March 2005 Odd Wisconsin
You probably remember tossing newspapers over your handlebars onto customers' porches (and occasionlly into their birdbaths). But instead of coming by bicycle, these newspapers arrived in Waukesha by airplane in 1912. The pilot, a famous "boy aviator" named Farnum Fish, is shown here at the controls and in the air....
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 31, 2005
On this day in 1951 Remington Rand Corporation delivered the first UNIVAC. Short for "Universal Automatic Computer," it contained thousands of vacuum tubes, used flip-flopping mechanical switches to manipulate data, and employed punch cards to output and store information. On that same day Steve Wozniak was having his diapers changed...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 30, 2005
This 1897 "fishing pole bike" made of bamboo seemed like a good idea at the time, but apparently failed to catch on. More pictures of early Wisconsin bicycles can be found at Wisconsin Historic Images....
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Posted in Curiosities on March 29, 2005
Today's Odd Wisconsin has no Wisconsin connection - - or only a tenuous one. Tonight and tomorrow The History Channel broadcasts a 4-hour series on early exploration called "The Conquest of America." They've recreated four important voyages and expeditions in video, overlaid with quotations from the explorers' own reports. Last...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 28, 2005
This weekend Disney subsidiary ABC is airing the latest in a long series of films and television shows based on the famous Laura Ingalls Wilder novels. Most of these have simultaneously sentimentalized frontier life and childhood, so it’s always a good tonic to return to original sources for a clearer...
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Posted in Children on March 25, 2005
You’ve seen them, skimming across the winter horizon at impossible speeds like a flock of some fantastic arctic birds. Wisconsin has been a center of ice boating for a century and a half. From humble beginnings in the 1850s (the first boat was built from discarded lumber), the sport quickly...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 24, 2005
The 1840s were full of utopian dreamers who thought women's rights should be legally protected. During the 1850s a flood of new immigrants, political corruption, and an economic crash dampened much of the utopian energy in Wisconsin, and the Civil War largely dislodged it from the popular mind for an...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 23, 2005
In 1876, 37-year-old attorney Lavinia Goodell (1839-1880) had the audacity to think that she ought to be able to practice her profession. When one of her cases was appealed to the state supreme court that year, she was not allowed to represent her client there. In rejecting her application, Wisconsin...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 22, 2005
It’s that time again – the vernal equinox. Flowers will soon be appearing through the last snow. In kindergartens the little ones will be planting seeds in the ritual science experiment, and soon they’ll be hunting Easter eggs. Their elders will be showing off new dresses and Easter bonnets, and...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on March 21, 2005
After the Civil War, Belle Boyd was as famous as Paris Hilton or Britney Spears is today. Boyd was a Virginia teenager when the war broke out, and her sympathies naturally lay with her homeland. Union troops soon occupied her town and tried to raise the stars and stripes over...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 18, 2005
It’s St. Patrick’s Day again, when every cheesehead is allowed to be Irish for a day. Immigrants from Ireland played powerful roles in Wisconsin history, as you can see in this feature article from the Society home page . They settled all over the state, including not just in Milwaukee...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 17, 2005
Our state capitol was named after James Madison, born 153 years ago today in Virginia. He died on June 28, 1836, and a week later the U.S. Congress passed the act that created Wisconsin Territory. President Andrew Jackson appointed Henry Dodge as governor, with responsibility to conduct a census, hold...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 16, 2005
Today is the birthday of the Wisconsin boy who invented modern department stores. Ripon native Gordon Selfridge worked his way up through Marshall Fields and took his midwest American optimism into the very heart of the staid British Empire. In 1909 he opened his own department store on London's Oxford...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 15, 2005
On March 14, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt created the first federal wildlife preserve. Wisconsin's best known refuge is Horicon Marsh in Dodge County, adminstered jointly by the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the Wisconsin DNR. Read about its early history, when the marsh was dammed and steamboats crossed it,...
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Posted in Animals on March 14, 2005
On this date (March 11th) in 1824 the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs was created. One of its first actions was to call this council at Prairie du Chien in 1825 to determine boundaries between western tribes. The following year Indian Affairs commissioner Thomas McKenney attended another council held near...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 11, 2005
Today is the 150th anniversary of the most famous civil rights event in Wisconsin history. On March 10, 1854, a Missouri slave owner appeared in Racine and demanded that Joshua Glover be turned over to him according to the U.S. Fugitive Slave Law. The authorities arrested Glover, but anti-slavery feeling...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 10, 2005
Social Security reform is in the headlines again this week as policy makers debate its future. But did you know that the original system was designed by Wisconsin experts? On March 9, 1933, the U.S. Congress began its first 100 days of enacting New Deal legislation. President Franklin Roosevelt's top...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 9, 2005
These are the words that set off a furor during the Wisconsin constitutional convention of 1846. When the population of Wisconsin Territory had grown high enough to permit our becoming a state, 124 elected delegates met at Madison to prepare a constitution. Among them were a critical mass of visionaries...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on March 8, 2005
Before leaving home in the morning, do you check the forecast at weather.com or on the TV? Did you know that weather forecasts were the brainchild of Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham? Lapham (1811-1875) came to Wisconsin in 1836. In 1844 he published its first accurate map by gathering data...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 7, 2005
Glory-of-the-Morning (Ho-po-ko-e-naw) is the first woman described in the textual record of Wisconsin history. She was an 18th-c. female chief who, according to oral tradition (recorded in tribal historian David Lee Smith’s book, Folklore of the Winnebago Tribe) was chosen to lead the Ho-Chunk Nation about the year 1737, at...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 3, 2005
Eleazar Williams (1787-1858) is surely one of the oddest characters in Wisconsin history. He was born and raised among the Mohawk Indians and sent as a teenager to the missionary school that would evolve into Dartmouth College. He became a Protestant missionary himself, and his intelligence and eloquence gave him...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 3, 2005
150 years ago one of Europe’s most notorious radicals rode into the village of Watertown after several years on the run. As a student in Germany in the late 1840s, Carl Schurz (born on this day in 1829) had been a colleague of Karl Marx and other visionaries who insisted...
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Posted in Odd Lives on March 2, 2005
March is Women’s History Month, so for the next few weeks Odd Wisconsin will occasionally feature the lives of Wisconsin women. Indian women, of course, have been making history in Wisconsin for the longest time. Although passing references to them occur in the 17th-c. Jesuit Relations, the first detailed accounts...
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Posted in Curiosities on March 1, 2005
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