August 2005 Odd Wisconsin
Many of us have been glued to the television over the last 48 hours watching the wind come ashore and the water rise in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities. Our hearts and prayers go out to those people we see marooned on rooftops, holed up in the stifling...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 30, 2005
More odd things happened in Wisconsin lumber camps than were ever written down, but perhaps few were as curious as the lumberjack betrayed by a violin. This short memoir tells how in 1885 a murderer hiding in the depth of the forest in northeastern Wisconsin was tracked down and identified...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 29, 2005
"...she had been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great arms were about her in the distant African forest, and again today, in the Wisconsin woods..." So wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs in one of the most famous pulp novels in American history, Tarzan...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 25, 2005
Despite our state's republican, democratic, and progressive traditions, various Wisconsin institutions have been quick to crown a queen whenever it might serve their public relations purpose. Naturally we've had numerous prom queens, a Dairy Queen and a Sweet Corn Queen, and even a Kraut Queen. A few weeks ago we...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 21, 2005
Israel’s forced removal of settlers from Gaza this week invites comparison with the forced removal of Native Americans from Wisconsin 150 years ago. In Israel, many settlers believe that they reside on traditional homelands where their ancestors lived for thousands of years. Many also believe that these lands were given...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 16, 2005
That's the claim made by the not-so-mighty Hillsboro and Northeastern, which maintained a grand total of 4.8 miles of track between Hillsboro and Union Center, west of Wisconsin Dells. Its story is told in this 1927 Wisconsin State Journal article, which explains the crucial role the private line played in...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 15, 2005
Wisconsin is one of only 12 U.S. states that prohibit the death penalty. Our last execution took place more than 150 years ago, when John McCaffary was hung in Kenosha for drowning his wife in the summer of 1850. The restraints that bound his arms and legs that day ultimately...
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Posted in Strange Deaths on August 12, 2005
Summer's reached that point where we can hardly recall icicles in the mustache, damp and bone-chilling lakeshore winds, and days so short that it's dark when we arrive at work and dark again when we leave. No, now it feels as if we'll always lounge like these two in summer...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 10, 2005
That's what Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, is often thought to have remarked when the condition of starving peasants was reported to her. History caught up with her by replying "Off with her head" and she died under the guillotine at noon on Oct. 16, 1793. By then her wealth...
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Posted in Curiosities on August 7, 2005
Bugs are the third element (after beer and brats) in any traditional Wisconsin cookout. In June of 1820 James Doty found "The musquitoes are very thick [on Lake Superior] but the sand fly, a small insect, is more numerous and much more annoying. It is impossible to sleep where they...
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Posted in Animals on August 2, 2005
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