Welcome, Tourists

This week has special significance every year, more in some places than others.  We all welcome summer with the longest day.  For people in tourist towns in northern Wisconsin and Michigan the schools are out in the big cities and many welcome dollars are on the way to be spent, often somewhat carelessly, by vacationers.

As a lad, the geezer worked for two summers in the meat department of a National Tea Store, the biggest food market at the time in my north woods hometown.  About 30 resorts of various sizes were in our trading area.

The store increased the staff in the middle of June to be ready for a big increase in business. The resort owners required large amounts of supplies for their kitchens, and many people owned summer homes in the area that needed provisions.  Thousands of “summer people,” most from Chicago or Milwaukee metro areas, shopped in our store.

In mid-June, the store manager appeared in our department with revised price lists.  Just about every item magically required a 10 percent increase almost on the day the first tourist appeared in town.  At the end of August the manager again handed out revised price sheets.  Would you believe the prices were lowered by about 10 per cent nearly across the board?

We took one slogan of the day seriously: “Keep Northern Wisconsin Green, Bring Money.”

My credit card company this week offered to double, from one to two percent, the usual cash-back bonus for all purchases made in London from now until August 31.  Do you suppose those UK purveyors of chintzy souvenirs are going to hold their Olympic Games price increases to two percent?

It sounds to me like a big net loss for tourists.  The card company ad features a handsome color photo of the Big Ben clock tower. We’ll stay home and be awed by the chimes via television.

Northwoods Wants

The geezer doesn’t spend much time reading a weekly electronic edition of my hometown newspaper.  Members of my immediate family are long gone.  Even my interest in the obituaries is declining as fewer and fewer familiar names show up. 

A visit to the want ad section is extremely rare. Yet something drew my eye there in the April 17 edition of the Tomahawk Leader. I found this entry:

WANTED:  Double-barrel shotgun. Also: A girlfriend. Each need not be real pretty but proper functioning is important (Need not be a single transaction). 715-612-1680.

At least one north woods denizen hasn’t lost the somewhat quirky sense of humor long associated with the area.  If you’ve got the goods and  want to make a deal with him, call the number.

The Penguins are Gone


Dr. P. Tatineni expressed surprise when he learned I’d lived three-quarters of a century without spending a single day as a patient in a hospital. So were several nurses and other caregivers at Borgess Medical Center in Kalamazoo after my health winning streak ended on June 9.


One nurse suggested I might be forgetting something, perhaps intentionally. “Oh, you must have been born in a hospital,” she said. Not so, I was born at home with Dr. William McCormick presiding. He and other doctors routinely made house calls 75 years ago. Dr. McCormick was said to have delivered a good share of the population in northern Lincoln County, Wisconsin, during a long career. He went where he was needed, to a farm, a home, or to the delivery room at Sacred Heart Hospital.


Dr. Tatineni mused about changes in hospital care during our brief conversation. He said he was a student of the history of medicine in the United States. He pointed out that hospital use has come full cycle. Early in hospital history, almost no one was born or died in them. Those two important events most often occurred at home. Now, a great many Americans are born and die in hospitals, although the cycle may be heading in the other direction lately as ancient birthing practices and hospice care become more popular.


I would not have had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Tatineni, or the displeasure of an unscheduled visit to his workplace, had June 9 been routine for me. It started normally. A little computer work and play was followed by some light yard work helping wife Sandy with a landscaping project. The day was hot and humid, but I took frequent breaks. Nonetheless, I felt more tired than usual in the evening, and went to bed early.


A few hours later, I awoke with a little problem. I was struggling to breathe. Breathing is fairly fundamental to the human condition. I thought my visit to earth was about to end. I felt the way we felt as kids at the end of a sprint when we needed a rest period to “catch” our breath. My trouble the evening of June 9 was I couldn’t catch it, and it felt like I never would.


Sandy and son Lee and his fiancée Karen were my first caregivers. They rushed me to the nearest emergency room five miles from our place very quickly. We arrived at 11:30 p.m., and a nurse had me connected to an oxygen supply within minutes.


After two hours of tests and treatments, the presiding doc decided I needed a hospital stay. He gave me a choice of two in Kalamazoo, about 15 miles away. I picked Borgess Medical Center because Sandy had good experiences there earlier. The nurse made some calls and I soon was strapped to a gurney and on the way, monitored closely by two paramedics.


The paramedics said it was their fourth consecutive trip to Borgess in what had been a long day. A nurse at the hospital said such trips cost $1,500 each (when the bill came weeks later, it was slightly more than $1,000). In a big country like ours, the sheer distance between facilities contributes to high health care costs, a factor seldom mentioned when we discuss the quality of care versus the expense.


I roomed at Borgess for three days. The experience included many revelations for a first-time hospital resident. I intend to describe some of them, here and later. Now, before you click to another site after observing that this neophyte is going to babble about a lot of stuff we already know, or any boob can discover by watching medical shows on the boob tube (I watch “House,” one of the few entertainment shows we bother tuning in on), let me elaborate. I’ll try to compare important, but not dramatic, situations you usually don’t observe on the TV shows with my recollections of hospital activities 60 years ago.


Whoa. How can this instant hospital expert know anything about conditions 60 years ago? He never was a patient. Well, I have a few qualifications in that regard.


As a younger man, I became very familiar with how things were done at Sacred Heart Hospital in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, my hometown. I visited many times to see friends and family members. My grandmother, father, and mother were among the patients I spent time with. Also, my family was very much in tune with medical practices in those days. One aunt spent her entire working life as a sort of business manager and general helper in the offices of Doctors Baker and McCormick, serving three of the four doctors who practiced in the city during most of her lifetime. An addition, members of the Baker and McCormick families were good friends of ours.


Sacred Heart and Borgess have a common heritage. Both were founded by nuns. Hospitals thus created have been one of the great voluntary contributions to American society. Andrew Carnegie built libraries to nurture our minds; Roman Catholic (and Episcolal) nuns established hospitals to minister to our bodies. Both types of institutions were open to everyone; most were from the start, all became so as racial segregation diminished in America.


As irreverent youths, we referred to nuns as “penguins,” but only at a discrete distance. The Tomahawk variety wore uniform, cumbersome, black habits. The more portly sisters tended to waddle a bit, and the net effect indeed was a certain resemblance to the Antarctic birds. The flight of these wonderful “birds of mercy” at Sacred Heart and Borgess over the years roughly parallels the changes in what is most important to every patient—the nature of the caregivers and how they deliver their services.


At Sacred Heart in the 1950s, nuns handled almost all the nursing and administrative duties. They wore their habits at all times on the job, and everywhere else in public. A few “civilians” staffed kitchen and maintenance positions and performed some aspects of patient care. The latter, as I recall, all wore white uniforms. The nuns were in full command of hospital activities. That was very clear. Three doctors performed surgeries, prescribed treatments, and made rounds at the hospital. I remember seeing them attired in business suits, often with vests, during routine visits to patients.

It seems reasonable to assume staff composition, appearance, and duties were similar at Borgess years ago, although the scale of things was much different. Sacred Heart had 25 beds. Borgess, serving a much larger population, has hundreds today and probably always was larger. It is likely, however, at both places most nuns were extremely dedicated to their vocation. At Sacred Heart, they lived together in a building right next door to the hospital. Running that hospital was their major mission in life, and they had only to walk a few yards from their home to their workplace to get on with their daily business.


The hospital nuns mirrored what my Catholic friends said nuns as a group were like in the 50s. A few were cheerful and jolly. More tended to be reserved and severe, especially in dealing with youths. Discipline had high priority. Visiting hours at Sacred Heart were strictly enforced. Visitors and patients were expected to quietly follow all rules. Borgess in 2010 has the same “general visiting hours” and lots of suggestions about behavior in a guidebook, but nurses were willing to arrange all sorts of exceptions and nobody seemed a bit concerned about minor rules violations, unless they interfered with patient care.


Sacred Heart had no guidebook. The nuns told you what the rules were, or assumed you knew. In the 50s hospital, it was somewhat difficult to get answers to questions, including reliable reports on patient condition. The whole area of communications has changed greatly in hospitals. I paid attention to that at Borgess; communications has been my vocation.


Like television, hospital uniforms progressed from black and white to full color in 60 years. The black habits and all-white outfits have disappeared, with very few exceptions. Medical programs on TV show that, usually by treating us to views of heroic surgeons wearing colorful caps. But you have to spend a little time in a modern hospital to appreciate the full spectrum of costume color.


Personnel even are color-coded. The Borgess guidebook devotes a full-page chart to the codes. As examples, volunteers wear purple, occupational therapists dress in burgundy, and housekeepers wear light green. Only doctors have become more uniform, they all wear white lab coats nowadays, rather than business suits. I didn’t worry much about who was wearing what during my stay, but the color diversity added some welcome pizzazz to the place.


A more important kind of diversity contributes much to the ambience at Borgess. In the old days at my hometown hospital, every staff member was Caucasian. A few of the nuns spoke with pronounced accents, I think German in all cases, indicating they were immigrants. Other than that, there was no ethnic or racial diversity. All the doctors were men.

There were virtually no opportunities for Sacred Heart to have any staff diversity. The small city’s population included only one African-American family, and its members had good jobs with the railroad company. None of the Native Americans in the area lived within the city limits; as far as I know, none worked at the hospital. The commute from where they lived would have presented problems in those days, when not everybody had a car.


Sixty years ago the population in the Kalamazoo area no doubt was not nearly as diverse as it is today; it has diversified gradually. It’s safe to say the Borgess staff followed suit. Dr. Tatineni emigrated to the U.S. from India. A no-nonsense respiratory disease expert, a female African-American doctor, popped in to check on me in the middle of my first night at Borgess. One of my caregivers was an Asian-America, a young lady who was super-efficient and sported a perpetual smile. Many registered nurses (RNs) and other staff members appeared to be African-Americans, but they came in so many shades of color that heritage was not always apparent.


The difference in hospital staff competency between the 50s and now is vast. The early nuns probably got almost all of their training in convents or on-the-job. Older sisters taught and showed the younger ones how things were done. The “civilian” nurses’ aids I knew about also had little or no formal training. My aunt, with no medical training whatsoever, did things like taking x-rays and giving injections when she worked in a doctor’s office. The doctors taught her. We can assume that sort of thing occurred in hospitals as well.


However, I doubt the doctors who practiced at Sacred Heart had much time to devote to teaching nuns or anyone else about medical techniques. They had demanding schedules. A separate post will focus on that in the weeks ahead.


The Sacred Heart doctors in the 50s all had medical degrees. All were general practitioners; specialization just occurred over time. The townspeople had some opinions on that score. If you wanted excellent attention during pregnancies and at baby deliveries, or diagnosis by a doc with a kindly bedside manner, you went to Dr. McCormick. Dr. George Baker was your man for serious surgery. His son, Dr. Rowe Baker, was more of a jack of all trades. He was very efficient, and when urgency was important, he was the go-to guy. After Dr. George retired, before I got to know him other than by reputation, Dr. Rowe took over the complete Baker practice.


Some sophisticated procedures simply could not be done at Sacred Heart. At Borgess, staff doctors have special advanced training in caring for hospital patients, and many advanced procedures feature highly trained specialists. Borgess has a brain and spine institute and a heart treatment center, among other things, on its campus. A whole lot more medical brain power is available than in the old days.


I was around long enough for numerous shift changes to often bring new caregivers to my bedside. Shifts changed daily and once again with different people on the one weekend day I was there. Every RN I talked with had a four-year college degree. Every Personal Care Associate (PCA) who appeared in my room had a two-year degree. Every specialist (a respiratory therapist was available to me at all times) had at least a two-year degree. Several types of specialists were part of the staff. The day before I was released, an occupational therapist spent a solid hour running me through some tests and giving lots of good advice on how to cope with breathing problems in the future.


You might think with all that education the Borgess caregivers would be somewhat of a hoity-toity bunch. Not true at all. With one exception, to some degree all exhibited friendliness and good cheer almost all the time. The most mundane questions were answered, a few jokes were told, and a little time was taken for general chitchat, although all obviously had busy schedules. I think the level of dedication to their work was at least equal to that of the nuns in the 1950s.


The sole disappointment for me was a PCA who seemed somewhat too detached from her work and showed minimal interest in caring for me or my roommate (he was a soft-spoken gentleman who had been in the hospital for three weeks recovering from major surgery). Perhaps the PCA merely was having an off day. Or, perhaps she might find a different line of work more pleasant and rewarding. No organization is perfect. Generally, the Borgess people were terrific.


Despite the high levels of education the Borgess staffers had attained, they wanted more. I think this is another major difference between them and the Sacred Heart personnel in the 50s.

The Sacred Heart nuns were not known for personal ambition. After all, except for those who might aspire to becoming administrators, they had reached their career goal the day they dedicated themselves to their vocation. Other staff had high school educations, or less, and seemed content with their status in life. Going on to college was not considered as important in those days as it is today. The doctors were firmly established in the community as family physicians; they were highly respected and fairly wealthy citizens. They had no particular motivation to complicate their busy lives with advanced training.


It’s altogether different at Borgess. One RN was completing a master’s degree and intended to pursue a PhD so she could operate a high-level business in the future. Most of the PCAs I talked with were working on four-year degrees, or expressed a strong desire to do so. A nice young man doing housekeeping work was earning cash to help him along the way as he studied at a local college.


A whole lot of Borgess staff members I met were interested in higher education as a key to their personal advancement, and not just the youngsters. Several taking courses had ten or more years experience as caregivers. Incidentally, that attitude of valuing education permeates the Kalamazoo community to a remarkable degree. Some think much of it is motivated by “The Kalamazoo Promise” to public school students. I promise to write some about The Promise at a future date; it’s an unusual, unique actually, financial assistance program that has national implications for community improvement. If this aside arouses your curiosity and you don’t want to wait, check out The Promise with a web search.


Put a flock of intelligent, highly educated, ambitious and culturally diverse people together in often-stressful situations and interpersonal conflict is likely. Yet, I never heard any sniping at colleagues or back-biting during my stay at Borgess. Things got a little tense once in a while, but the RNs stepped out of their role as friendly consultants into an order-giving capacity, and when the crisis was over the whole crew returned to normal. Normal seemed to be friendly coexistence.


The closest thing to competitiveness was a comment by one of the PCAs who talked with me several times because she was finishing up a college writing course, learned I dabble in discourse, and wanted to compare notes. With a mischievous grin, Amy said she would be pleased to answer some of my questions about her work at the hospital, but only if I agreed to write, “Amy was the coolest PCA.”


Amy was finishing the last writing assignment in her English course; she was happy about that. We agreed that writing is not a particularly easy chore. But if she could concentrate on it in her limited spare time, I can make a little extra effort, too. I intend to tackle at least six topics related to my hospital stay and earlier experiences in my hometown. One, dear to every patient’s heart, will be the food. Others will be staff communication networks, effects of computerization, patient-staff communication, caregiver pay, and suggestion systems.


One future topic has some political importance in these parts. The question is about the merits of expensive duplicate services when two major hospitals coexist in the same area. My stay at Borgess completely changed my mind about that. Other things interest me, so the duplication discussion and the other hospital stories will be interspersed with other items on this Blog.


But if you want a chance to agree or disagree with the views of one mature adult about hospital care, past and present, check in here once in a while and see what’s posted. I hope a nun or two will read this, and do that. I want to conclude this piece of the picture with a little message for all of them.


The last time I visited Sacred Heart Hospital, when my mother was a patient there during her final days, I saw only one nun. She was in modern, attractive attire, not wearing a habit in the traditional sense. She was not working as a nurse or personal care provider.

There may be more than one nun on staff at Borgess Medical Center now, but all those I talked with could name only one off-hand. She is not serving as a nurse. Her coworkers admired her good work as a spiritual counselor and patient confidant.


Sacred Heart Hospital is no more. Labor costs as the number of nuns available to staff it declined surely were a factor in its closing. What now is Borgess Medical Center overcame that and other obstacles to grow and prosper as part of Borgess Health, a huge health-care organization in southwestern Michigan. Although very few nuns work in day-to-day Borgess operations, the Sisters of St. Joseph continue their involvement as sponsors.


The penguins have flown away. Hospital care is in the hands of the Amys of the world and their associates. And they are pretty cool. But those nuns gave a great gift to many hometowns across America, whether the hospitals they founded ultimately died or flourished in other forms.


The nuns I’ve encountered over the years were rather secure people. They didn’t really need morale boosts to keep them going—especially from a fairly impious Lutheran who was raised as a Christian Scientist and has been told his name is on the rolls in a Mormon mountain vault whether he wants it there or not. But they deserve great amounts of appreciation, whatever the source.


Bless you all, hospital sisters, wherever you may be.

A Blueberry Thrill


The women in my life have done a great job helping me indulge in a great pleasure—eating plump, sweet blueberries. I love ‘em.


My mother, an elegant lady who usually dressed as if for a special occasion whenever she left the house made an exception at the height of blueberry season in northern Wisconsin. She put on her field uniform. It consisted of high-top boots, a pair of well-worn coveralls, and a decrepit floppy hat. Thus attired, she went off to spend a long day picking as many blueberries as she could find.

When Mom got home, we enjoyed blue treats for weeks. The berries appeared as desserts, in muffins, over breakfast cereal, and best of all, in pies. The pies were heavenly. They inspired me to demand a blueberry pie instead of the traditional cake as the centerpiece of my birthday celebrations. I not only requested pie, I insisted on one to be eaten only by me!


Mom had no freezer when I was a little boy. She compensated by canning and otherwise preserving foods in wondrous ways. Because of her skills, blueberries were available in our household months after the picking season ended. I got my personal pie complete with candles on every birthday as far back as I can remember.


My addiction to the annual pie coupled with a reputation for conservative financial management (being a tightwad, some might say) led to a family story that survives to this day. On one of my birthdays, a favorite aunt, Dorothy, was visiting from Milwaukee. She begged for a piece of my pie. I very reluctantly agreed, but only after she agreed to pay me a dollar for a small slice.


Wife Sandy is a superb cook, but pies are one of the few things not in her repertoire. After we hooked up, she compensated for that by ferreting out stores that could provide a blueberry pie in mid-winter for my birthday. A couple of times, when no stores or bakeries had pies on their shelves, she was forced to substitute things like blueberry pop-tarts, but the tradition continued and we got some laughs out of the new varieties of pie.


Last year, our first in southwestern Michigan, son Lee’s fiancée Karen showed us one of the reasons agriculture is a leading industry in these parts. We are in blueberry heaven. Karen took us to a major blueberry farm only about 12 miles from our home. You could pick your own, as my Mom once did, but it was a lot easier to let a small army of green-card workers do that hard work. Sandy bought 30 pounds of Michigan’s finest. We celebrated with a round of blueberry ice cream cones.


Sandy split the haul into manageable quantities and froze the bags. Now, I’m enjoying the “perfect breakfast’ (see Dec. 6, 2006, post) seven days a week. I just thaw out a bunch of berries, top off some oatmeal with them, and love every delicious minute of getting started into a new day. If Sandy must buy pop-tarts for my birthday, she is forgiven.


As a native Badger, it is embarrassing to admit that southwestern Michigan blueberries are superior to northern Wisconsin blueberries, but they are. Some of the same soil, topography, and climate conditions that once made our newly adopted area the celery growing capital of the United States (Michigan still is number three behind California and Florida, which have much longer growing seasons) apparently are ideal for growing fantastic blueberries. We didn’t move here for the berries, but had I known how good they are, I might have.


Hey, Fats Domino. Where did you find Blueberry Hill?  I’ll bet it was right here.

It Wasn’t Heavenly


The silver-haired gent looked up from his restaurant meal, spotted my faded Packers sweatshirt, and smiled.


“You from Wisconsin?”


“Sure am.”


“Whereabouts?”


“Tomahawk.”


“Oh, up north. I’m from Ironwood.” The elderly diner’s face took on a sheepish look. “We were right next door to Hurley.”


Some people claim Hurley is the town that put the “sin” in Wisconsin. Others quote a saying that goes back at least 60 years. “There’s Hurley, Haywood, and Hell, and Hurley’s the worst of the three.”


That’s the way I remember the saying. Others disagree. A few continue to argue about it. They quote a slightly different version: “The three worst places on earth are Hurley, Hayward, and Hell, and Hurley’s the toughest of the three.”


That, to me, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Obviously, Hell is not on earth. A few wordsmiths argue that the saying doesn’t refer to the biblical Hell at all, but to the Michigan city of that name. The trouble with that idea is that Hell, Michigan, is in the lower peninsula, nowhere near Hurley and Hayward, and it never was known as a center of bad behavior.


One blogger recently wrote a post arguing that the order of things in the saying really was “Hayward, Hurley, and Hell. . .” because in the old days Hayward came before Hurley on the passenger train run to the far north. That amateur historian claims the saying was based on a railroad conductor’s announcement of the next stops. That thought is interesting, but it’s a real stretch. Neither one of the Hells in question was on that railroad line.


No matter how the “real” saying goes, associating Hurley with Hell was a reasonable thing to do. The town was notorious for providing illegal gambling, booze, and prostitutes to loggers and miners. After the big trees were cut and the valuable ore dug out, enterprising Hurley business owners continued to furnish their primary products to anybody who wanted to buy.

Hurley is just 90 miles north of my hometown, straight up Highway 51. Stories of illicit activities in Hurley abounded. Silver Street, the main thoroughfare, was said to be lined by two-story wood-frame buildings. Each featured a saloon in the front, a gambling parlor in the rear, and a brothel operation upstairs. Some served food, but that was incidental. Acquaintances described all sorts of exotic activities they had seen in Hurley, summed up by “they get you anything you want.”


I assumed the stories were basically true. They aroused my curiosity about the place. I remained curious for a long time, because many years passed before I visited Hurley. During most of my youth, my family didn’t have a car, so we couldn’t do a lot of visiting anywhere. And if we could have traveled, Mom certainly would have vetoed any plan involving a trip to Hurley.


Frequent news stories about events in Hurley contributed to my curiosity. State agents regularly raided Silver Street establishments and made numerous arrests. A few days after we read detailed descriptions of the evil acts the state police discovered, smaller news articles reported the results. Typically, local magistrates found most of the accused not guilty, and the others only slightly guilty. The slightly guilty got small fines and went back to work.


For a while in the 1940s and 50s, the good citizens of Hurley made determined public relations efforts to clean up the city’s image. The most famous attempt was a program launched by the mayor; he encouraged residents to paint all the buildings in the city white. They really did that. The new puritanical color scheme had little effect on opinions about the place. City officials took to sending out news releases comparing the number of churches in Hurley to the number of saloons. The churches led by a slight margin. That tactic failed utterly to convince anyone that Hurley was heavenly.


Hurley still conjured up images of a little sin city in 1978 some 30 years after I first started hearing and reading about it. That’s when I finally made my one and only visit to Silver Street.


Ironwood, which is separated from Hurley only by the Wisconsin-Michigan border, was home to the headquarters of the Ottawa National Forest. We in the U.S. Forest Service wanted to consolidate ranger districts in the forest to trim administrative costs. We expected trouble because any Upper Peninsula proposal to cut jobs always ran into opposition. I was sent from the regional office in Milwaukee to work on the plan with our people in Ironwood. “Ah,” I thought, “finally I’ll get to see Hurley.”


I booked a motel room at the far end of Silver Street. It was nearly dinner time after I got checked in the day before my meetings in Ironwood, so I stopped for advice at the motel desk. The clerk recommended a fast food place. I said I wanted to eat in one of the old Silver Street establishments to see what it looked like.

“You’re a little late,” the clerk said. “The last one burned down two weeks ago.”

Up Nort Wit Da Yoopers

After learning I grew up in Northern Wisconsin, a neighbor introduced me to a man he said was a Yooper. Having been exposed to an occasional “Uff da” and dozens of Finlander jokes in my youth, I knew something about where the guy hailed from.

Residents of my hometown had much more in common with the denizens of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula than with those down-State city slickers in Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. We were suspicious of State government. After all, State agents could hurt our tourist business by enforcing liquor, gambling, and fishing and hunting regulations. (The drug store in the front part of my family’s “Main Street” building had two slot machines in the middle of the establishment, right in front of the fishing tackle display, many years after gambling was declared illegal in Wisconsin.)

We didn’t want to discourage anybody who liked to travel “up Nort for the Fourt” or any other time. The city people brought greenbacks we needed, and we were pretty good at extracting them. There also was a common perception that more tax dollars were traveling the 200 miles south to Madison than were migrating back up Highway 51 to the north.

Similar feelings about Detroit and Lansing were more intense in the U.P. The Yoopers, a true collection of rugged individualists, several times pushed proposals to secede from Michigan. In 1962 they got serious and formed the Upper Peninsula Independence Association to make it happen.

About that time, my Dad became well acquainted with William F. Brown, who had come to town to open a real estate and insurance agency. Mr. Brown was in his early 60s, an energetic, outgoing man with a wry sense of humor. He landed a part-time job as an appraiser when property values were in question during lawsuits in the county court. Brown had lots of real estate expertise, but not much knowledge of the area. He recruited my Dad as a partner who had lived in Tomahawk all his life and knew a lot about the values of various building locations and whether the owners were likely to have maintained their property.

I recall Mr. Brown chuckling about how he and Dad could complete an appraisal in a matter of minutes. He said they never entered a building, or measured much of anything. They just got the construction date, eyeballed the place, roughly paced off a few dimensions, and declared a value. Dad said they must have been fairly accurate; their findings were only challenged once in the many years they worked together.

Mr. Brown wasn’t a Yooper, but he knew a chance to interject some humor into the Northwoods environment when he saw one. He became a vocal supporter of seceding from Wisconsin to join the U.P. in a new Great State of Superior. I was young and quite willing to entertain thoughts of rebellion against any authority that happened to be present. I read some of the realtor’s writings about getting a divorce from Wisconsin and forming a 51st State with the Yoopers. Dad just snorted when I said secession seemed like it had merit. “It’s all a bunch of Brown’s b.s.,” he said.

The State of Superior never materialized, but there was some fun during the campaign. Lots of folks wore T-shirts featuring the proposed State’s official emblem . . . a giant mosquito.

Ghastly Gein Pops Up Again

Ed Gein died of cancer in a mental institution two decades ago, but writers concocting stories about horrible events for the Halloween season continue to resurrect him. People who lived in Wisconsin 50 years ago, as I did, would prefer the world forget about Gein.

Younger generations may not have heard of the killer, grave robber, and mutilator of bodies who lived in a farmhouse he decorated with human remains near the small community of Plainfield, Wisconsin. But they can get the idea from a series of fictitious monsters patterned after him. Gein’s story was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock”s famous thriller, “Psycho.” He also was the model for Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Leatherface wore clothes made from human skin; so did Gein. More recently, Gein inspired the terrifying “Buffalo Bill” character in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Gein admitted, without a trace of remorse or concern, to two murders and exhuming more that a dozen bodies from the local graveyard. He made lampshades, bowls, a shirt, and other items from the cadavers. The local sheriff investigating the disappearance of a woman found her in Gein’s farmhouse. Her beheaded and disemboweled body was hanging upside down from a ceiling beam. The discovery was made in November 1957, the year I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

I never encountered Gein, nor did I help those who burned his farmhouse to the ground shortly after he was arrested. But I unknowingly passed too close to him for comfort many times over a four-year period. Perhaps I exaggerate the proximity, but nevertheless the annual resurrection of this creature scares hell out of me.

Plainfield is about the halfway point between Madison and my hometown. I, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends, drove through the area whenever a trip was made to or from home by auto. One time, three of us stopped in a Plainfield bar for a beer. Two men who stopped in a Plainfield bar a few years earlier never were heard from again. Although he was known to favor dispatching or mutilating women, Gein was suspected of doing the men in. He never admitted guilt regarding the missing men. There were several other mysterious disappearances in the area over several years.

Thank God I never hitchhiked home from school. That probably was due more to circumstance than common sense. Thumbing a ride was an acceptable way to travel in those days. Neither we youngsters nor our parents thought much about the danger involved. Nowadays, parents worry much more, and hitchhiking is rare. Teenage travel may be less adventurous, but it surely is safer.

If you are among those planning a pilgrimage to look for spooks where Gein’s farmhouse stood, or in the Plainfield cemetery where he is buried near many of his victims, please do us all a favor this Halloween. Stay away, and let Ed stay dead.