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EastsideNews
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Goodman Community Center
May l June 2016 PHOTO COURTESY OF PATRICIA JACOBSEN
Eastside HISTORY
A child’s eye view of the historic east side By Sarah White, East Side History Club
At our March meeting, Ann Waidelich and I shared stories and photos we’ve uncovered in the process of collecting material for the second edition of “An East Side Album.” Tom Moore sent us this reminiscence of Circle Park: “In the early 1940s, Elmside’s Circle Park had no name — it was just a wide place in the middle of the boulevard. It was a big round lawn with an intermittent low hedge and trees along the edge. Us neighborhood boys liked to use the open space for pick-up softball and touch-football games. But we had problem. “If things got boisterous, a neighbor, an old widow woman, would call the police! She contended that the circle was
Neighborhood kids shooting marbles.
History Club meetings will return in the fall Mark your calendars Sept. 19 Oct. 15 Nov. 12 Meetings are at Goodman Community Center 149 Waubesa St.
a park, not a playground. Then when a police car came, it would pause in front of her house, we kids would run, and the police would drive off, all to be repeated again and again. Until one day, the parks department showed up and planted a large evergreen tree in the middle of the circle — right on our pitcher’s mound. We moved our games to Olbrich Park. Some time later, the parks department showed up again and cut down the tree and installed a sandbox and park benches. Apparently the old widow woman had either died or moved away!” Around the corner, and a few years earlier (1938) on Center Avenue, a little boy named Perkins posed for Orwin Jacobsen’s camera in his Halloween cos-
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Perkins, a neighbor boy, trick or treats in the 2700 block of Center Avenue, circa 1938. tume, judging from the fallen leaves in the snapshot. Zig-zag a few blocks and fast-forward to 1948. Another little boy, 5-year-old Mike Ely, posed for another parent’s camera with his prize-winning fish beside his house at 2737 Lakeland Ave. He had just caught the biggest northern pike
ever caught in Lake Monona. It is memories like these that too seldom make it into a city’s official history, but they help us recall why we have always loved the Schenk-Atwood neighborhood. This fall we expect to celebrate the publication of a revised, expanded edition of our neighborhood history, “An East Side Album.” First published to commemorate the opening of the Goodman Community Center in the old Kupfer Ironworks factory, the revised edition will include additional photos and memories like these. There are also updates to material included in the first edition. The East Side History Club, a project of GCC, meets for three months each spring and fall to collect and share memories of Madison’s east side. If you would like to receive meeting notices by email or postal mail, contact Anitra Hovelson at anitra@goodmancenter.org or 608-204-8016. The East Side History Club blog at eastsidehistory.wordpress.com shares local history “finds” as they come to light. To submit your memories and pictures to publish on the blog, send an email to sarah.white@firstpersonprod.com. l PHOTO: ANN WAIDELICH
This is how Circle Park looks today, with Tom Moore’s house at 422 Elmside Blvd., just visible on the right.
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Gunderson Family since 1922
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