding, well, we've
got to develop that.
We've got to put a condo on one end
of it. That thing is sitting there
not earning anything for
us. And
people in my mind sometimes fail
to realize that
in this life...
There's more than economics,
and the idea of
just sitting by a
lake and watching it
has value that exceeds
most anything that you could write
in your checkbook.
And today, I grew up
understanding that.
I grew up
appreciating that.
These lakes were created 10,000
years ago when the last
glacier receded,
and the lake we're looking
at right now is one of those that
has very little, if
any, development.
So what do we see?
We see pond lilies.
We see natural vegetation
all around it.
And if you went out into it, my
guess is that you could look
probably to the bottom because
there's no- external
pollution.
It's a natural environment.
And when I say that Lake is 10,000
years old, it is.
That's a long time.
And again, the
extent to which our
society can continue,
and maybe this is an exaggeration,
will depend on the extent to which
some of this can be
maintained to remind
us.
That nature is important
in our lives and lakes and
water are essential.
A little out of...
I'm going to just help you in your
own way.
Did we look bad-tempered?
That is what that family is doing,
is just perfect.
Where is it?