October 2005 Odd Wisconsin
William DeSteese of Fond du Lac County enlisted in the Union Army in the spring of 1864, one month shy of his 14th birthday. In this short memoir recently added to Turning Points in Wisconsin History, he recalls sneaking out of camp in Virginia with other young soldiers and calling...
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Posted in Children on October 29, 2005
John Lawe (1780-1846) was one of the first English-speaking residents of Green Bay, arriving in 1797 to trade for furs. He grew to be one of the village's most respected and affluent residents, building this house (luxurious in its day) and holding various public offices. None of that kept him...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on October 26, 2005
'Tis the season to be ghouly. The sun has begun to set early, the full moon looms large on the horizon, and dead leaves fly like witches on broomsticks through the Wisconsin sky. Our state has its share of ghostly legends. Eery sounds long escaped Juneau's haunted house, where a...
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Posted in Curiosities on October 22, 2005
This week's cold snap will turn the cranberries and maple leaves red and send some of us out to finally buy that new storm door or put plastic over the windows. It also sparks questions (no pun intended) about how Wisconsin residents used to keep warm. For nearly all of...
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Posted in Curiosities on October 19, 2005
On this date in 1967, the first violent anti-war protest on an American campus occurred in Madison, shown in tonight's PBS documentary Two Days in October. But more than a century before, the good citizens of Port Washington and Milwaukee had engaged in similar violence when the U.S. government attempted...
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Posted in Curiosities on October 16, 2005
This week the world watches the people of Iraq try to form a new national government. Here in Wisconsin, we went through a similar phase 160-odd years ago when a rag-tag assemblage of pioneers attempted to invent first a territorial government and then, a decade later, a full-fledged state government....
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Posted in Curiosities on October 12, 2005
Madison photographer Arthur M. Vinje, 1888-1972, had an eye for the curious moments of everyday life, whether they were mundane (like this Italian housewife in Greenbush, 1941) or historic (such as VJ Day, August 15, 1945. Many of his pictures are also aesthetically compelling: this is no ordinary wedding photograph....
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Posted in Curiosities on October 9, 2005
It's October, the month when pumpkins are harvested, sold for jack o'lanterns, paddled in Lake Mendota (really), and made into pies. These Madison kindergarteners making their first pumpkin pie at Dudgeon School in 1954 are identifed in the caption, but where are they today? They would be in their mid-fifties,...
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Posted in Children on October 7, 2005
The media has buzzed these last few days with the bizarre story of an attempted theft here at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The phone has rung at least once a day with calls from the press asking what really happened. It wouldn't be appropriate to comment in Odd Wisconsin on...
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Posted in Bizarre Events on October 5, 2005
There's a clamor in the press this morning over the President nominating for justice of the U.S. Supreme Court a candidate who's never sat as a judge anywhere, even in a small-town traffic court. Here in Wisconsin we once had a powerful judge with a similar amount of judicial experience,...
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Posted in Odd Lives on October 4, 2005
We read in the press that the legislature is considering allowing citizens to carry guns, as was common in the Old West. One of those western cowboys later settled in Milwaukee. He knew Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and other famous gunslingers, and gave this newspaper interview (and shared his...
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Posted in Odd Lives on October 1, 2005
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