Wisconsin People & Ideas – Summer 2019

The many faces of

Sharon Kerry-Harlan

R.I.P. Milwaukee Journal • Jade Ring Winners • Words for Water

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WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Breanna Dollak • Head Gallery Attendant, James Watrous Gallery Chelsea Chandler • Director, Environmental Initiatives Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Kelly Hilyard • Program Assistant, Environmental Initiatives Bethany Jurewicz • Events & Exhibitions Manager Matt Rezin • Building Manager & Membership Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Development Director Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Nikita Werner • Administrative Assistant Ann Wilson • Business Manager OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Patricia Brady • President Tom Luljak • President-elect Tim Size • Immediate Past President Rich Donkle • Treasurer Roberta Filicky-Peneski • Secretary Steven Ackerman • Vice President of Sciences Malcolm Brett • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Freda Harris • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Tina Abert, Madison Kimberly Blaeser, Burlington Frank D. Byrne, Monona Joseph Heim, La Crosse Jane Elder, Madison Catherine G. Kodat, Appleton Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Dipesh Navsaria, Madison Kevin Reilly, Verona Linda Ware, Wausau Nathan Wautier, Madison Marty Wood, Eau Claire OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Freda Harris • Foundation President Andrew Richards • Foundation Vice President Rich Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Mark Bradley Patricia Brady Kristen Carreira Jane Elder Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak Tim Size

Wisconsin Academy Steenbock Center Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-263-1692 • wisconsinacademy.org

Editor’s Note Wisconsin is home to the best poets in the United States.

Sure, we’re probably better known for award-winning cheeses, picturesque places like Door County, and the Green Bay Packers. But I think there is a case to be made for Wisconsin as the poetry capital of America.

This perhaps audacious claim (which runs counter to our inclination toward “Midwest nice”) is reflected in both the dozens of poets laureate in communities around the state—from Howard Paap in Bayfield to Carly Anne Ravnikar in Kenosha—and the astonishingly deep pool of talent from which we draw our Wisconsin Poets Laureate, all of whom can stand toe to toe with the Robert Frosts of the world.

Speaking of Frost, Milwaukee poet David Southward just snagged the 2019 International Frost Farm Prize for his lovely sestina, “Mary’s Visit.” Southward is just one of dozens of top-tier poets writing from Milwaukee (think: Antler, Franklin Cline, Dasha Kelly Hamilton, and Susan Firer). The city’s Woodland Pattern Book Center happens to have the largest collection of poetry chapbooks in the U.S. and hosts a staggering 200 poetry-related events per year. Places like The Mill in Appleton, Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, and even the Coloma Hotel all host regular poetry readings, as do most public libraries (and pretty much every coffee shop and gallery between Sturgeon Bay and Washington Island).

Not convinced yet? Consider the annual poetry contests we hold through this magazine, which regularly garner over 600 poems from across the state. And we’re not the only organization handing out awards for poetry. The Wisconsin Writers Association and Council for Wisconsin Writers support poets and writers through annual contests, while the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and Chippewa Valley Writers Guild provide readings, workshops, and other opportunities for writers.

Regional publications such as Hummingbird, Barstow & Grand, Journal from the Heartland, Rosebud, and a handful of campus-based publications like Midwest Review and Portage Magazine, all work to connect readers with Wisconsin poets as well as fiction and nonfiction writers.

Part of the reason we are so rich in poetry here in Wisconsin is because we have a close-knit community of poets and lots of ways for them to share their work. This is not always the case for Wisconsin writers in other genres. Through partnership and collaboration—such as the one we are undertaking with the Wisconsin Writers Association in this issue—we can work together to perhaps one day make our state the creative writing capital of the world.

Patrick Stutz Photography

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

Jason A. Smith, Editor

On the cover: Artist Sharon Kerry-Harlan in her Wauwatosa home, 2019.

Photo by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

SUMMER 2019

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CONTENTS 04 From the Director 05 Letters 07 Happenings Essay

10 Deadline: Requiem for The Milwaukee Journal, 1882–1995

Paul G. Hayes

Photo Essay

16 Words for Water

Mary Dougherty

Report

22 To Keep Every Cog & Wheel:

A Rationale for Preserving Locally Rare Species John D. Lyons

Essay

28 Remembering Ecologist Franklin Schmidt

Ken Parejko

Courtessy of The Milwaukee Journal

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16

Mary Dougherty

VOLUME 65 · NUMBER 3 SUMMER 2019

@ Watrous Gallery

34 The Many Faces of Sharon Kerry-Harlan

Jody Clowes

Book Review

44 Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can

Help Save the World, by Marcia Bjornerud

Michael Hopkins

2019 JADE RING CONTEST WINNERS Poetry

46 _Bathtub Baptism

Kayla Knaack

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 15589633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

Since 1954, Wisconsin People & Ideas has been a trusted resource for people who care about the issues and ideas that shape life in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin People & Ideas publishes fiction and poetry from Wisconsin writers, highlights new works by visual artists and photographers from all corners of the state, and explores science and environmental issues that affect our people, lands, and waters.

Copyright © 2019 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS JASON A. SMITH editor VERITY ALTENBERGER editorial assistant JEAN LANG copy editor

Fiction

JODY CLOWES arts editor

Pamela J.A. Fullerton

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader

Nonfiction

HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

48 Going to Join Dickens

51 My Miss New Orleans

Julia Gimbel

facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy Humor

55 Crop Tending

Janice Wilberg

Ideas that move the world forward Join the Wisconsin Academy and help us create a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin people and ideas.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/WatrousGallery

From the Director

I

t seems these days that discussions of metrics and measuring success are humming around me like the mosquitoes in my garden. It might be the influence of the time I spend working on grant proposals and program evaluations, or maybe it is all those social media posts I see about “Five Ways to Increase Your Organization’s Impact.” Whatever the case, I just can’t seem to escape the notion that everything I do requires proof of demonstrable progress toward quantifiably positive outcomes.

It’s exhausting. Yet I find it hard to turn off.

In a recent conversation about this year’s cool and soggy June, a friend said, “Well, it sure doesn’t feel like summer!” I was tempted to ask, “What factors would you say define what summer should feel like, and which of these are key indicators of a satisfactory summer?” This was a sign that I clearly need to step away from the keyboard a bit and enjoy the season’s often unquantifiable pleasures. In doing so, I realized my imagination does indeed have many measures of what a summer should feel like.

My mother was from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where a favorite description of summer was “three months of poor sledding followed by nine months of winter.” Here in south central Wisconsin, I think of warm days, sunshine, and twilight that lingers well into the evening. My friend and early mentor Lee helped me mark the progression of summer through the fruit varieties captured in canning jars: strawberries, sweet cherries, sour cherries,

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raspberries, blueberries, and peaches. When the Bartlett pears were on the shelf and the tart apples were ready for sauce, you knew the season was over. Even the bounty and quality of local fruit can be a metric, as in, “The raspberries are phenomenal this year!”

Sandy toes and damp towels are just two metrics that mark the months we spend in and around our favorite lakes, rivers, beaches, and oceans—take your pick. While my highest rating goes to clearwater lakes punctuated with shoreline white pines and loon-song at dusk, a backyard sprinkler or community splash pad can make the grade on a really hot day.

Summer can perhaps be measured best by the things we do outside that would be ridiculous to do during much of the rest of the year: eating (all hail the picnic in its many forms) as well as enjoying music, theater, and looking at art for three hours under intense sun while consuming food that may or may not be on a stick. Summer should include local sweet corn fairs and fests, and maybe dancing in the streets followed by cherry pie à la mode. There should be the smack of a baseball encountering a bat and the slap of a screen door hitting its frame, as well as gentler noises like the distant drone of a lawn mower or the sound of birdsong after a thunderstorm.

It’s not all fun and birdsong, however. Summer is also peak season for road construction, killer tornados, insects that bite, sunburn, and days of heat-index misery. It can be a time of very hard work, too, for the harvesters who gather by hand, the road construction workers laying hot asphalt, and the dairy cows unable to find a shady spot to rest. (I thank you all for your labors.)

And yet we wouldn’t trade our summers for anything. Sure, we are likely to complain about the heat and humidity and bugs, but we also know that winter is never too far away. As Shakespeare noted long ago: Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

So, whatever makes this season “summer” by your measures, take the time to savor its pleasures and enjoy.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

Member News

NEWS for MEMBERS FELLOWS NOMINATIONS We a re a cce pt i n g n o m i n a t i o n s fo r t h e 2020 Fellows Awards from August 1 to September 30, 2019. We encourage all Academy members to nominate someone they know for a Fellows Award, which recognizes outstanding leadership and achievement in and across the disciplines. To find information about the Fellows nomination process, or to meet current and past honorees, visit wisconsinacademy.org/nominate.

SPECIAL MEMBER APPRECIATION OFFER B e g i n n i n g i n A u g u s t 2 0 1 9, a l l a c t i v e Academy members will be invited to share an annual membership in the Academy with up to three friends, colleagues, or family members. This is our small way of saying, Thank you for your ongoing support, and of celebrating our upcoming 150th anniversary year in 2020. Look for your special member appreciation offer to appear in the mail over the coming weeks. If you do not receive yours by September 1, 2019, or if you have any questions regarding the status of your membership, please contact us at members@wisconsinacademy.org.

Letters The James Watrous Gallery is a beautiful space and director Jody Clowes does an amazing job curating and drawing artists from around the state. What an opportunity it was to show my work at the gallery’s Uprooted exhibition this spring. When I am out in the middle of the woods painting by myself for weeks on end, I’m always hoping people will connect with the work. Knowing that I was making work for Uprooted alongside other Wisconsin artists, and that we were going to come together in Madison to have this show, gave me this wonderful sense of camaraderie and community. Thank you!

Bethann Moran-Handzlik, Fort Atkinson

When it comes to the issues surrounding climate change, the Academy has been focused more determinedly and for a lot longer than many other groups in Wisconsin. I’ve been worried about climate change for a long time, and tend to think of it as a sort of thousandpound gorilla in our culture and in our environment. Whether its through the Environmental Breakfasts or the Climate Fast Forward Conference, I’ve been pleased to work with an organization that has “the long view” on these sorts of things. The Academy is filled with bright, passionate individuals, and there’s nothing better than tackling an intractable problem with a bunch of other bright people.

In most of the Climate & Energy Initiative work that I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in, we’ve moved as steadily as we can toward solutions—and I appreciate that.

Sharon Dunwoody, Professor Emerita, UW–Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communications

FULL CIRCLE LEGACY PROGRAM Have you considered adding the Wisconsin Academy to your will or estate plans? Legacy gifts provide the financial foundation for building a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin ideas. Leaving a legacy to the Wisconsin Academy is simple, gratifying, and beneficial fo r f u t u re g e n e ra t i o n s . Le a r n m o re a t wisconsinacademy.org/legacy.

We want to hear from you. Please send feedback and comments about Wisconsin People & Ideas and other Academy programs to: editor@wisconsinacademy.org. Thank you!

SUMMER 2019

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happenings

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson (1982), the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, was honored at a ceremony held in the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda on June 18, 2019. The 85-year-old justice is retiring this July after 43 years of service to the state. Those who spoke on her behalf during the ceremony included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who described Abrahamson in a recorded video message as among “the very best,” a jurist who “strive[s] constantly to make the legal system genuinely equal and accessible to all.”

Kevin Shafer (2018) from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District received the 2019 Water Warrior of the Year Award from The Water Council, a global center for advancing water technologies and stewardship. The Water Warrior Award was created by The Water Council to celebrate and acknowledge the successes of individuals in Wisconsin’s water industry who are making significant achievements while supporting the advancement of students in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) fields.

The Academy community was saddened to hear of the recent passing of artist and educator Truman Lowe (2005).

Born in 1944 near Black River Falls, Lowe learned traditional Ho-Chunk basketry, ribbon work, and beading from his parents. He brought these skills and a deep appreciation for the natural world to UW–Madison, where he taught in the Art Department for 35 years. His work has appeared in exhibits across the world and is held in many museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, where Lowe was Curator of Contemporary Art from 2000 to 2008. One of the foremost Native artists of his generation, Lowe will also be remembered for his compassion and generosity.

Across the U.S., the average number of reported cases of Lyme disease has more than doubled over the past decade. With 3,105 estimated cases of Lyme disease in 2018, Wisconsin ranks 4th in the nation for this tick-borne illness that, left untreated, can cause fever, rash, facial paralysis, and arthritis.

Caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and Borrelia mayonii.

Lyme disease is spread to humans by the bite of an infected deer tick.

Different species of ticks can carry one or more diseases along with Lyme, such as Babesiosis, Ehrlichiosis or Anaplasmosis, Bartonellosis, and the Powassan Virus. Because these tick-borne diseases aren’t well understood by the medical community, patients who suffer from them are often misdiagnosed.

A new medical center in Woodruff, near Minocqua, is being established to more effectively diagnose and treat Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. A project of the Minocqua-based Howard Young Foundation and the Open Medicine Institute, the $7 million TickBorne Illness Center of Excellence is the first in the Midwest to combine clinical treatment for tick-borne illnesses with cutting-edge scientific research.

“Our primary interest is to determine what works most efficiently in the treatment of tick-borne illness, particularly in the many complex chronic cases,” says Dr. Andreas Kogelnik, the director of the Open Medicine Institute and a national expert on tick-borne illnesses. “Often patients that come to us have already been seen by primary care physicians and various specialists. We will offer these folks a team approach over time to deal with their illness. You’re not going to unwind a chronic problem like that overnight.”

The Tick-Borne Illness Center of Excellence is scheduled to open in Summer 2019, and Kogelnik and other medical staff expect to see an estimated 2,000 patients per year. However, they will likely have more cases than they can handle, as scientists predict infection rates will rise as conditions become more favorable for ticks in the Midwest due to climate change.

James Gathany/CDC

Shirley S. Abrahamson

TI CK-BO RN E D ISEASE

Academy Fellows are recognized for outstanding leadership and achievement across the disciplines.

Learn more at wisconsinacademy.org/fellows.

SUMMER 2019

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H O M EG ROWN AUTH O RS When considering what to read this summer, you can count on the Wisconsin Literary Map Project to help you find a book by a Wisconsin author. Created by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English, this ongoing website project features resources for readers and teachers who want to dive into our state’s unique literary culture.

The site provides a comprehensive author list that connects readers to pages with author biographies, lists of works, links to author websites, and embedded maps to author hometowns. After just a short perusing of the author pages, visitors can catch up on the works and biographies of such Wisconsin standouts as Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold, or Little House series author Laura Ingalls Wilder, as well as lesserknown authors such as Silvia Acevedo, author of the God Awful trilogy, and prolific poet Tom Montag.

In addition to the detailed author pages, the website has a Wisconsin Literary Links page that connects visitors to interviews with Wisconsin authors, book reviews, and other author lists of note.

Created with support from the Robert C. Pooley Research Foundation, the Wisconsin Literary Map Project is a useful resource for Wisconsin literary community, bringing knowledge of Wisconsin authors to the forefront and encouraging the teaching and reading of books by homegrown authors.

ABHM

David Mitchell

happenings

A RTS H OTE L

David Mitchell

Instead of a typical, cookie-cutter hotel, imagine one made with creativity in mind, a place with rooms designed by local artists, four gallery spaces featuring rotating exhibitions, and a flexible black box space to showcase various performing arts. “ T h e i d e a i s k i n d o f l i ke a f i n e arts Disney World,” says John Price, programming director for Saint Kate, a new 219-room “arts hotel” located in Milwaukee’s theater district. Named for St. Catherine of Bologna, the patron saint of artists, Saint Kate was designed to celebrate the creative process and the arts through dozens of unique experiences with a Midwestern twist.

While more than 100 contemporary works from the hotel’s permanent collection, including a massive sculpture

by Deborah Butterfield, are spread throughout the property, the hotel’s MOWA | DTN gallery features 1,700 square feet of exhibit space curated by the Museum of Wisconsin Art. Outside the MOWA | DTN gallery, a red pay phone created by artist Mark Klassen plays recorded poetry by a handful of local writers, including Susan Firer, Matt Cook, and Paul Druecke.

Those seeking an immersive arts experience can stay in one of hotel’s five “Canvas” rooms, which are designed around the artworks of local artists such as Lon Michaels, Rosemary Ollison–Double, and Reed Skocz. The hotel’s ARC Theatre features performances of traditional as well as experimental works created by resident theater company ARCo. Throughout the property at any given time, musicians, comedians, even jugglers keep visitors engaged in the arts.

According to Maureen Ragalie, head curator for Saint Kate, the hotel’s mission is to “bring Midwestern artists to greater visibility and [help] Milwaukeeans realize the vibrancy of their own art community.”

Verity Altenberger 8

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Want to stay connected to new and interesting things happening across Wisconsin? Sign up for our e-mails at wisconsinacademy.org/connect.

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State State DayDay Conference Conference andand Annual Annual ArtArt Exhibition Exhibition PylePyle Center Center at UW-Madison at UW-Madison JoinJoin us for us for our our State State DayDay Conference, Conference, which which celebrates celebrates a year a year of regional of regional art exhibitions art exhibitions andand workshops. workshops.

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Essay

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Courtesy of The Milwaukee Journal

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DEADLINE REQUIEM FOR THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL, 1882–1995

BY PAU L G. HAYES

M

y career in newspapers ended the year I turned 61. I remember it well, because

the oldest of my four grandchildren was days away from her first birthday when I retired from The Milwaukee Journal on March 31, 1995. The grandchildren don’t remember their grandfather ever having been gainfully employed.

The Milwaukee Journal’s fourth floor newsroom in 1965, replete with green eyeshades, manual typewriters, dial telephones, plenty of ashtrays, and a few cuspidors.

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for young people. Today, Facebook and Twitter provide a curated stream of information in which the news is just another piece of content.

In our highly digitally connected world, where purchases and information alike are just a click away, one might wonder if there’s a need for newspapers anymore.

Courtesy of Paul Hayes

W

The author interviews Father James Groppi, the leader of a September 25, 1970, protest march by the NAACP Youth Council outside a Republican Party rally held at the Milwaukee Arena.

The day after I retired, the dominant source of news about Milwaukee and greater Wisconsin vanished. On the following day, April 2, 1995, readers of the former Milwaukee Journal and readers of another city paper, the Milwaukee Sentinel, received their first copy of the hybrid Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Ever since I witnessed the eclipse of this great American daily, I have become more and more aware of the rapid decline of newspaper culture.

This decline began well before my retirement, however. Its causes include the rise of television, middle-class women entering the workforce, and, most important by far, the rapid, invasive growth of the Internet and social media. Through websites such as Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist, the Internet supplanted newspapers as the primary medium for classified advertising—the financial lifeline of big city dailies. Although deplorably unreliable and undisciplined, social media have become the dominant purveyors of information

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isconsin has long been home to a world-class newspaper.

In 1960 and 1961, three opinion polls asked 335 editors, 311 publishers, and 125 journalism professors to rank the best of the roughly 1,760 newspapers in the United States. The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington Post, and The Milwaukee Journal were among the top six in each poll (the editors ranked The Journal third, publishers ranked it fourth, and professors ranked it fifth).

Given its sterling reputation across the board, why wasn’t The Journal as well known as The New York Times? The answer is clear: The Journal was a local newspaper, perhaps the best in the country, and a perfect fit for its community. It was the vacuum cleaner of southeastern Wisconsin, where seemingly no public action went unnoticed. When I joined, it aspired to become the newspaper of record for the entire state. However, if you weren’t from Wisconsin there was little reason to read it.

I walked into The Journal’s newsroom at 8:00 am on a Monday in early March 1962. My wife Philia and I had arrived from Des Moines a week earlier, and we found a furnished apartment above a German sausage shop in northwest Milwaukee. I drove downtown on two-lane Fond du Lac Avenue, as Milwaukee had no freeways at the time. The morning rush hour was horrible, and I was almost late on my first day of work. I made $120 per week.

The Milwaukee Journal Building exuded dignified prosperity, reflecting the character and success of its founder, Lucius Nieman.

Built in 1924, it occupied the southeast corner of 4th and State Streets. Its busy lobby, paneled with black walnut, served visitors with a post office, phone booths, and a counter that sold Journal-produced pamphlets about Wisconsin history and lore, fishing and travel guides, even recipes. Cheerful operators of three elevators delivered customers and employees alike to their desired floors.

I quickly learned that deadline panic at The Journal occurred five times a day. The State edition deadline was first. It carried news from correspondents covering most of greater Wisconsin and from four reporters in our Madison bureau. A 9:00 am copy cutoff for the State edition ensured that it would be printed, bundled, and loaded onto a fleet of green-paneled trucks before noon. These trucks then delivered the paper to communities across the state. The State edition was followed at 11:00 am by the Belt edition, which circulated to Madison and the suburbs around Milwaukee.

The Latest II edition deadline at noon was the day’s climax. The flow of information from city-side reporters swelled into a torrent that flooded the newsroom. The rewrite bank became a crescendo of urgent talk, ringing phones, and typewriter clatter, as people wearing headsets took notes from on-the-scene reporters at city hall, the county and federal buildings, central police headquarters, and local courtrooms. Reporters at the scenes of fires, crimes, or

Essay

accidents called from nearby pay telephone booths. All reporters carried loose change for pay phones. Less urgent afternoon deadlines included the Peach Sheet—a single page given away free with street sales that featured baseball scores, stock market numbers, and the day’s crimes—and the WUP edition, which was trucked overnight to northern Wisconsin and Upper Michigan (hence the acronym).

Like some reporters, I would occasionally rush back to the office to write my own story, composing the lead paragraph in my head along the way. I’d stop at the city desk and tell the editor the gist of the story and about how long I thought it should be. If he wanted a shorter story, he’d say so on the spot. He never asked for a longer one. At my desk, I typed my story, making three carbon copies. The original went to the city desk. A carbon was picked up for WTMJ radio for the 5:00 pm news (we often heard our stories on the car radio during the commute home), and another went to the Associated Press. The third carbon went into my file cabinet.

Before moving to press, local stories were reviewed by the city editor, an assistant city editor, the local copy desk chief, and a copy editor. If the story was a big deal, the paper’s managing editor also reviewed it. At every level, stories were checked and double-checked for accuracy, fairness, spelling, punctuation, clarity, and length.

Counting the reporter and the person assigned with the rewrite, six or seven people reviewed every story.

This system for creating “the news” in America was the product of 150 years of evolution and innovation, and it aspired to live up to the vision our Founders had of an independent press and its role in democracy. The Founders truly believed that newspapers were essential to good government, and they certainly would have been alarmed at the prospect of their steep and impending decline.

In March 1962, with The Milwaukee Journal approaching peak circulation, we weren’t yet alarmed. Yet the signs were there. We just didn’t see them.

A

n axiom of the free press is that civic progress and free speech are best protected by more rather than fewer newspapers. By this measure, the decline of the metropolitan daily began in the early 1900s. At their peak in 1910, there were 2,200 daily Englishlanguage newspapers in the U.S. Milwaukee had nine dailies—five English, two German, and two Polish—and 689 American cities had more than one.

However, chains were expanding and mergers becoming frequent, not only among newspapers, but throughout commerce, from drugstores and grocers to importers and manufacturers. Milwaukee emerged from World War II with only two English dailies: the afternoon Journal, founded in 1882, and the morning Sentinel, founded in 1837. Where The Journal was an immensely profitable paper, the once-great Sentinel was by 1962 a failing member of the Hearst newspaper empire.

By then, Milwaukee was one of the 40 or so remaining American cities with competing dailies. On May 27, 1962, members of the Newspaper Guild, the union that had represented the Sentinel newsroom since 1937, walked out. Earlier strike threats were met

by The Hearst Corporation’s vow to sell Wisconsin’s oldest daily newspaper. Hearst followed through with its vow, offering to sell the

Sentinel to Journal publisher and CEO Irwin Maier for $7 million.

The Chicago Tribune Company was interested, as was a group of conservative Milwaukee industrialists, yet none of the parties believed they could profitably run the Sentinel.

With no other takers, Hearst cut the price to $3 million and signed a deal with The Journal Company. Maier promised to publish both papers with independent voices. The Sentinel set up a separate newsroom in an annex just north of the Journal Building (the two buildings were connected by a walkway over an alley) where its demoralized staff sprang to life.

Of course, Milwaukeeans, especially those in the business community, feared that The Journal would impose its liberal bent on the Sentinel and the city would become a media monopoly town.

Surprising even to us in the newsroom was the intensity of competition that formed between The Journal and the Sentinel, which was far more aggressive than before the purchase. (The Journal’s city editor, Harry Hill, swore that, By God, he was not going to be beaten by the upstart setting up shop in the annex!)

In March 1962, with The Milwaukee Journal approaching peak circulation, we weren’t yet alarmed.

Yet the signs were there.

Both papers assigned reporters to important government offices and public meetings, and both kept their traditional editorial identities: The Journal was centrist liberal, the Sentinel conservative.

There was, of course, overlap: for instance, when it came to abortion, both papers were pro-choice.

For three decades, newspaper competition was never keener in Milwaukee. Reporters dreaded being scooped, and the truly cursed risked demotion or even dismissal if they were. Nervous editors found space for the flimsiest of stories, fearing that the opposition might publish it first. The Sentinel’s daily circulation grew by 10,000. The Journal’s weekday circulation held steady at 373,000, while Sunday circulation soared to over 560,000 papers.

Yet a careful observer of the paper over these three decades might have noticed one small sign of decline. For years The Journal printed its daily circulation number in small type on page one, comparing it to circulation a year earlier and always showing growth. That cute little feature was dropped in 1963, when circulation began a slow downward trend from its peak of 375,326 on weekdays and 567,042 on Sundays as television began to consume more reader time and attention.

The decline remained gradual until the 1970s, when the number of women in the workplace doubled to 46 million (and continues to

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grow today). This altered a familiar pattern for many middle-class American families in which stay-at-home wives cooked and tended children while husbands, returning home from work in the evening, settled into a chair to read the afternoon paper until supper time.

Indeed, a good number of women found work in the newsroom, which strengthened the culture and character of a space that until this time was dominated by men. Nevertheless, there were respected female journalists in newsrooms prior to this era, including Zona Gale and Edna Ferber, both of whom worked for The Journal in the early 1900s and went on to win Pulitzer Prizes for their writing.

While some losses in circulation for The Journal came from changes in culture, others were self-inflicted. When the price of gasoline rose sharply in the 1980s, Robert A. Kahlor, the vice president of production, decided to eliminate far-north delivery routes where the price of the paper didn’t cover the cost of gas. Thus ended The Journal’s ambition to be the newspaper of record for all of Wisconsin.

By 1981, daily circulation had fallen to 324,000. There was talk in the newsroom that a merger of The Journal and the Sentinel was probable, even though robust profits suggested that such drastic action could be delayed until the distant future. The news staff remained the largest in Wisconsin with 230 people putting out the daily Journal and about a third fewer at the Sentinel.

In 1986, retiring executive editor Richard Leonard and managing editor Joseph Shoquist were replaced with Sigvard Gissler and Steve Hannah, respectively. Kahlor, the penny-pinching vice president of production, became CEO. He gave Gissler and Hannah seven years to reverse the circulation slide. Many colleagues believed that they were foolish to agree—and destined to fail. Indeed their efforts proved superficial, futile, and pathetic. They hired a newspaper consultant who remade the appearance of The Journal, replacing dedicated news space with flashy color charts, blocks of white space, and oversized headlines. The paper adopted a mascot, a rolled-up newspaper with cartoon features named Rollie. Inevitably, someone was hired to walk around town in a Rollie costume.

Circulation plummeted by more than 70,000 to about 230,000 papers by 1993 when Gissler and Hannah left The Journal. They were replaced by Mary Jo Meisner and Martin Kaiser. Meisner, who previously had held five short-term newspaper jobs, served only three-and-a-half years—time enough to preside over the merger of The Journal and Sentinel into a single morning Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in April 1995.

I was in Costa Rica in January of 1995, covering the successful efforts of the Milwaukee Public Museum and Riveredge Nature Center to protect a patch of rain forest called Tirimbina, when I learned by phone that the merger was imminent. The last straw had been an unexpected price increase for newsprint paper that ignited a panic among management and set the merger machine in motion.

The next three months saw a flurry of planning: The new paper would have a news staff of about 300, larger than either The Journal or the Sentinel, but smaller than the two combined. In the end, 248 full-time employees from all departments left the papers. Many accepted buyouts, but others were fired. At age 60, I welcomed the buyout. But it was a tragic day for younger colleagues who were

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forced out. On March 31, 1995, the last Milwaukee Journal rolled off the presses.

Two days later the first Milwaukee Journal Sentinel appeared.

Much has happened since then. The Journal Company became a publicly traded company in 2003, ending its employee-ownership protection against outside raiders. In 2014, Journal Communications and E. W. Scripps Company merged as a broadcasting entity and spun off fourteen newspapers, including the Journal Sentinel, as the Journal Media Group. The Group was subsequently acquired in 2016 by the Gannett Company, a national chain of more than a hundred papers.

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oday, the newsroom of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel holds fewer than a hundred reporters and editors. Most of the building is empty. There is a single deadline daily. As a veteran of the old vacuum cleaner, I wonder what dirt we are missing.

Yet the Journal Sentinel remains the largest news-gathering operation in Wisconsin, without which radio and television news—and even social media—would suffer from a growing dearth of facts. Its writers are professionals, honest and good. Under editor Martin Kaiser and managing editor George Stanley, the paper won three Pulitzer Prizes in 2008, 2010, and 2011. Kaiser retired in 2015 and Stanley is now editor of this fine paper. I read it daily and encourage others to do so. The latest official figures put its circulation at 153,000, but a growing fraction of this is online only. Subscribers of the printed edition are rumored to be fewer than 90,000 and falling.

A version of this saga has unfolded in every major city in the United States. The question is, Can we maintain our democracy without prosperous, independent daily newspapers? Recent news out of Washington and Madison indicates that the outlook is poor.

Almost four decades of reporting environmental, demographic, and social dynamics taught me caution in predicting the future, and I will not do so here. These decades also persuaded me that the human institutions I once assumed to be enduring and dependable can be fragile and fleeting. My newspaper was one such institution. With my grandchildren in mind, I wonder if our democracy is another.

Paul G. Hayes is an author and former journalist for The Milwaukee Journal, where his writing garnered a Gordon MacQuarrie Medal from the Wisconsin Natural Resources Foundation and two Westinghouse Science Writing Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Hayes was named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 1987.

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Photo Essay

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Photo Essay

Words for Water

BY MARY D O U G H ERTY

L

ake Superior is one of the last places on earth with clean and abundant fresh water. By area, it is the largest fresh water lake in

the world, containing 10% of the globe’s valuable fresh water.

I call this lake my home, and felt I could no longer watch as mineral extraction, industrial agriculture, and overdevelopment increasingly threatened our waters. The idea for the Words for Water photography project (like many a good thing) popped up at our kitchen table one night. My husband, Ted, and I wondered what would happen if we took photos of people and their answers to a simple question: If water could speak, what would it say?

What we ended up with is a kind of “love letter” to Lake Superior composed with photos of all kinds of people from all walks of life.

Their messages from the lake—sometimes a single word or phrase as meaningful as any news article or water quality report—are entirely their own. Our hope is that the Words for Water photography project, which is still growing, will encourage people who care about Lake Superior to think and act collectively when it comes to decisions that affect our waters.

Add your voice to the project at wordsforwater.com.

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Photo Essay

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Photo Essay

Mary Dougherty is an advocate for communities dealing with factory farms and the creator of the Words for Water project. She is the author of the cookbook, Life in a Northern Town, and executive director of CORE Community Resources, a nonprofit that helps seniors stay independent and active.

Dougherty lives in Bayfield with her husband, Ted, five children, and three dogs.

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Report

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Report

To Keep Every Cog & Wheel A rationale for preserving locally rare species

BY J O H N D. LYO NS

O

n a particularly hot July day during the summer of 2012, Phil Cochran, Gary Borash, and I were

netting fish in the backwaters and side channels of the Mississippi River in southwestern Wisconsin. We were working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on an annual survey of Asian carp, a group of four non-native species from China that threaten Wisconsin’s aquatic ecosystems (see also “An Upstream Battle” in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Summer 2010).

WDNR

John D. Lyons and his son, Eric, seining a Mississippi River backwater near Cassville for Asian carp in 2007.

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Asian carp became established in the Mississippi River in Arkansas in the late 1970s and have gradually spread to southern and central Illinois, where they have the potential to displace several commercially and recreationally important native fishes.

While a few stray Asian carp adults have been found in the Mississippi River and its tributaries in Wisconsin, we were searching for evidence that the invasive fish was reproducing, which would mean that it might be able to establish a self-sustaining population here.

During the netting I noted that in one spot the river registered an astonishing 94 degrees—the warmest water temperature I’ve ever observed or even heard of in the state. It was the only time I could recall in my over forty years of Wisconsin fish studies that I felt like getting out of the water to cool off. All three of us were close to heat exhaustion by the time we finally got back to the Eagles Roost Resort in Cassville to catch some rest before going out again the next morning.

As Aldo Leopold eloquently states in A Sand County Almanac: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

While we did not collect any juvenile Asian carp that day, we did capture and release a few pallid shiners, a native minnow species on the Wisconsin Endangered Species List. A species is officially considered “endangered” in Wisconsin if it is extremely rare and likely to disappear from the state without strict protection. Collection and harvest are prohibited, and human activities with the potential to affect the species receive close scrutiny and may be blocked or allowed to proceed only with modifications.

When I told one of the resort workers about the absence of Asian carp from our nets, he was relieved. However, when I told him about the endangered shiners we saw, he cocked an eyebrow. “Why do we need to protect those fish?” he asked. “What good are they?” Maybe it was the heat, but I couldn’t come up with a good answer and the conversation moved to other topics.

However, his question stayed with me as I headed back to my room for a blissfully cool shower and a cold beer. As a lifelong, self-professed fish obsessive, I’ve always believed that all fish species are worthy of study and protection. It never occurred to me to ask why we have laws to protect rare fishes—or rare species of any animal or plant—in Wisconsin if that species is common elsewhere

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and in no danger of disappearing across its entire range. It seems that arguments for protecting these locally rare plants and animals are not as well developed or easily explained as those for globally rare species, which are in trouble everywhere they occur.

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any wild plants and animals have clear economic value, making it is easy to argue for their protection, or, more accurately, their conservation or “wise use” in order to ensure a steady supply and a consistent economic return. Think of the cod we eat at a Friday fish fry, the bears we travel to Yellowstone National Park to see, or the wild ginseng some diligently search for and sell at a high price. In Wisconsin, fish species such as the muskellunge and largemouth bass are carefully monitored and managed as they are pursued by hundreds of thousands of anglers who contribute millions of dollars to the state’s economy and support thousands of jobs. Other species popular with anglers such as channel catfish and lake whitefish are also harvested commercially for food.

Many wild plants and animals, sometimes termed non-game species, have no significant direct use yet may support other highly valued species or play a critical ecosystem role. Sometimes it’s both, as with the small fishes upon which musky and bass prey that often consume mosquito, black fly, and other nuisance insect larvae.

Some organisms of little obvious value may have unusual metabolic processes or pharmacological properties that perhaps someday could be transformed into profitable chemicals or helpful drugs. For example, the blood of lampreys—six species of which occur in Wisconsin—contains a compound that may help improve the delivery and uptake of drugs used to treat human brain disorders. Likewise, the venom produced in the spines of some fishes has the potential for pharmaceutical applications (three small catfishes with venomous spines live in Wisconsin).

Even if we don’t fully explore the economic, ecological, or pharmacological value of a species, it still has intrinsic value. As Aldo Leopold eloquently states in A Sand County Almanac, when talking of wildlife conservation and ecosystem management: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” And many people believe (as do I) that humans have a moral obligation as stewards of the Earth to ensure the survival of species, each a unique and amazing product of evolution (or, if you prefer, God’s creation).

Ironically, rules designed to preserve rare species (which typically prevent them from being caught and kept) can limit our exploration of their chemical or pharmacological value. To capture and experiment on rare Wisconsin species requires special permits from the WDNR that are issued only for sanctioned scientific or educational purposes. Overtly commercial permit applications are likely to be rejected, discouraging exploration into a species’ economic possibilities. Thus, the slender madtom, a small catfish, is unlikely to have the venom in its spines analyzed for possible pharmacological properties in Wisconsin, where it is very rare. But such an analysis certainly could be done in southern Illinois or Missouri, where it is common and not specifically regulated.

Because of their scarcity, most rare species in Wisconsin are also unlikely to play a key role in supporting economically important

Ryan Hagerty/USFWS

Fast-moving and invasive Asian carp such as these silver carp in the Fox River in Missouri can out-muscle juvenile walleye and other filter-feeders for food.

species or factor much into ecosystem function. Even the moral argument for preserving locally rare species doesn’t hold much water. It’s difficult to make a simple and compelling moral case for preserving a species here if many viable and secure populations remain elsewhere. The pallid shiners we caught in 2012 and 19 other Wisconsin fish species fall into this category. If pallid shiners were to be lost from Wisconsin, the species would be in no immediate danger of disappearing from the Earth. Or would it?

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he overall likelihood of a species continuing to survive is enhanced when it consists of a variety of populations spread out across the landscape. Small populations geographically removed from the core of the species’ range, as is the case for most locally rare species in Wisconsin, provide an extra margin of safety for the species’ survival.

Excessive harvest is often what we think of as a primary driver of species decline, but disease epidemics triggered by ecosystem alteration and loss of habitat due to unfettered development can potentially eliminate even abundant species over a few decades.

Too, harmful invasive species can place additional pressure on native plants and animals, accelerating their decline. Yet it is humans, as the May 2019 United Nations report on biodiversity notes, that largely control the fate of the nearly one million species at risk of extinction over the next few decades.

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Closely related to sturgeons and prized for its caviar, the paddlefish is a native rare species in Wisconsin.

The pallid shiner, a native rare species in Wisconsin.

The slender madtom, a native rare species in Wisconsin with poisonous spines.

Photos by John D. Lyons

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Report

Indeed, a quick glance at the last two centuries of biodiversity in America underscores how quickly formerly common plants and animals can decline and even disappear in the face of human activity. In the 1800s, for example, there were an estimated 60 million American bison; a century later only about 300 remained, the last vestiges of a species decimated by unrestricted hunting and the agricultural transformation of the landscape. Similarly, at the time Europeans first began settling North America, there were thought to be three to five billion passenger pigeons, representing 25% to 40% of all the birds in what is now the United States. By 1900 the species was extinct, done in by wildly excessive hunting and massive losses of native forests, prairies, and wetlands.

The presence of a protected population, even if small, that exists beyond a species’ core range is a relatively inexpensive form of biological “insurance.” As the human population and its ecological footprint continue to grow, this insurance will likely become increasingly important. For example, the expansion of Asian carp in the central United States threatens the paddlefish and several other native large-river fishes. If Asian carp do not become established in Wisconsin, then Wisconsin may become an important refuge for the paddlefish and other large river species.

Locally rare populations also provide another kind of survival insurance. These populations typically exist in marginal areas, either geographically or ecologically, where conditions are extreme relative to those at the core of its range. Consequently, these marginal populations may have developed unique genetic, ecological, or behavioral traits that allow them to survive lessthan-optimal conditions. They represent a potential reservoir of adaptations that may allow the species to persist in the face of a changing global environment. Just as a diverse financial portfolio is best in times of economic change and uncertainty, so too is a species that has distinct populations with different environmental tolerances and preferences. A population in Wisconsin, although small and under threat, may confer increased resilience for the species as a whole.

For example, one of the climate shifts observed over the last 30 years has been an increase in annual temperature fluctuations. Overall, most areas are projected to become warmer in the future, but they will also likely encounter more extreme warm and cold conditions. Populations at the northern edge of a species distribution, such as the pallid shiner in Wisconsin, already experience a wider range of temperatures than populations farther south. The Wisconsin population of pallid shiners can tolerate water up to at least 94 degrees, as our 2012 sampling demonstrated, and wintertime temperatures as cold as 32 degrees. This means they have a total tolerance range of at least 62 degrees. More southerly populations in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, where the water temperature never gets below 40 or so degrees, have a tolerance range of only about 52 degrees. Thus, Wisconsin’s pallid shiners may be better equipped to deal with an increasingly variable and extreme temperature regime than their

southern counterparts. And if the southern edge of pallid shiners’ range were to become too warm for the species, the population in Wisconsin would become even more important to the overall survival of the species.

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o what good are those few pallid shiners we caught on that hot summer day? Perhaps not much individually. But their presence in our stretch of the Mississippi may have disproportionate importance because of their geographic location and genetic, ecological, and behavioral adaptations. The same probably is true of many other rare plants and animals in Wisconsin. Preserving as many wild species and as much diversity as possible within these species is an economic and moral benefit to humankind. Consequently, the treatment these species receive in our state through strict and specific laws may ultimately help determine their continued survival on earth.

But laws alone are not sufficient. We all have a role and a responsibility to help preserve the plants and animals of the state. We must advocate and work for healthy air, water, and soil, appropriate land use, protection from invasive species, intact and properly functioning ecosystems, and responsible use of energy and natural resources to help ensure the continued well being of all Wisconsin species—ourselves included.

John D. Lyons is a fisheries scientist and ichthyologist. He worked at the WDNR for 32 years before retiring in 2017. When Lyons began with the WDNR, he was also appointed as adjunct curator of fishes at the University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum, a position he still holds today.

An expert in the field of fish and aquatic habitat conservation, Lyons has published over 180 scientific and popular articles on the subject. He was named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 2018.

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Essay

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Essay

REMEMBERING ECOLOGIST FRANKLIN SCHMIDT

BY KEN PAREJ KO

I

n Wo rd e n Tow n sh ip, ju st a few m iles so u t h of Stanley in Clark County, lies Schmidt Maple Woods.

Named for the Schmidt family, these eighty-six acres of mature hardwood forest were formative to the life and career of the youngest member of the family, Franklin Schmidt, who grew up to become a pioneer in the field of game management.

Franklin Schmidt, May 3, 1935. Photo courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation and The University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives (ID S14477).

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Yet few today recognize Franklin Schmidt’s name or appreciate his conservation legacy. Perhaps this is because he died so young in a tragic fire that also killed his mother and a family farmhand.

In Schmidt Maple Woods today, amidst an abandoned silo and the ruins of a barn, a lonely stone monument marks these tragic deaths with a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1822 poem “Wandrers Nachtlied II” (Wanderer’s Nightsong II): Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch In the woods the birds have gone silent.

Only wait a bit And you, too, will rest.

To understand the legacy of Franklin Schmidt, one needs to understand the land on which he was raised. Schmidt Maple Woods in Clark County looks much the same today—a carpet of trilliums, trout-lilies, and hepatica covering gentle wooded slopes—as it did when patriarch George Washington (G.W.) Schmidt purchased it in 1906. After the glaciers receded ten or fifteen thousand years before, the first indigenous peoples lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans came and forced them from these lands. The lumberjacks who came through and cleared parts of the forest were followed by pioneer homesteaders who settled in to scrape a living from the soil, a heavy glacial clay with a thick layer of loam and humus.

A Professor of German at Lake Forest College in Illinois, G.W. had hoped to erect a boy’s boarding school in these woods. Instead, he began to work on clearing land for a farm and in 1907 moved his wife, Margaret, and three young sons—John, Karl, and Franklin— to Fernwold, the name for the family farm that G.W. created by combining fern (which also means a place that is far-off in German) with wold, an Old English word for woods (related to the German word wald). The name Fernwold reflected G.W.’s love of the German poet, novelist, and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was not to the Bible but to Goethe that the Schmidt family often turned for practical advice on how to live: “Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast” (without haste but without rest) was likely a favorite maxim of theirs.

The first time he stepped on this land, six-year-old Franklin Schmidt’s mind and spirit came alive. Coming back from a walk in the woods, sometimes wet from rain and his face covered with mosquito bites, Franklin would bring a treasure to share with his family: a pretty flower, an unfamiliar seed or nut, an exotic rock, or the brittle remnants of an insect exoskeleton.

When Franklin wasn’t out exploring the natural world, he was reading about it. Even though it was a resource for teachers, Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study was one of Franklin’s favorite books. In 1913, at age twelve, he sent Comstock

The remains of the Schmidt family hearth and home today.

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Aaron Carlson

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Aaron Carlson

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A carpet of spring ephemerals lines the forest floor.

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a letter about the ferrets he raised at Fernwold, describing how they would often run free in the home’s sitting room and hide under his father’s desk or curl up in his mother’s knitting basket. Comstock was so impressed with Franklin’s observations that she published them in her 1914 edition of The Pet Book.

Franklin’s appearance in The Pet Book could be considered the first of many scientific papers published during a brief but influential career inspired by the plants and animals of Fernwold. In a 1926 note published in the journal Copeia, Franklin listed seventeen species of reptiles and amphibians he’d collected in Clark County.

He later described in a short note in the Journal of Mammology how he dug a pit in a hardwood forest, its floor “covered with a dense growth of ferns,” and caught a male woodland vole, Pitymys pinetorum (now Microtus pinetorum). His was the first record of this species in Wisconsin.

His paper on the small mammals of Clark County, published in 1931, is a detailed work, complete with maps of collection sites, geology, soil types, and ecozones. This comprehensive paper features a species list, methods of collecting, descriptions of stomach contents, and, in some cases, behavioral observations that reflected the zeal with which Franklin approached his work. For instance, he describes how the star-nosed mole goes about eating an entire earthworm in less than ten seconds and that, after being dropped into a tank of water, the mole immediately begins to scratch

Essay

itself to fluff up its fur to dry. Franklin writes that while walking on a logging road he was surprised by a snowshoe hare that jumped out of the woods and collapsed dead in front of him. He suggests the snowshoe was probably weakened by the twenty-seven engorged wood ticks he found stuck to its ears.

Even before Franklin entered the University of Wisconsin in 1927 at age 26, he had gained invaluable experience beyond Clark County with a stint as a field naturalist with Chicago’s Field Museum. After graduating from the UW in 1930, Franklin enrolled in a graduate program in game management with Aldo Leopold as his mentor.

During the early 1930s as a graduate student, he traveled across the state to promote the novel concept of “game reserves” and new ideas on science-based game management to attendees of Wisconsin Conservation Commission meetings as well as gatherings of local sportsmen’s clubs such as the Izaak Walton League.

When the droughts of the 1930s spawned fires that decimated southwest Wood County, Franklin joined the Wisconsin Conservation Commission in advocating for a game preserve there that would allow for prairie and sharp-tailed grouse to thrive in the open, less-forested lands. Through his experience with the Wisconsin Conservation Department and UW Department of Game Management, he understood the feeding habits of these native birds and made recommendations on how best to increase and maintain healthy populations. He captured and banded more than 100 birds and filmed their mating dances, on one occasion bringing Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune reporter Henry Fey along to hear what he called “the oddest tooting and booming noise you can imagine.”

In 1935, the 34-year-old Franklin drove from Madison to Fernwold with a briefcase full of papers on the ecology of Wisconsin grouse, which he planned to submit for publication in a few days. These manuscripts, supported by many pages of notes and photographs, were the backbone of his doctoral thesis in game management, and Leopold had assured Franklin that the papers were publishable. Indeed, as Leopold wrote in his 1936 tribute to Franklin in The Wilson Bulletin, “Franklin Schmidt knew more about the life history and ecology of the prairie grouse than any living man, and as much as any living ecologist knows about any American game bird.”

It seemed that Franklin’s doctorate and his dream of creating a nation-wide consulting service in game bird management were within reach. After years scraping by on fellowships and shortterm jobs, he would at last have a regular income and the career he’d always wanted.

On the evening of August 7, 1935, the Schmidt family gathered at Fernwold to prepare for a trip to Mankato, Minnesota, for the funeral of G.W.’s mother. That August night Franklin’s nephews Robert and John and their friend Elwood Shaw from Chicago were also spending the night at Fernwold, as were farmhand Florian Brzuzan and maid Mildred Micke. Franklin’s brother Karl, a renowned field researcher for the Field Museum in Chicago, would join them in the morning after spending the night in Stanley.

As the sun came down on Fernwold that night, the house lights were switched on. G.W., a charter member of the local telephone association, had modernized both the house and barn by installing

an electrical generator. That night the lights flickered more than usual. Several times during the evening the house went dark before the generator powered back up. One can imagine G.W. asking Florian to have a look at the power plant in the morning after milking. One by one, family members and guests retired for the night. Franklin climbed the stairs to his room and slipped into bed.

They meant to get an early start to Mankato in the morning.

While the fire that consumed Fernwold is believed to have started in the knob-and-tube wiring, no one knows for sure. There are nearly as many versions of the details as there were newspaper reports. Common to almost all was that Margaret woke up around midnight and cried out that there was a fire. Her screams awoke the maid Mildred, who hurried to the barn for a ladder. Placing it against the house she tried to reach Margaret, Florian, and Franklin on the second floor but was pushed back by the flames.

Some say Franklin, after making his way out, ran back in to save his mother, and perhaps his papers as well, all of which were lost in the fire. Some say Franklin and his father escaped and both hurried back into the house to find Margaret, before G.W. led a badly burned John, Robert, and their friend Elwood to safety while Franklin was trapped inside. In the end, the fire killed Margaret Petersen Schmidt, farmhand Florian Brzuzan, and Franklin Schmidt, the brilliant young ecologist who, in the words of Leopold, “knew more than his fellow workers because he saw more keenly, thought more deeply.”

Though not as well-known as Leopold or John Muir, Franklin Schmidt deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s ecopioneers. In addition to his discoveries of and insights about Wisconsin’s animals, his legacy includes the establishment of the 43,696-acre Necedah National Wildlife Refuge and the 9,150acre Sandhill State Wildlife area near Babcock—places where our children, and future generations, can enjoy the natural world that Franklin reveled in and the species he fought so hard to protect.

Ken Parejko is a retired professor of biology at UW–Stout. He grew up in Rusk County with two avid pursuits: literature and the outdoors.

Parejko is author of Monarch of the Butterflies— an exploration of monarchs that ranges across science, literature, and the arts—and is finishing his third historical novel.

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@ Watrous Gallery

The many faces of

Sharon Kerry-Harlan

BY J O DY CLOWES

W

hether she’s working in textile, collage, or photography, Sharon Kerry-Harlan

makes art that buzzes with life and energy. The Wauwatosa-based artist is best known for her unconventional pieced quilts that set bold, graphic shapes and patterns against a background of subtle color and lively stitched line. Her quilts are dominated by funky, off-kilter geometric designs that mingle freely with stark, staring faces punctuated by flowers, hands, birds, small figures, and the occasional word. These dazzling compositions tease the eye, drawing one’s attention from fine details to the big picture and back again.

Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Down The Avenue (detail), 2016.

Discharge-dyed cotton, metal 58¼ x 52¼ inches.

Photo by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

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Barb Eijadi

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Kerry-Harlan in her home studio, 2019.

Untitled (detail), 2019.

Discharge-dyed cotton, beads, and found objects.

Photos by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography.

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Many of Kerry-Harlan’s quilts and mixed-media works focus on the drama of a single face, arresting viewers with an uncompromising gaze. Although she lives and creates art in a quiet Milwaukee suburb, Kerry-Harlan is drawn to the activity and crush of unfamiliar people in the big city. “The mass of human faces in the crowded urban environment intrigues me,” she says, ‘especially what they reveal to the world and what they disguise from the world.” This dichotomy is reflected in Kerry-Harlan’s masklike faces that rarely reveal more than the hint of a smile. With expressions of dignity, wariness, or resignation, they offer a sober counterpoint to her dynamic, playful approach to design.

A slight, elegant woman with a dry sense of humor, Kerry-Harlan has been active as an artist for most of her life, drawing, taking photographs, and making collagesand quilts. Her quilts, in particular, have received international attention and have been included in exhibitions at the Nelson Mandela Gateway Museum in Cape Town (South Africa), the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, to name just a few.

Kerry-Harlan learned to quilt from her mother, a woman determined to give her children the best possible education. Attending academically rigorous boarding schools in Ohio and Louisiana that emphasized art and culture, Kerry-Harlan realized early on that she wanted to be involved in art. She was also inspired by the example of her uncle, Marion Sampler, a successful graphic designer, painter, and collage artist based in Los Angeles. Recently retired from Marquette University, she is free now to dedicate her days to making

@ Watrous Gallery

Untitled, 2019. Discharge-dyed cotton, beads, and found objects, 41 x 33½ inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

art, and splits her time between her home and studio in Wauwatosa and those in her hometown of Hollywood, Florida.

When she began working with textiles, Kerry-Harlan found the range of patterns available in commercial fabrics limiting. So she decided to design her own, experimenting with dyeing, painting, and silk screening to create yardage that suited her needs. Eventually, she settled on discharge dyeing, a process that uses an agent like diluted bleach to discharge (remove) dye from colored fabric to create a pattern. On black fabrics, discharge dyeing creates warm, earthy browns and orange tones that contrast beautifully with the original color. The process is simple, but it must be timed precisely, and, since Kerry-Harlan makes 10 to 15 yards at a time, it can be quite labor intensive. “I have to lay it all out on the floor, and the design work requires real focus,” she says. “I need seclusion and quiet so that I can get it all done in sequence and on time.”

She’s also fond of rust-dyeing fabric, a technique that transfers the imprint of rusted metal to her yardage. Collecting discarded auto parts, tools, and other implements, she wraps them in fabric, ties them tightly (it helps to do some “crunching and scrunching,” she says), dusts them with salt, sprays them with vinegar, and leaves them to bake in the sun for several days before rinsing the fabric clean. For Kerry-Harlan, the rust-dyed yardage carries memories of working people from the past. “I like to think about who used [the rusty items], who touched them, and I like knowing that their handprint or signature is somehow embedded in the fabric that will be sewn and quilted and painted on. I love preserving the history of their imprint in my work.”

Whatever technique is used, the yardage Kerry-Harlan creates is not an end in itself. After their initial transformation, her fabrics are cut or torn into strips, recombined and reassembled with stitches, and often embellished further with paint, beads, or found objects.

She begins by placing a few patterned pieces on a design wall, gradually adding and subtracting elements until she’s satisfied with the complete design before sewing it together. It’s an intuitive and improvisational process, and fabric strips or blocks that do not make it into one piece often turn up in another down the road.

Once the fabric is pieced together, Kerry-Harlan typically uses machine stitching to emphasize shapes and layer the work with line.

She may add a button or a bead here, a safety pin there—usually just a few, although some of her newest work is thickly encrusted with beads and found objects—and she often leaves the frayed edges of fabric visible, lending a textured contour to the seams between each block.

Titled, 2017. Ink on found paper, 9½ x 3½ inches.

From the series Fake News: Interrupted Dreams, 2017. Acrylic, ink, and thread on newspaper 13½ x 10½ inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

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@ Watrous Gallery

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@ Watrous Gallery

While much of Kerry-Harlan’s imagery is purely abstract, her geometric elements, faces, and figures often draw inspiration from West African sculpture, masks, hairstyles, and textile design. Like the rusty shovels and engine parts that carry imprinted traces of their owners’ lives, the art and artifacts of West Africa imbue Kerry-Harlan’s work with a form of ancestral history. Her pieces carry a complex burden of references and associations, calling to mind African artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the profound influence of African art on early Modernism, and later black artists like Loïs Mailou Jones and Romare Bearden who actively claimed classical African art as both heritage and inspiration. Through Kerry-Harlan’s work, African motifs become abstractions that convey her artistic identity and respect for her cultural heritage.

Kerry-Harlan’s mixed-media collages are typically even more abstract, although their titles and imagery often reference contemporary Black American life. She approaches paper collage much as she does her quilts, painting large sheets with broad strokes and bold patterns before cutting or tearing them into raw material for collage and gluing or stitching them together. A collector by nature, Kerry-Harlan draws on her stash of antique letters, advertising, envelopes, and stamps, incorporating them into the paper she’s painted. The resultant collages feel raw and direct. Dominated by stark black ink and white paper, these collages echo the sense of urgency found in her quilt work on a more intimate scale.

Although she has favored an earthy black and brown palette for many years, these days Kerry-Harlan is branching out with bright color in two directions: a series of fabric dolls she calls Black Eyed Peas and the startlingly intense Painted Portraits, which are framed with vividly patterned African print fabrics.

Inspired by a doll-like figure she saw at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, she made the Black Eyed Peas with scraps from her own yardage designs, silk screened and painted in seemingly endless variations. They are clearly human, but their features are often ambiguous. Letters and numbers often share pride of place with swaths of black dye. Kerry-Harlan likes to display the Black Eyed Peas in generous groupings, like families of similar but strikingly distinctive individuals. Hung in a dense grid, they seem to bring the faces and figures from her quilts and collages into a higher relief.

Black Eyed Peas, 2015–2019. Mixed media on cotton with beads, pins, and found objects, approximately 18 x 7½ x 3 inches each.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Man with Pink Hair, 2018. Acrylic on cotton with African fabric, 39 x 34½ inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Whereas the Black Eyed Peas are closely related to her two-dimensional work, Kerry-Harlan’s radically different Painted Portraits represent a personal response to the vibrant Afrofuturism found in the 2018 film Black Panther, which features positive images of black people imbued with agency and power. “I came out of that movie with a sense of energy and optimism that I had not felt for a long time,” she says. “I knew at that point I was going to create something that exemplified, at least for me, that sense of energy.”

Drawing on her collection of African print fabrics—and thinking, too, of her childhood fascination with comic books—she began to envision portraits of strong black men and women, surrounded by vivid color and vibrant patterns. “I wanted it to look like you were walking down a gallery of family portraits, with something like the strong presence of the African women in the film,” she says.

While the classical African motifs in much of Kerry-Harlan’s work denote ancestry and tradition, the print fabrics in these portraits celebrate contemporary African life, fashion, and design.

For Kerry-Harlan, they also suggest the power of narrative. “These fabrics have a history of storytelling, in that women often weave stories around the patterns that are in the fabrics. I liked the idea that the Black Panther movie was storytelling about the future, while my African fabrics are often telling stories about the past.”

In these audacious new works, the faces of Kerry-Harlan’s subjects still offer just the barest hint of a smile—but they pulse with life and hope.

SEE THE EXHIBITION On view at the James Watrous Gallery in Overture Center for the Arts 201 State Street • Madison

SHARON KERRY-HARLAN textiles and works on paper

JULY 12 – AUGUST 25 Please join us for:

Art @Noon Tour Saturday, August 3 Thanks to Wisconsin Academy donors, members, and the Wisconsin Arts Board for their support:

Sharon Kerry-Harlan is represented

by Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee.

Jody Clowes is the director of the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery. Drawing on years of experience running gallery programs, curating exhibitions, and writing about art, Clowes creates exhibitions that explore ideas at the intersection of the sciences and the arts and bring people together to celebrate our state’s unique creative culture.

Find out more about this and other exhibitions that explore ideas at the intersection of the sciences and arts at wisconsinacademy.org/gallery.

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BOOK REVIEW

Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

by Marcia Bjornerud Princeton Univerity Press, 216 pages, $24.95 Reviewed by Michael Hopkins

What can we learn about ourselves by looking at rocks?

In her latest book, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Lawrence University geology professor and frequent New Yorker contributing writer Marcia Bjornerud provides a fresh perspective on the relationship between humans and natural history.

Riffing off the current trend of mindfulness, Bjornerud’s Timefulness seeks to expand our concept of the planet’s enormous timescale by focusing our attention on rocks, what she calls “the subtle, syntactically complex language of the Earth.” Bjornerud (who is also a Wisconsin Academy Fellow) calls her book a translation of sorts—“my transcription of what rocks have to tell us”—and the story she hopes to relate is one about time.

With this book she hopes to establish in readers an awareness of the world as it is today with knowledge of its geologic past, so that we might think more clearly beyond our own brief lifetimes and begin to understand—and even predict—our future. “Geology,” she notes, “is the closest we may get to time travel.”

Spoiler alert! The earth is 4.55 billion years old. But how do we know this? Bjornerud’s lively writing brings us on the hunt for the answer, providing a true detective story that spans centuries, beginning with the work of 18th century Scottish naturalist James Hutton, the father of modern geology, through the recent development of modern radiometric dating. She takes us on a journey to gather clues, from the highest Himalayan peaks to the depths of the ocean floor, about the pace and scope of little-known earth processes.

Many parts of the book cause the reader to stop, pause, and reflect in wonder at the creative nature of scientific discovery: how the evolution of earth’s atmosphere can be traced back 700,000 years by drilling down and analyzing frozen bubbles beneath the polar ice caps, or that our vast knowledge of seismic activity exists despite a lack of direct observation of the actual tectonic plate shifting that happens during an earthquake.

While inspiring wonder, Timefulness also issues a warning.

Natural geological processes that have unfolded over millions of years are now being accelerated, sometimes over mere decades, through the strip mining of coal, natural gas “fracking,” and the unfettered combustion of these and other fossil fuels. Bjornerud mentions how a shocking “1,600 years of ice has vanished in the last two decades. … The use of the word glacial to mean “impercep-

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tibly slow” is quickly becoming an anachronism; today glaciers are among the rapidly changing entities in nature.”

Bjornerud cautions readers against thinking that geoengineering —implementing carbon capture and sequestration systems or mimicking volcanic activity with stratospheric aerosol injections—can reverse the course of global warming. “Tinkering with atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business,” she says, as “ungovernable forces can come out of thin air.”

Designed to open our eyes to the history of the planet upon which we depend, Bjornerud’s detailed descriptions of large-scale geological processes also provide us with the sense of scale to understand the multigenerational impact of our decisions. By giving a voice to the dynamic life of rocks and the magnificent stories they have to tell, Timefulness provides a useful tool with which we might repair our estranged relationship with the natural world.

Michael Hopkins lives on a small farm in Neenah, Wisconsin, with his wife and their dog, cats, and chickens. His book and music criticism has appeared in Philadelphia Weekly and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and his short fiction has appeared in Millwork and Pleiades. His short story “Static” won first place in the 2018 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest.

Don’t know what to read? Check out reviews of new and interesting books by Wisconsin authors at wisconsinacademy.org/reviews.

Jade Ring Winners

Wisconsin People & Ideas and the Wisconsin Writers Association are pleased to announce a new pilot partnership to provide more opportunity and encouragement for Wisconsin writers. The Wisconsin Writers Association has served the creative needs of Wisconsin writers since 1948.

In addition to hosting events, workshops, and conferences across the state, the WWA hosts the annual Jade Ring Contest, which provides cash prizes (and an actual jade ring) for Wisconsin writers in four categories: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Humor. As part of the pilot partnership, Wisconsin People & Ideas is pleased to showcase the award-winning works from the 2019 Jade Ring Contest in this issue of the magazine: 1st Place Poetry

“Bathtub Baptism,” by Kayla Knaack - Marion Judged by Max Garland 1st Place Fiction

“Going to Join Dickens,” by Pamela J.A. Fullerton - Athens Judged by Judy Bridges 1st Place Nonfiction

“My Miss New Orleans,” by Julia Gimbel - Milwaukee Judged by Jim Landwehr 1st Place Humor

“Crop Tending,” by Janice Wilberg - Milwaukee Judged by Mel Miskimen

Congratulations to all of the 2019 Jade Ring Award winners.

For more information and writers’ resources, or to become a member of the Wisconsin Writers Association, please visit wiwrite.org

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Bathtub Baptism tires screech; mother sleeps blood seeps from my forehead gash broken windshield glass then blue and red lights flash across my mother who can’t walk the line slap on the cuffs; clipped wings of a dove “safe now,” say the strangers “tell us everything; trust us,” they urge like next-day’s vomit rush forth the words family secrets purged what a shame; childhood trauma leaves a stain on the brain of a girl alone in the world abuela will take me in next of kin, a grandmother I hardly know plunged into the tub, water stained from the gash on my damaged brain blood red water she pours, her voice mutters low “en el nombre Del Padre y Del Hijo y Del Espíritu Santo.” “trauma has a way,” they say, “of surging through generations of family you never knew” our people were raped and enslaved epigenetic fissures in our bones, the Tree of Life shamed, I was doomed from day one by evil long expired what a bloody, bloody shame, the way you were wired what a shame, they say a bond despite the blood and abuse strung like a rope—or a noose a line from the heart of my mother to mine, ripped in my heart a gaping hole my mother en route to the county jail

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WISCONSIN WRITERS ASSOCIATION JADE RING CONTEST WINNERS: POETRY

red water pours; I tremble and stare through wet hair at a painting on Abuela’s wall of a virgin so full of grace it emanates like the rays of the sun or the wings of a dove wrapped in constellations I am soaked in the eyes of love these might be mere musings of a damaged brain, but if evil is so incarnate “evident in scans of brains and DNA scars of shame,” they say then is it so hard to believe that if evil can wound, love could heal? grace pours down like rain through fissures of bones pooling in the heart’s hole washing the stained brain’s shame love incarnate in the holy water of a bloody bathtub baptism

Kayla Knaack

Kayla Knaack and her husband, along with four children (plus one on the way), live in Marion where they own and operate Pigeon River Brewing Company. Knaack’s 2019 Jade Ring-winning poem, “Bathtub Baptism,” was inspired by her volunteer work as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children in protective services.

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Going to Join Dickens

BY PAM ELA J.A. FU LLERTO N

T

he old woman shoved her fist deep into her mouth to stifle the harsh dry cough. If they heard she was out of her bedroom, they would come downstairs and put her back to bed, scolding her all the while for having disturbed their sleep one more time. She pressed herself hard against the wooden kitchen table until the spasm passed, straining to hear any hint of sound other than her own rasping breath, the constant ringing in her ears, or the winter wind moaning around the corner of the building.

When the coughing fit subsided, she shuffled awkwardly toward the mudroom at the back of the house. She entered and closed the door to the kitchen behind her. The hooks on either side of the short vestibule were crowded with winter coats and jackets, rain slickers, and old woolen barn sweaters. The space smelled faintly of Lysol, sweat, and dry manure. A line of barn boots stood in a neat row against the north wall.

The old woman struggled into the first jacket at hand, a large, tan canvas jacket with many pockets. She didn’t zip it—her hands were too crippled and swollen with arthritis to manage something as tiny as a zipper tab. Next, she braced both hands against the wall and one-by-one, plunged each foot (right one always first, then the left) into a pair of mid-calf muck boots. They felt strange with no socks. Before her last stroke, she went out to the barn every day with her little Dickens to visit the horses, and she had always worn thick white socks under her boots. Without socks they were uncomfortable, their rough foam inserts scraped her fragile skin with every step, but she guessed it wouldn’t be for too long.

For a full minute she stood motionless before the outside door. Perhaps if she still had her husband, or had different children, this wouldn’t seem such a good idea. But she knew what was coming if she acquiesced to her son and daughter-in-law. She had lived through it with

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her own mother, a lingering death in a nursing home full of strangers and sickening odors.

The mere thought of those smells made her gag slightly, acid rising to the back of her throat.

Her long-dead husband’s cane still stood in the far corner, and she reached out to grasp it. It was fitting that something of her sweetheart’s should take this journey with her. She opened the door and stumbled down the first step into the cold wind. With a trace of her old orderliness, she turned and carefully pulled the door firmly closed behind her.

She was going to join her little Dickens. He had been her constant companion for the fifteen years since her husband’s death. A toy terrier-pit bull mix, he had been faithful, intelligent, and he had smiled; one of those rare dogs who pull back their lips when happy to display fangs and teeth in a ferociously funny grin.

After her son and his wife insisted on moving into the farmhouse to help care for her, her daughter-in-law complained bitterly when Dickens was allowed free run of the home. The old lady had stood up for him, and for another two years the brindle dog had lain at her feet during every meal and slept curled next to her on the bed each night. Finally, he couldn’t make the leap up to her side and he slept on the rag rug next to her bed, reaching up occasionally to touch her hand with his warm, moist nose.

Then he had a seizure. It lasted only a few minutes, but it felt much longer as she held his head, stroked his side, and told him in a low, soothing voice that everything would be okay. She knew she was lying to him. It was the same lie her son told her about going to stay in Oak Haven Nursing Home. It would not be alright and she wouldn’t have it.

She shuffled carefully between the snowdrifts toward the barn, the stinging snow creeping between collar and warm neck-skin and forcing her to squint against the swirling ice crystals. When she reached the barn, she opened the Dutch door and stepped into the dark warmth. The horses shifted in their stalls. Thunder nickered and his burly head emerged over the stall-gate. Only his white star and strip were visible in the gloom, but they beckoned to her like the beacon from her grandfather’s lighthouse.

She stroked the massive head framed in soft winter curls, and he blew soft snuffles into her neck. She wished she had one last apple to give him as his tender lips gently nibbled on her crooked fingers. After murmuring a final endearment, she moved down the aisle to greet Rainy in the next stall. As she did so, a furry body wound between her legs. With effort, she bent to pet the old barn cat, Mousetache. The cat purred and rose up on its hind legs, front paws kneading her thigh. The rumbling vibrations pushed into her flesh through her cotton nightgown and they felt good.

The last time she had come to the barn with Dickens was two days after the convulsions began, just at the start of true winter. He had already had four more episodes by then, each one longer and more violent than the last. She feared losing him and wept to see his bewilderment as he emerged from each seizure. It mirrored her own fearfulness after her first

She shuffled carefully between the snowdrifts toward the barn, the stinging snow creeping between collar and warm neck-skin and forcing her to squint against the swirling ice crystals.

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stroke when she had thought she was dying. She knew now that waiting for the end was infinitely worse than the reality of death could ever be.

Dickens must have known this too. As they came out of the barn on that last visit, she turned left to return to the house; he turned right, toward the woods. She called to him, her loyal, obedient little dog, and he turned to look at her—a look of such longing and determination—then trotted away, his tail swinging in perfect metronome rhythm to his staccato footfalls. He never returned.

Her dear husband had died in the hospital with tubes and machines gasping and beeping a discordant cacophony. He was heavily drugged, and, although she believed he suffered no physical pain, she knew he had lost all ability to think and communicate. She had worried about his dreams, though, as she watched his eyelids flicker and his hands clench and jerk spasmodically as he lay in the mechanical bed.

Dickens had known a better way and so did she. She stroked Rainy’s neck one last time, sliding her hand up under the mane where the hair is always soft and warm. Then she walked slowly out of the barn, leaning on her sweetheart’s cane, and when she cleared the door, she turned resolutely to the right, toward the woods, toward her little Dickens.

Pamela J.A. Fullerton was born in Milwaukee but raised in a rural Wisconsin town as one of sixteen “PKs” (preacher’s kids). After a career in human resources and as an administrative labor law judge, she moved to a farm in central Wisconsin where she breeds and trains Arabian and Thoroughbred racehorses.

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My Miss New Orleans

BY J U LIA G I M BEL

A

t first, the music sounded like some kind of Dixie funeral dirge.

The students’ expectant faces turned to watch the brass band’s slow march down the aisle of the auditorium. The musicians, dressed in crisp white shirts, black ties, and snapbrim caps, walked in a slow cadence as their horns released the mournful tones. Then, with a flourish, the white-gloved Grand Marshall blew his whistle and snapped open his green parasol, launching the band into an upbeat tune. The smiling deans followed the musicians down the narrow walkway, their colorful gowns and sashes whirling as they moved with the joyful beat.

It was this processional that welcomed the class of 2021 and its families to Tulane University in New Orleans.

Josh and I couldn’t believe that our daughter Lena would call this city home for the next four years. We fell in love with New Orleans on our first visit 25 years before, a feeling amplified with each subsequent trip. Now, after a tearful goodbye in the sultry August heat, we’d leave our baby to discover and, we hoped, delight in the city for herself.

Lena will find that it’s a little rough around the edges. Yet New Orleans is a place like no other in America: sidewalks buckling and heaving over ancient oak tree roots, multicolored strands of beads from Mardi Gras past draping over wrought iron fences, gas lamps flickering above grand entrances, and plates heaping high with spicy, bright red crayfish.

The Crescent City, so nicknamed for its position on the first high ground along a bend in the Mississippi River, took shape under early French and Spanish rule. During its first hundred years, the settlers battled a succession of devastating hurricanes and fires, and, refusing to give in, built and rebuilt their city time and again.

In 2011, we introduced our young teenagers to New Orleans. We basked in the historic French Quarter where the streets are lined with two- and three-story buildings, their deep balconies trimmed with elaborate arched railings and lush hanging planters filled with ferns and flowers. Lena and Elijah hoisted up the tall sash window of our hotel room and scrambled onto the balcony to watch the happenings below in Jackson Square.

The early French influence is a major part of New Orleans’ identity—from street names like Chartres or Dauphine to elaborate above-ground cemeteries— particularly in the city’s

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beloved cuisine. The early residents preserved the high standards of French cooking while adapting to common local ingredients. Our young teenagers tucked into a perfect example at Café du Monde, where French-style beignets blanketed in powdered sugar arrived alongside creamy, chicory café au lait.

On that initial family trip to New Orleans, we knew one thing for sure: our kids would either love it or hate it. It’s a place that shows its true face to the world, reveling in its unique culture, but also not shying away from its problems. It can feel kind of scary at times. We knew we’d won them over when they both took to the food—even the raw oysters—and accepted the colorful city with all its imperfections.

The four of us bellied up to the oyster bar at Felix’s, watching our shucker make quick work of dozens of bivalves while regaling us with stories of his hometown. New Orleanians, it seems, want you to love the place as much as they do. With a wink, he promised Lena that any pearl discovered was hers.

The Creole, Cajun, and African American settlers joined the French and Spanish to create a melting pot of fantastic flavors found in po’ boys, gumbo, shrimp étouffée, king cake, and the list goes on. About a month after she started school, Lena called and told me, “Mom, they have grits every day, and red beans and rice are in regular rotation at the dining hall. I’m obsessed.” I hung up the phone with a grin, knowing the city was already pulling her in.

In those first months I sure did miss my baby girl, but I knew she was in good hands in that faraway place. She reassured me that the locals made her feel less homesick because of their kindness. “Just like Midwesterners but with more spice,” she said.

The minute our November parents’ weekend visit ended, I began plotting my next trip south, renting a charming little house not far from campus. Known as a Shotgun House (if all the doors are open, apparently a shotgun blast will travel through without hitting a thing), this type of dwelling is seen all over town.

Walking to campus with Lena every morning, I gaped at all the little Creole and Centerhall cottages and double-gallery houses in the neighborhood. Most of these unique homes are built right up to the property line; some with shuttered openings, others held up by columns; all painted myriad colors.

Even though Lena and her friends Uber around the city, I prefer taking the streetcar from the Uptown area near campus down stately St. Charles Avenue. For just over a dollar, I can relax on a wooden bench in one of the oldest continuously running streetcars in the United States and enjoy sightseeing on the grand avenue, along which are beautiful Greek Revival antebellum mansions, their lavish gardens replete with colorful blooms and drowsy bumblebees. I wonder who lives in these houses and try to imagine what life is like behind those towering wooden front doors.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of strands of Mardi Gras beads drip from the old oak tree branches along the route. It occurred to me that this would be the first time someone in our family would be in New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras, which happens the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Festivities often run for weeks prior to what is known as Fat Tuesday. In fact, Tulane, along with every other school in town, closes for several days so everyone can participate.

During the run up to Mardi Gras, private clubs called “Krewes” organize dozens of parades throughout the city. Lena was surprised to discover that even though it’s a big party, Mardi Gras is really about the community, with families coming together and people of all ages lining the parade route and kids perching from homemade ladders.

Cries of, Throw me something, mister! abound as people reach for the “throws” hurled off the floats. Generous Krewe members pay for everything they toss. Back in the late 1800’s, people caught glass bead necklaces But today parade goers snatch plastic necklaces, Doubloons stamped with Krewe names, stuffed animals, and special cups (and, according to Lena, even panties). Instead of throwing them, the famous Krewe of Zulu hands down sought-after painted coconuts so no one gets clocked in the head.

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One of Lena’s favorite parades is hosted by the all-female Krewe of Muses. The ladies of this krewe spend all year bedazzling their throws, which are high-heeled platform shoes decorated with sequins, feathers, rhinestones, and glitter. Snagging one of the coveted stilettos is a sign of good luck.

Tulane has a few Mardi Gras traditions of its own. Just off the streetcar line as you enter campus, there’s a huge tree covered in beads. After their first parade, freshmen toss a necklace and hope it catches on the branches—a good omen for acing their final exams. Lena said that beads aren’t allowed in the campus bar for safety reasons, so the street outside grows ankle deep with the necklaces the bouncers confiscate and toss away.

Folks in the black wards of the city weren’t welcome to participate in the parades at first, and that initial rejection spawned the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. The American Indians were the first to accept free slaves into their society, so in a sign of respect the black wards assigned themselves tribal Krewe names.

Each year, the Big Chief and Krewe members spend thousands of hours in their clubhouses creating elaborate handbeaded costumes and headdresses. At an agreed-upon time, the Krewes face off to see who’s “prettiest.”

I first saw a Mardi Gras Indian on the HBO show Tremé. In a poignant scene, Big Chief Albert Lambreaux returns home after Hurricane Katrina to find his house and social club destroyed.

In response, Lambreaux dons his full Indian regalia, the feathers of his elaborate costume reaching beyond his outstretched arms, as he asks a rival Krewe member for help. As a sign of the respect he garners, his request is granted.

You can see some of these amazing costumes and learn about the unique cultural traditions of Black New Orleanians at the Backstreet Cultural Museum, located in the Tremé Neighborhood.

The threat of a hurricane actually cancelled Lena’s first day of classes this year, freaking us out a little. But Hurricane Katrina was the one that nearly knocked the wind out of New Orleans for good. The devastating storm made landfall on August 29, 2005, with a surge that breached the city’s levees. By the time the hurricane subsided, more than 1,800 people were dead. Many of the city’s poorest residents couldn’t evacuate and instead scrambled to their rooftops, hoping for rescue.

It was heartbreaking to watch the government’s pathetic response to the storm, forever immortalized in George W. Bush’s praise of the head of FEMA, Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” African Americans, disproportionately affected by the storm, disagreed with President Bush’s assertion, and Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked at the time that much of the nation has “an amazing tolerance for black pain.”

With almost three quarters of the city’s housing damaged or destroyed, native New Orleanians and Tulane students alike scattered to other states, sometimes permanently. When I visited, some eight months after the storm, my cab driver lamented the loss of so many residents, wondering how they would ever teach their kids about this distinctive place if they never returned home.

On that initial family trip to New Orleans, we knew one thing for sure: our kids would either love it or hate it. It’s a place that shows its true face to the world, reveling in its unique culture, but also not shying away from its problems.

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In the next breath, he laughed, though, and said at least the daiquiri shops were back in business. Drive-through daiquiris are just one aspect of the unique drinking culture in New Orleans. Bars in the city proper often stay open 24 hours, and you can get a “go cup” when you want to take your drink with you. Open carry of intoxicants is legal in the French Quarter, and laws against open carry are rarely enforced elsewhere in the city.

Tulane University takes the wellbeing of its students very seriously, encouraging the kids to take care of each other and imbibe wisely. And of course, they do imbibe—most often at a local bar called “The Boot,” to which Lena dragged us during Homecoming.

Walking through New Orleans, drink in hand, you’ll hear music coming from every direction. This is the birthplace of jazz, a place where slaves playing drums during voodoo ceremonies collided with brass horn players from Europe. Musicians of many cultures flowed into town and, over time, created a unique, jubilant style of music that matches the energy of the city.

A musical Second Line parade is traditional for a New Orleans funeral. At the close of Tulane’s convocation, the horns converged in a happier version where the brass band and deans led the celebration forming the “Main Line,” with students organically flowing into the “Second Line” as they left the auditorium.

Watching Lena and her classmates stream out onto the quad in that gigantic Second Line, we took a deep breath and crossed our fingers. Would New Orleans capture her spirit as it had ours? Would she dance to the music and revel in its special blend of hot sauce and sheer abandon? Could the hole in our hearts formed by her leaving ever be filled?

When I hear Crescent City native Louis Armstrong plaintively sing of moonlight on the bayou, of Creole tunes filling the air and magnolias in bloom, of forever longing to be there, I understand.

The song title asks the question: “Do you Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?”

My answer is yes. Yes, I do.

Julia Gimbel has been published in the anthologies Family Stories from the Attic (2017) and Creative Wisconsin (2017). The discovery of her late father’s World War II journal motivated her to write her first full-length nonfiction book, as yet untitled, set for release in Spring 2020 by Orange Hat Publishing. She lives in Whitefish Bay with her husband, Josh.

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Jade Ring Winners

WISCONSIN WRITERS ASSOCIATION JADE RING CONTEST WINNERS: HUMOR

Crop Tending

BY JAN I CE WI LBERG

I

n the kitchen are an empty egg carton and two packages of seeds, cilantro and basil, my favorite herbs. My plan is to start the seeds in the egg carton and have sweet little shoots to plant when it gets warm. I have never done this, but I see myself doing it. I wasn’t raised on a farm, but I could have been. I lived in that part of the country. Instead, my father sold washing machines at Sears. Tulips grew at our house, but no crops.

In the farthest part of my backyard is a Victory Garden. It sits behind a grove of day lilies that, last summer, was vanquished by ferns. I noticed this one day sitting on the back porch, how suddenly the lilies had flattened as the ferns flourished, having sprouted in places they’d never been before, as if they’d been laying pipe all summer long to erupt at just that moment. I wondered what I could have done to prevent the takeover of the lilies. It had happened on my watch (theoretically, at least), but I wasn’t watching or I’d have seen it coming.

The Victory Garden was brought to my house by earnest people in Milwaukee who want us all to grow our own food. I fell for their pitch while I was visiting my daughter in San Diego. She lives on the side of a hill where there are no gardens. It’s too steep, and there isn’t enough water anyway. I loved the Midwestern greenness of the idea, so I signed up. Two weeks later, volunteers came to my house with some two-by-fours and asked me where I’d like my garden. I had no idea.

The nice volunteers walked up and down the yard, their faces in shadows cast by the giant pine trees on either side. Whole nations of birds lived in the trees, chirping constantly. It was a sweet, shady woodland paradise. Snow White would have been happy there, singing, a tiny bluebird perched on her finger.

Finally, the crew put the garden back by the neighbor’s fence. It was early spring, so it was not yet evident how much the giant buckthorn growing in the corner would leaf out and cloak the garden in darkness as summer went on. They must have known, of course, because they were experts. But they said nothing, leaving me to the hopefulness that is my spring ritual.

At the end of that first summer, after the buckthorn had blocked the garden from the sun, after the tomato plants had grown leggy and thin in their desperate reach for light, and after meal worms and snails invaded, leaving big chewed holes in the beans’ leaves, I had the

SUMMER 2019

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WISCONSIN WRITERS ASSOCIATION JADE RING CONTEST WINNERS: HUMOR

Jade Ring Winners

Next summer, I thought, next summer the sun will really shine on my garden, and I will have crops.

buckthorn cut down. Next summer, I thought, next summer the sun will really shine on my garden, and I will have crops.

When I next planted the garden, the lilies were coming up strong and the ivy on the side of the garage was vivid and thick. I texted a picture to my daughter in California, and she wrote back “Beautiful!” I was giddy with hope.

I worried, though, about my neighbor’s tree which seemed to have sprouted wings over the winter and was hanging threateningly over the fence, fingering its way toward my garden.

I considered cutting off its branches, since they were hanging in my yard, but it seemed belligerent, something our mean neighbor Charlie would have done. He often gaped at university students parking their cars in front of his house as if, any second, they might break into crime and he’d have to call the police. Charlie would cut those branches off and not think twice. If he hadn’t already died, I might’ve called him.

I planted beans, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce. For a while, it seemed that there was enough light, but as the days got longer and the neighbor’s tree got thicker, I could see the writing on the wall. I sat on the back porch and watched. The garden was failing, I could feel it from yards away. So I stopped going back there. It was like visiting a dying bird. There was nothing I could do. Better to let nature take its course.

It’s spring now and I am hopeful about the seeds on the kitchen counter. I think they will grow. And in late summer at dinner time, I will cut fresh cilantro and basil and garnish my dishes as they do on TV. I’ll pick beans fresh off the vine, slim and green, unblemished, and make salads with ruby red tomatoes. The table will be set with day lilies, carefully picked from the hundreds swaying gently in the wind, the ferns bowing deferentially from afar.

Janice Wilberg is a writer, community activist, and the founder of Time of the Month Club, a nonprofit that collects menstrual supplies for homeless women. Wilberg writes a regular blog called Red’s Wrap, and has had essays published in the New York Times and Newsweek, as well as in several anthologies.

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