Easter Tidings From Wisconsin

by Delores Miller

 

Holy week.  Palm Sunday.  Jesus’ march to Jerusalem.  Church services handed out palm fronds, have mine in a bud vase.  Looks nice.

 The children will be gathering this weekend.  Hope we can get them all together for a picture.  Richard and family will come from Boston.

 Russell filled 50 dozen plastic eggs with candy and coins for the Easter bunny to hide around the farm.  He had hoped to do the hunt in the year, but alas we still have so much snow that he will have to put it in the new car shed.

 Spring was supposed to arrive last week, but it couldn't find it's way to Wisconsin.  We still have so much snow and ice.  The yard is one sheet of ice.  Hard even to find our way to the mailbox.  The sun is warm, and the snow will melt a little, only to freeze again at night.  The farmers like the snow though.

We went dancing one Sunday afternoon, and then I threw out my knee and have been hobbling around for two weeks.  Will go to the chiropractor and see if he can straighten it out.

 Daylight savings time began a few weeks ago, don't know what good it does, with all the snow and cold weather we hunker in the house yet.  St. Patrick's Day March 17.  Tradition around here is to go out to eat for Corned beef, cabbage, red potatoes and carrots.  Russ cannot stand the smell, but humors me and goes along.

 My hair has slowly been growing, after being bald for 6 months, an afterthought from my cancer treatment, chemo and radiation.  Even got a hair cut.  Came in gray and not curly like some people get.

 The children are all busy with school.  Some have spring break, but with all the snow, there was not much they could do except huddle in the house.  Denise is taking Keith's children to Disney in Florida for 10 days.  Nice girls, 13 years old,  real teenagers now.  Marianne's children are involved in dance recitals, even won a few awards.  They were busy selling Girl Scout cookies.  Had to stand in front of Walmart in the cold and rain trying to sell, and they said people really purchased the good cookies.  Madeline is volunteering at the YMCA at a leadership conference each Wednesday, besides working at McDonalds.  Thinking about college a year from now.  Connor and Robin are volunteering at the Humane Society.  Connor plays with the dogs, getting them ready to be adopted.

 Matt is working on his antique car, a Pontiac Firebird.  A long hard job.  And we watched the election of the new Pope Francis from the Vatican in Rome.  From Argentina.  And our President Obama was in Israel.  Russ watches all the political commentaries from Washington D. C.  on television.    I watch on my own tv, the travel and cooking channels.  

 So what is new with you all?

copyright 2013, Russell and Delores Miller

Memories of Sunrise School

Typical Old Brick School House

By Delores Miller

In the fall of 1944, me, a shy little six-year old girl with long braids, new home made dress, and leather shoes trotted off to Sunrise School, almost two miles north down the long road in Dupont.  I had visited the year before when brother Wilbert was in eighth grade, with Miss Jean Kopitzke as teacher.  She was kind to me, even though I fidgeted and twitched and babbled.  She let me sit next to her on a brown rounded back chair while she was tutoring.  Gave me coloring sheets to keep me occupied.  I never forgot her tact and kindness.

Anne Fox followed Miss Kopitzke and stayed at Sunrise for six years.  Other first graders were Raymond Draeger, Barbara Schwan, Hilda Riske, Manfred Poppe and Me.  Manfred left for warmer  Arizona after two years but the four of us  twelve years later graduated from Marion High School.

This was a happy  brick school with as many as thirty students in all eight grades.  The bell tower and the honor of getting to pull the rope.  The mysterious attic and being sent on an errand amongst the mice and dust and ghosts of past students. The library.  Lunch boxes with a thermos smelling of stale milk, perennial baseball.  Games of cops and robbers, tag, crack the whip, hide and seek, leap frog, anty over the school house, red rover, snow forts, snowmen, king on the mountain, sledding, swings, merry go round, flag pole.

Snow was so much deeper and days colder.  Card parties, picnics, the screech and shriek of chalk, the smell of clean blackboards, pounding the erasers.  The outside water pump, the bubbler, the finicky wood and coal furnace that often backfired with the register in the middle of the floor.  Smelly outhouses.  Lunch outdoors in spring and fall under the box elder and cedar trees. Trading lunches.  I liked a fried Spam sandwich. 

Halloween, Valentines Day with the big Christmas entertainment.  Sunrise had a built-in stage for our program.  In those early days, before the end of World War Two, no electricity and real candles on the tree which someone donated.  Paper chains made with construction paper and glue made of flour and water.  Virginia Miller played piano for the program.   Most of the songs came from the 'Golden Book of Favorite Songs'. Virginia also gave private piano lessons, I went, had no talent but blustered on anyhow.  Other students took accordion lessons and played at the Christmas program.  As an art project, we made gifts for our parents, and Santa made an appearance handing out a brown bag of candy and fruit.  Oh how good that tasted.

Selling Easter and Christmas Seals.  Gathering milk weed pods for the war effort to be made into parachutes.  The clock on the north wall, flanked by windows and squeezed between George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and General Pershing.  Varnished hardwood floors, rubber hectograph duplicating machine, goiter pills, small pox vaccinations, the fear of polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, goiter pills.

Drowning gophers for the nickel bounty.  Weekly Readers to keep us up-to-date on World affairs,  round world globe suspended from the ceiling.  Rolled maps. Educational radio  programs from the Wisconsin School of the Air from Madison, the dreaded Ranger Mac and Professor Gordon for Music.  Art and Science.  Boxes of State lending library books, my favorite was Hiawatha. No such thing as learning disabilities in those days.  Everyone learned and made us what we are today.  Franklin Roosevelt felt like God to us, along with the  visits from Mrs Amundson, the county supervisor, who sneaked in once a month.  Bib overalls, union suits, brown cotton stockings, garter belts, bloomers, mash bag dresses, leather shoes, four buckle goulashes, wet dirty wool mittens, socks and caps. 

Quarterline Cheese Factory just down the road to the east with Harold and Elda Brown as cheese makers.   Pupils would grab a handful of cheese curds from the vats on the way home from school.  Oh how good they tasted sprinkled with salt.

Shortly after Marvin and Dawn Hintz  were married in 1949 they opened their home  in a displaced family from Latvia.  Latvia, on the Baltic Sea in Europe was taken over by the Communists after the Second World War.   The Garins and their children who at that time could speak no English, Nora, Maija, Egils and Arnis.   They quickly acclimated to Dupont and Sunrise School  Very intelligent. They lingered for about five years at Sunrise and then drifted to other Latvians near Milwaukee and were never heard from again.  By that time Esther Miller was teaching.

Sunrise was one of four schools in Dupont, Maple Valley, Pioneer and Lake Michael.  Dupont was six miles square, and the theory was no student would have to walk more than three miles to school.

In 1917 the State of Wisconsin deemed brick schools to be built to replace the wooden ones.  Records show that $210 was spent to purchase 26,000 bricks.  Thirty cords of rock and stone were hauled for the basement walls.  Manual labor was provided by farmers with their horses and wagons.  A dollar a day they were paid.  Hankey and Nehring did most of the carpentry work.  Total cost for the building projet came to $4189.69.  At first a pot bellied heater was used, and in 1928 the new  pipeless furnace was installed at a cost of $288.15.  This edifice served hundreds of students in it's  almost fifty years of education purposes.

And then it was time for us 8th graders in the spring of 1952 to leave Sunrise for the Big High School in Marion and life was never the same for us innocent students of Sunrise School.

Copyright 2013, Delores and Russell Miller

 Delores Miller lives with husband Russell in Hortonville, Wisconsin.    In the summer of 2007 they  celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a party hosted by their five children and ten grandchildren.  It’s been a long road.  Dairy farming until retirement in 1993, they continued to 'work' the land, making a subdivision of 39 new homes on their former hay fields.

Saturday Afternoon Company

By Fiona M. O’Downey

Of the two women, perched like dusty birds on the sagging remains of a once fine red velvet fainting couch, the daughter saw the stranger first. From her vantage point on the porch of the ramshackle dog trot house, propped almost incidentally under the eaves by two long poles and the Grace of God, his sudden appearance had startled, but not frightened her. The noon sun was high up, knife bright, chopping up the shadows into bits, when he came up over the crest of the ridge. A gaunt figure, silhouetted black against the toneless sky, the daughter saw him pause briefly, then limp down into the windbreak of ragged slash pine that delineated the boundaries of Bodies Flat Land.

She saw him first because it was as if, she reasoned, she had somehow been expecting him. She had been day dreaming, rambling in her mind to a place where young fellas with polka dot bow ties and clean hands proffered exotic gifts like ice cold Co-Cola's and picture show passes. Her hands worked lazily and of there own accord at the unshelled pile of yellow butter beans in her lap; she wondered, but just for an instant, why the man hadn't come by the Town Road like all the others... then, gazing out to where the sun dappled earth was splashed with various attitudes of shifting light and shadow, she dismissed the thought. It was Saturday afternoon after all, the man was company and company meant money. She didn't want to know anymore.

The mother bore a heavy set face which had a discernible expression of hopelessness. Her small watery blue eyes had taken on the hues of a summers evening at sunset, in that winking moment when the last of the light is lost. She too wore bib jeans faded in such a way that the woman and her garment had become one solid grey washed unit. Her large fingers worked automatically at the pile of beans in her lap; she dropped them into a rusty bucket between her bare feet, the pods she tossed into a heap behind her. The daughter was simply a thinner repetition, only distinguished by the fact that she had a really ugly wall eye; a round white thing that protruded from it's socket like a misshapen marble. The other eye was a deep clear blue, and her curly blond hair was twisted up into a scraggly top knot. She had taken extra care with it today, because she had been hoping for early company. They hadn't had any Saturday afternoon company for a spell of a time.

 
Continue by clicking on the following url:

http://morecontinued.blogspot.com/2013/04/saturday-afternoon-company_16.html

copyright 2013, Fiona M. O'Downey

Fiona was born in Utica NY in the East end, in a house that her great grandparents purchased in 1905. There were never-ending stories told around the kitchen table, the dining room table, any table. Reading well by the age of four, she commenced  to enhance her literary knowledge by stealing books from the library. Her favorites were fat tomes with lots of pictures, although these were difficult to hide under a coat.  Fiona somehow managed her capers until the librarians called Mom, who was unaware a treasure of literary works was abuilding beneath Fiona's bed, where no one had cleaned in ages.   A trip to the local parish church for the sacrament of confession ended the whole sordid affair when Fiona was edicted by a representative of God here on earth to cease and desist.  That's the last time she took an order from anyone in authority.

Interesting "Picks" ....

... I Have Found At Estate Sales

by Harold Ratzburg
 
 
    As you probably  know by now, for over 20 years my hobby has been attending estate sales, garage sales and flea markets looking for collectibles.  Like the pickers in the TV show, "American Pickers", I will buy anything I think I can make a buck on, and I pass those things along to other collectors by selling them on Ebay or at the Military Vehicle Rally's the little Frau and I like to go to.
    Over the years, I have come across some interesting---and profitable---items, so let me tell you the stories of some of my most interesting finds.
   Dr. Young's Ideal---Rectal Dilators----Yes, I did say "Rectal Dilators".  I was poking through the contents of an estate sale in Montclair, NJ,  and there on a table was a neat box which showed  these unusual plugs, four of them in four different sizes.  Reading the descriptions in the box cover showed that these things could work wondrous cures to the human body. 
    On the top of the list it showed that the dilators were for the Intelligent treatment of Piles, Constipation and Nervousness.  (It made me kind of nervous just looking at the dilators, but when you think about it, they were in four sizes so you could take your pick.)
    In a little smaller print below, the list continued to claim cures for head ache, constipation, insomnia, indigestion, and diseases caused by blood blocking circulation, malnutrition and defective elimination and the abuse of cathartic drugs.  Also shown was a detailed set of written instructions for use.  Women were advised that the plugs were "wonderfully beneficial during pregnancy and before and after periods."
    In a separate booklet included in the box was a small booklet which warns, "The Man or Woman who is afflicted with CONSTIPATION, PILES, or any intestinal, Rectal or Nervous Ill and puts this book aside unread, makes a serious and regrettable mistake for it contains much of interest and value.  THIS BOOK TELLS HOW piles, constipation and various rectal and internal diseases, together with their associated chronic ills,can be safely and surely overcome by yourself in your own home without pain or discomfort, and at a trifling cost and giving lasting relief."  Now----how about THAT?
    So I went for it and purchased it for $10.00
    Pretty obviously, the equipment was dreamed up years ago by a "quack" Doctor.  In those days, there were plenty of Quack Doctors selling "Snake Oil" and other wonderful cures at carnivals and anywhere else that they could raise a crowd to listen to them.
    So guess what!  I put the box and contents on Ebay and it sold the first time around for $132----to a Doctor out in the Midwest.  There is a collecting field out there where people are looking for the old quack cures, and I would suppose that a lot of them are doctors with an interest in the history of medicine.
    Only once have I seen another set like the one that I had, and it was in a museum, where they showed a collection of the old quack cures.
    In a way, I am now kind of sorry that I sold the things because they do make one heck of a conversation piece on your coffee table when friends come to visit.
 
    Tooth extractors-----On another Friday I went to another estate sale in Verona, NJ. (It's funny how an old geezer like me forgets so many things, like--why do I have this hammer in my hand?---- but I still remember such details as where I found some goodies.)  Taking my trusty flashlight in my hand, I prowled through the house and got to the basement.  It was a typical basement, pretty full of boxes, the furnace and work bench, and tools etc, and on a ledge above the foundation blocks, I saw three tooth extractors, just laying there for me to find them.   I picked them up and with my other picks, I went to the checkout lady by the front door and offered her $1.00 apiece.  She accepted.
    I recognised from history books I had read and some museums that I visited, that these little things were pretty old and vintage, but I didn't know just how old and rare they were.
    Then of course, comes the work----and fun----of researching what I found. 
    A little hook at the end of the tool is on a swivel, and to use the thing, a dentist would  hook the little hook on one side of the tooth and by twisting the handle the tool would lock against the other side of the tooth, and by twisting and pulling, the dentist could work the tooth loose and pull it out,  Now, doesn't that sound like a lot of fun for the patient??  
    Looking through some reference books about the military equipment used back in the Revolutionary War and the Civil war, I found photos of tooth extractors which looked very much like the ones I had found.  That meant that the three extractors that I had found could date back 200 years or more, to the 18th century.  There were no manufacturers marks or dates on the ones that I had found.
    Over a period of time, I put the extractors into the Ebay auction, one at a time, and each of them sold for well over $300 to three different dentists around the country for a cool profit of about $1000 on my $3.00 investment.
    So Folks, that gives me what I call "Bragging rights" about my crazy hobby that causes most people to just shake their heads when I tell them about it.  NObody understands me, but what the heck.  It keeps me from hanging around in a bar somewhere.




Copyright 2013 Harold Ratzburg

Harold Ratzburg was born at the start of the Great Depression and raised on a Dairy Farm in Wisconsin.  He served four years in the US Air Force in the 50's and was stationed in Germany, where he met his wife Anneliese, who helped get him through College to become a Civil Engineer.  After a time as a Highway Engineer and College Instructor, he wound up as a City Engineer of a small town in New Jersey.  Twenty four years later he retired to become an old geezer telling old stories on his new fangled computer.