Old News - from 4th Grade

Marilyn Weidler Ulve has been digging deep - and found these "letters" written by classmates during that year.  Shirley Mitchell was the teacher for many of us that year, and these memories will live in infamy.  To view the letters in a readable size double-click the picture and it should take you to the online album where the pages are larger.

Apparently homecoming was just as important back then as it is today since several classmates mention the parade.  Chuck Hendrickson mentions the first game of the year, against St. Ansgar, the traditional opener, and I know that we LOST that game.  In one of my letters I reference staying over with my cousin Craig that Friday night, and for some reason I still remember, clear as bell, standing in their barn while he came dancing into the milking area, with a sing-song announcement that "St. Ansgar won their game last night!  St. Ansgar won their game last night!"

Seven years later we played at St. Ansgar in another home opener, and he snuck out from his wingback position to cut me down from my defensive end position - several times.  I never saw him coming for the first three or four times he did it.  A couple years ago he was sharing the story at a family gathering.  He thought it was really funny.  Ha ha.

Where We Are

Perhaps it was curiosity that killed the cat, but I wondered just how scattered our class is, and what it would look like on a map.  And here it is.  You can zoom in or out to be able to view each location more carefully, and scroll down to view a directory listing as well.  I left the names off the map but can provide you with a link to a map that includes names if you ask.

Clearly most of the group still lives within a 30-mile cluster of the hometown, but we have made it to a number of other states plus Norway.  Without Richard's exact address I was not able to be anymore precise than a dot in Norway.  Hopefully he lives somewhere near there.

To view a full-screen map, click the NKHS 62 No Names link below.  If you're familiar with Google Maps you will find this operates the very same way.


View NKHS 62 No Names in a full screen map

A Frog Not Forgotten

In one of those weird conversations that pops up at a class reunion, Jo Olson told me about a biology assignment she once had, and last week emailed me the full story.

A bit of a chuckle here - I had completely forgotten about the frog until I was talking with Maynard. We had a good laugh because he remembered too when we had the assignment to impregnate a female frog in class. I can't remember the details but my frog refused to get pregnant and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. After some discussion and investigation by Mr. Midtgaard, we discovered my frog was a male! Boy, was I relieved 'cuz I still got a good grade!!! Funny you should mention it - I just found a dead frog in my closet - gift of my daschund sophie (I assume). jo

Please note, Jo, the labeled parts of the female frog shown here.  Just in case you get the assignment again.

are you listening, grandma?

Merrilee Reid forwarded this photo, which speaks all too well to the generation gap.  And by the way, this is gender-neutral even though Grandma is mentioned.

I'm discovering that young folks don't email each other - they use Facebook or texting.  I watch my granddaughter type out a text with her thumbs even faster than I can type it on a keyboard.

I turn to Grandson #1 for assistance with iTunes.  And my 10-year-old grandson put together a PowerPoint for his dad's Lions Club that was superior to any that I have done.

So then I stopped to ask myself what it was that I taught my own grandparents.

Nothing.  I taught them nothing.  But I perhaps showed them my double heel-click.  Maybe.

More about McNamara

An email from Ann Johnson fills in more background on Donald McNamara.

Yesterday we bumped into some long-time friends of ours whom we haven’t seen for ages; Curt and Sue Evans who farm near Joice.

Curt wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed reading about our search for Donald. He was very, very complimentary about all that we had done and all that was involved. He grew up in Joice and graduated from Lake Mills High School with Jan in 1964. She had told him about our project and directed him to the NKHS 62 website.

LIGHT BULB!!!

Knowing his age, I said, “I’ll bet you knew Don and Ron McNamara when you were in school”!

He said, “I sure did! We rode together on the school bus to Lake Mills but we knew them as “Carberry.” Then he started talking about Don and what a nice kid he was. Curt said the twins’ birthday was one day after his birthday so they called each other “Brother”. He spoke so well of Don and said they were really good friends.

He said both of the boys were very good athletes...he said so many things about the boys, I can’t begin to remember all of them. I told him I thought Shane would love to hear stories about his dad as a kid and Curt said, “Oh, you need to get in touch with Barry Anonson. He still lives in Joice; he and Don were really good friends. They both lived in town...I wasn’t around them so much because we lived in the country but those two were together all the time.”

He chuckled and said, “As I remember, the game warden took their guns away once because they were shooting sparrows around town.” There were stories that Michael (Shane's son) would like to hear...Curt said that Don was “a heck of a baseball player”. (He also said Don and Ron teased Deb (their sister) unmercifully....he even told us the name they called Deb but I can’t remember it. Curt was really enjoying talking about his friend.

The story continues . . . Ray Calhoun will be pleased that it does.

Here Are Some Words . . .

Today's paper featured a story about Chris Kluwe, the punter for the Minnesota Vikings, who is now blogging for the paper.  Kluwe is a real piece of work.  He's already well-known for his Tweets (Chris Warcraft on Twitter), for being a video game afficionado, serving as bass guitarist for his band Tripping Icarus, and now this blog, which you can read here in full...

Call it "fair play" that we give some time to the Viking side of the river and their two fans after posting the story about Jim Reid's visit to Lambeau, that paean to the Green Bay Packers.  (By the way, has anyone ever visited the Vikings Hall of Fame???  Oh, yeah, they don't have one.)

Anyway, the first paragraph in his first post is - How exactly are you supposed to start out a brand new blog/journal/random-blathering piece? It’s always vexed me. Should I just dive right in? “Hi, I’m Chris Kluwe, the punter for the Vikings. HERE ARE SOME WORDS, READ THEM.”


Personally, I can relate to that, and so can many of you who have posted or attempted to post on this blog, I am sure.  Kluwe will blunder forward, and if you've read anything about him you know what he posts will be entertaining, thoughtful, satirical, and insightful.  We should all do the same.

The door is open - come on in and drop some words.  And if I put some up, please read them!  Even if they are random-blathering.

Californians come to Wisconsin

Jim and Merrilee Reid came to town to visit last week, completing their trip around Lake Michigan following the Class Reunion, including a stop (for Jim) at the Packer Hall of Fame and Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

We enjoyed dinner at one of Hudson's fine downtown restaurants, then ambled out onto the Old Toll Bridge (also known as the Dike Road) that is a local landmark, where a passerby snapped this photo for us.  At one point in time Highway 12 traversed across this bridge and on into Minnesota, the connection between Chicago/Milwaukee/Madison and the Twin Cities.  

The lights in the background may be either boats or the I-94 bridge that replaced the section we were standing on.  Minnesota is on the right, and Wisconsin on the left.

A little history may be of interest for you:

The Hudson Toll Bridge was built in 1913, and it closed in 1951 after a new US-12 bridge was built one-half mile downstream. Today, people refer to the bridge as the Old Toll Bridge. Toll income from the bridge resulted in City of Hudson residents paying little or no property taxes for many years.

The hill on the Minnesota side on which the bridge would finish was steep, causing problems for some automobiles.

Old timers recall that Ford Model T cars often had a hard time climbing the bridge on the Minnesota side. Those cars had a transmission with metal bands. As the bands wore down, they would begin to slip. Drivers often found that they could back up the hill since reverse was used much less and the reverse band in the transmission would not be wore down quite as far.

A point of information: property taxes may have been low or non-existent for years until 1951, but they have since caught up.  Stan and Richard, the part about the Model T is for you.

And there's your travel tour for the day.  Come on up and visit sometime!