Favre Fumbles Finale

Sports, after all, are forms of entertainment. For youngsters, the activities provide fun and promote health. At college and professional levels, sports generate diversions from the trials of the real world for millions of fans. For some, that probably is healthy, too.

No athlete over the past two decades has been more entertaining than Brett Favre. Whether you loved or hated the “kid” with the mighty arm and faulty judgment, he made some amazing plays on the gridiron. His daredevil approach sold a lot of tickets and piles of merchandise for the Packers, and also for their competitors in the National Football League. His country boy demeanor off the field, which now appears to have been faked, endeared him to young and old.

As a Packer fan since 1947, I had to love a guy who ended a 25-year string of mostly mediocre seasons and made Green Bay a proud football place once again. Favre was the biggest factor in a Super Bowl victory and a string of winning records. Nevertheless, I don’t have to love him anymore, and I don’t.

Most Packer fans forgave their idol when he started making an annual event out of hogging headlines as he agonized (his word) over leaving the game he claimed to love. We so appreciated his earlier positive contributions that we could overlook the juvenile negative situations he created in his final years of “will he, or won’t he, play next season.”

It was even OK with me when Favre came out of what looked like a real retirement for a try at one more championship with the New York Jets. Pro football is a business, and the quarterback had a right to seek a new employer in the twilight of his career. The problem is how he went about it. After double-dealing the Packers with a phony retirement announcement, he double-crossed the Jets with a “retirement” designed to get him a release so he could head to Minnesota, where prospects of a championship were better. Then he even cheated his new Viking teammates by coyly stalling the deal until the rigors of summer practice sessions no longer could affect him.

For a Packer fan, an aging local hero going to a team outside the “black and blue division” wasn’t much of a problem. But going to the Vikings is something like ex-Yankee great Yogi Berra coming out of retirement to signal pitches for the Boston Red Sox.

To the many records Favre holds he now can lay claim to the title of biggest liar, manipulator, and sell-out artist in the history of pro football. Oh sure, he’ll get into the NFL Hall of Fame fairly soon. He earned that with his achievements on the field. With his recent failures off the field, however, he is pretty well assured of a spot in the Hall of Shame. There he can join Pete Rose (I really didn’t bet that much), Michael Vick (Hide Your Beagle, Vick’s An Eagle), and other “heroes” who leave a lot to be desired as role models for our youngsters.

The Thrill Is Gone

About once a month for the past eight years Sandy and I hopped into her car, put on some jumpy music, set the cruise control on 70, and enjoyed the mountain scenery on the 45-minute trip from our home near Ogden, Utah, to Malad, Idaho. There we had lunch and bet one dollar on each of the next ten Powerball drawings.

Playing the numbers is a bad bet, and we knew it. The odds of a win are very long. So our little trips were more in the nature of enjoyable outings than ventures into serious gambling. We won ten dollars once. We won three or four dollars a couple of times. One time, we bought a ticket for a friend and his numbers hit for $100. When I gave him his winnings, he bought me a beer. Not much of a payoff for our work as bookies.

But, as for other players, the prospect of instant riches for a small investment kept us going back. Because gambling was considered sinful as well as being illegal in Utah, we had the added incentive of experiencing the minor thrill of sneaking away from home to do something naughty.

We’ve now been Michigan residents for seven months. Betting on numbers, ponies, and all sorts of other things is perfectly legal. We haven’t placed a bet yet. Crossing the Otsego Township line to buy a lotto ticket in our favorite grocery store just doesn’t seem like a glamorous sampling of forbidden fruit.

However, a glitzy new casino recently opened about 20 miles in the other direction. Now, that is just a little bit more tempting . . .

A Gift of (Face) Value

In the early 1960s, our small Sales Promotion Department at The West Bend Company devoted considerable time to analyzing the desirability of various types of prizes. We usually had two or three national sales contests running simultaneously, and district managers and distributors sponsored many additional smaller contests.

There were two “golden rules” in the award selection arena. First, as with a gift item, a good prize was something desirable that the recipient wasn’t able or likely to get for themselves. Second, good prizes should appear to be worth more than they actually cost. Trophies and brief vacations at resorts were good. Clothing was not. One time, we gave away lots of Green Stamps, bought at a steep discount, of course.

Consider the savings bond. At the time, a $25 or $50 bond represented a fairly significant amount of extra cash for a salesperson. The grateful recipients seldom noted that our company paid only $18.75 or $37.50 for those bonds, and they would have to wait years to collect the advertised value.

Sandy and I recently qualified for a “face value” award, proving that the marketing maneuver remains in use. We wanted to get a Discover credit card to facilitate trading at a favorite discount store near our new home. Out of the blue came an ad displaying “$100” in big type as an incentive for new card owners. The small type said the $100 was a savings bond. Of course, the ad did not say that Discover would buy that wonderful $100 gift for $50.

I chuckled and ordered the card, citing the offer number. After all, $50 was a nice little bonus, and we wanted a card anyway. The very next day a new Discover ad came in the mail. This time the bonus was $100 in cash. I quickly got on the phone and asked if I could switch to the new offer, since our card order had only been approved a few hours earlier. The agent seemed surprised by my request. She said, “You mean cash is better than a bond?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. She excused herself for a huddle with her boss. The verdict, delivered with several apologies, was that the savings bond was the only reward available to me.

Maybe there should be a golden rule for prize receiving--Don’t be too hasty about applying.

Finding a Genius

(Ed. note: This story appeared in Days with the Dads last December. Al Groncki, who was the contract supervisor at the McCoy Job Corps Center, read it and sent an e-mail saying the story essentially was correct, but some details were wrong. He was acquainted with the young man, and arranged his further education in Washington, DC. This version has the revisions Al suggested.)


I worked for nearly two years as public relations coordinator for the McCoy Job Corps Center located at Camp McCoy in western Wisconsin. In Job Corps, we had good kids, great kids, and some bad kids that may have been beyond redemption.

A few were brilliant. I carefully researched the background of one of these, and wrote a feature article about him that was printed in regional newspapers in Milwaukee and Minneapolis-St. Paul as well as local media, after they checked out the facts.

The 17-year-old Corpsman scored in the 99 percent level of the Stanford Achievement Tests. Math, science, language, history—name the subject, and he was outstanding. What made this amazing is that he never spent a single day in a school, nor was he home schooled in the usual sense.

Like many Job Corps enrollees (by the way, George Foreman was a Jobs Corps enrollee), our prodigy came from a troubled family. His parents both died when he was about 5 years old and he went to live with an aunt and uncle. A year or so later, his aunt died and he was left with the uncle. The uncle had been a teacher, but became a traveling salesman and sometime gambler. When the uncle went off to work or play, he dropped the boy off at a local library with some direction on what to read. However, the young man was pretty much on his own with freedom to explore all subject matter. He and the uncle discussed the day’s learning events most evenings.

For unknown reasons, the boy and his uncle had a falling out. The lad was abandoned in Milwaukee. By chance, he went to Catholic Charities (I phoned people there while verifying the story). They initially put him to work as a janitor. The people in charge soon realized he had extreme intelligence, but no job skills or formal education, and suggested he enroll in Job Corps.

This guy was no nerd. He was a handsome lad, who starred as a pitcher for his dormitory softball team and also played on a basketball team at the Center.

He completed the six-week drafting course, one of the toughest the McCoy Center offered, in two weeks. At the time I learned about him, he had been awarded a high school equivalency certificate, and finished so many Job Corps courses that the counselors had run out of places to send him. He was placed in a center in Washington, DC, where especially talented Corpsmen could attend George Washington University. He intended to study medicine. I have no idea where he is now, but will wager that "Dr." precedes his name.

The Old and the New

It’s trite in the extreme to comment on the many contrasts in Europe between the very old and the very new, yet they continue to be intriguing.

On April 10, I walked out of Munich’s Hofbrauhaus, where brewing operations began in 1607, went a few doors down the street to an internet cafe, and with the help of our resident electronic guru Karen, posted a blog story that could be viewed by millions around the world (of course, only a few actually wanted to read it).

The cost of sending the international message was less than one Euro ($1.30), or about half the price of a beer at the Hofbrauhaus.

Heads Up

Writing newspaper headlines can be a high art, but also a risky business. The story labels must fit in a precise space in a style specified by the publisher, and be written in a minute or two. Trying to quickly capture the gist of a story in an appealing way doesn’t always work out.

Almost anything can result in a headline gaffe. The classic example used in journalism school in the 50s stemmed from the fact that Manly and Fertile are two small towns in Iowa. A newspaper serving both communities announced a wedding thus: Manly Man Weds Fertile Miss. Wonder how many offspring resulted?

A headline blunder ruined my first attempt to cover a basketball game as sports editor of the Daily Tribune in Wisconsin Rapids in 1964. The home team scored an important win, and I affixed a rather large headline to my story. It said something like: Dempsey Scores 19 as Raiders Win. Seems ok, however, the young man’s name was Dempze, not Dempsey. Dempze was a well-known family name around Wisconsin Rapids, and Chief Editor Carl Otto blistered me with a commentary on my headline writing abilities when he saw my version.

Otto skewered me so thoroughly that I greeted his comeuppance with relish a few months later. He had a special red phone in his office available for a “stop the presses” command just like those in the movies. Every day, just before the presses were turned on, the printing plant superintendent hustled into Otto’s office with a proof of the front page. He and Otto sat side-by-side checking Page One to ferret out any errors needing last minute corrections. One day they somehow missed a badly misspelled word in the biggest headline on the page. When he found out (after thousands of copies had been printed), Otto turned redder than the phone he had failed to use that day. Playing dumb, I observed he didn’t appear to be feeling well, and offered any help I could give. That turned him purple.

My headline recollections were inspired by an internet message forwarded by Ray Brown, retired Intermountain Research Station scientist, and Dave Tippets, public affairs officer at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, CO. The message showed strange headlines published by papers around the world Here they are, with comments:

Alton Attorney Accidentally Sues Himself (Wonder which of him won)

County to pay $250,000 to advertise lack of funds (That’ll help)

Volunteers search for old Civil War planes (Difficult task. Didn't the first plane fly in 1903?)

Army vehicle disappears (Story was about an Australian Army vehicle with camouflage paint that mysteriously vanished)

Caskets found as workers demolish mausoleum (Probably were bodies in them, too)

Ten Commandments: Supreme Court says some OK, some not (Now, there’s a choice?)

Utah Poison Control Center reminds everyone not to take poison (Duh)

Federal Agents Raid Gun Shop, Find Weapons (Surprise!)

Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25 (I would have guessed 20)

One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers (Oh come on, we know what the headline writer meant)

Help, the Old-Fashioned Way

The emergency help system recently went down in our county for mysterious reasons. While 911 was useless, we were advised to dial a ten-digit number if we needed cops, firemen, or medics.

In the 1940s, and perhaps even earlier, you could get help in my hometown without knowing a single digit. You just picked up the phone and when asked “number please” told the operator what the problem was. She turned on two yellow lights at opposite ends of “Main Street” (Wisconsin Avenue). One was attached to the corner of Bradley Bank; the other was hung on Allen’s Grocery.

The lights were a signal to the police. They contacted the switchboard operator who told them what was needed and where. They then dispatched themselves or whoever else was required to handle the emergency. If a blaze was the problem, a siren heard throughout the city alerted volunteer firefighters.

It sounds like a Rube Goldberg operation now, but the small-town system worked, and taxpayers didn’t have to pay for three shifts of dispatchers and a batch of sophisticated electronic gear.

Twelve Seconds of Fame

When Walter Cronkite died this week at 92, commentators rushed to describe his two decades of fame as the “most trusted man in America.” Cronkite was very famous. As many as 18 million viewers regularly tuned into the CBS Evening News when he anchored the program from 1962 to 1981.

For 25 years, I thought his program had given me two minutes of fame. I appeared on the show in 1973 as a U.S. Forest Service spokesman reporting on western forest fire activity. Telling new acquaintances that “I once was on the evening news with Walter Cronkite,” always was an attention-getter and a positive shot to the old ego, because until recent years just about everybody had seen and admired Cronkite.

Quite a few people told me they saw the forest fire show. But a quarter century passed before I saw it. I was interviewed at the Boise Interagency Fire Center (now the National Interagency Fire Center). My work was hectic, with no time for television watching, so I missed the original show. I asked others for descriptions. They said it ran about two minutes, and looked all right. I called it “my two minutes of fame” for years after that.

When the fire crisis was over, the Director of Fire and Aviation Management came out from the national office to tell personnel at the Boise center what a good job they had done. He planned to show a tape of the Cronkite program as part of his presentation. Just as the tape was about to roll, I was called away to answer an urgent media telephone request. I missed the show again.

Last year, in an idle moment, I googled myself and discovered that Vanderbilt University had the show in its Television News Archive. I invested $35 to view it. Sure enough, there I was, delivering a couple of uninspired sentences describing the fire situation.

The show segment did run about two minutes. But I was only on camera for 12 seconds. My fame was fleeting.

And that’s the way it was on Aug. 21, 1973.

Dialing His “Cell”

A recent news report of national survey results said drivers talking on cell phones were one of the top three causes of “road rage.” If my old golfing buddy, Hank Cheatham, was asked for his opinion he probably would have picked cells as enemy Number 1, and perhaps also as Numbers 2 and 3.

Cheatham was vocal about his dislike of cell phones. He didn’t own one, said he never would, and never missed an opportunity to register disgust when a cell rang within his earshot. When cell use broke the serenity at a golf course, Cheatham exhibited an advanced case of “course rage.” Cheatham also disliked slow golf play, and didn’t hesitate to make his feeling about that known.

One day, two foursomes of our pals were waiting impatiently at the par-three tenth tee while several groups ahead of us dawdled between shots for what seemed inexcusable lengths of time. To the amazement of the other seven hackers, Cheatham pulled a phone out of his bag and made an elaborate show of dialing a number.

“Randy,” he said loudly, apparently to the head pro, “things are really screwed up on the back nine. You should send somebody out here right now. If you don't get these people moving, we will quit playing golf here."

We were amazed by the whole episode. Harry Tullis, who started the group playing at that course about 30 years earlier, was bug eyed and speechless. Then, our player nearest Cheatham examined the phone and started to laugh. Cheatham’s “cell” was the type sold at Toys R Us.

Winning by Losing

In Arizona, a young man recently won an election for a Town Council seat in a small city when he drew a king to beat his opponent’s six. The candidates cut the cards after they tied in the balloting with 660 votes each. The news story said using a gambling method to resolve an electoral tie was relatively rare, but did happen in Arizona from time to time.

It happened in Wisconsin at least one time, but with a different twist, according to family lore. Apathy reached such a height (or depth) in my hometown about 60 years ago that no one could be persuaded to run for one of the vacant alderman positions. Two undercover campaigns apparently were launched without the knowledge of the candidates. When election results were tabulated, my father and the other noncandidate had identical write-in vote totals for the seat on the City Council.

Dad and the other man cut the cards to resolve the issue. Dad drew the high card. The drawer of the losing card won the honor of serving as a City of Tomahawk alderman.

Strauss, You Were in Tune

In Days with the Dads, I implied that Johann Strauss II may have been spending too much time in Viennese wine taverns when he created his classic waltz. We crossed the famous “blue” Danube twice two years ago, and it definitely was green.

This spring, as we headed north from Vienna along the Danube, we observed the same phenomenon several times. The river was green. It was green when we stopped for the evening at a bed and breakfast in Regensburg on a bluff overlooking the stream. The day had been sunny and bright, as had all others when we had observed the famous river.

The sky was overcast when we rose early the next morning. The Danube was deep blue! It stayed that way as we turned west and drove through the upper river basin, an area not often visited by international tourists. At Walhalla, a temple built on a hill by King Ludwig I of Bavaria to honor distinguished Germans, excellent views of the river were part of the attraction.

A bust of Strauss is among the 130 on display in Walhalla. He can look down on a beautiful Blue Danube, and marvel at the ignorance of American tourists who don’t understand that it’s when and where you look at things, as well as how, that matters.

Health Food

Constantly seek the truth, and you shall find it. The author of the “Flat Belly Diet” recommends olives as containing monounsaturated fatty acids, iron, vitamin E, copper, and fiber. The fiber helps control blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Eating only a few at a time is suggested, because olives have mega calories.

I subscribe to this great wisdom. At regular intervals, I surround two small olives with several ounces of cheap gin and a dash of expensive vermouth. The drink should be stirred, not shaken. (Agent 007 may have been a 10 with women, but as a connoisseur of martinis he was a zero.) After sipping the drink until it is depleted, make another and ingest it.

Four olives consumed in this manner invariably make me happy as well as healthy.

Grading Off the Curve

As a land grant institution financed mainly by legislative appropriations, the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s was committed to enrolling just about anyone who applied on time after graduating from a high school within the State. The faculty often seemed equally committed to flunking out all who failed to meet rigorous standards.

“Standards” were very much in the mind of the applier in those days in Madison. There were great differences between requirements for passing some “snap” courses and successfully negotiating many tough required courses.

Freshman English was a requirement. It was taught by grad students in small, workshop-like classes with emphasis on creative writing and all sorts of demerits for grammatical and format errors in the compositions. The mere thought of freshman English frightened some wannabe engineers, who could be great number crunchers but woefully inadequate wordsmiths.

English 1a and 1b were pretty easy going for me. In 1a, the presiding grad student bestowed an A on every one of my papers and test results. But when my final grade arrived, it was a B!

I sought an audience. “I don’t understand your complaint,” the instructor said. “You should be proud. I only gave three B’s in my three sections. You would have to master English to get an A. No college freshmen ever could be on that level. I’ve never given an A for the course.”

No wonder some of the engineers were terrified.

Elsewhere, “standards” apparently could be negotiable. History was among my loves, but the lecturer for one course on Americana was totally boring and so was the textbook. I took to cutting the classes and leaving the book on a shelf a bit too much--so much that the big point counter on an essay question exam called for a description of a phase of history totally unfamiliar to me. Desperately, I filled most of the blue book with a contrived answer to the question, hoping good penmanship would count for something.

The blue book came back with a passing grade and a note beside the contrived answer: “Obviously, you skipped two lectures about this and didn’t bother to read Chapter 10. But I was intrigued by how you dreamed up a totally fictional part of American history. So I gave you a B for creativity on this one.”

And then there was the long-running student joke that surfaced every semester at registration time. “Don’t take basket weaving. I heard four Navajos signed up. They’ll raise the curve out of sight.”

A Miracle Worker?

President Obama’s appointment of Utah Governor John Huntsman, Jr. as ambassador to China seemed a good idea when it was announced. Huntsman speaks Mandarin Chinese, a skill acquired and used during a two-year stay among the inscrutable ones as a Mormon missionary.

After recently learning some details about Huntsman’s negotiating skills, I think the appointment rating should be ratcheted up several notches from “good” to at least “excellent.”

Huntsman actually convinced the Mormon Church to let the legislature change several of the stranger provisions of the State’s liquor laws. On May 12, the “Zion Curtain” was lifted in restaurants. This quirky regulation required bartenders to prepare drinks behind a partition so patrons could not see them concocting the sinful mixtures. On July 1, looser regulations will permit establishment of the State’s first distillery since the 1920s. It will operate in Southern Utah. Also in July, the private club system will end. For decades, imbibers had to buy a membership to drink in a bar, or enter as a guest of a member.

These changes are revolutionary in the Beehive State, and the word is that Huntsman was the driving force behind them. Perhaps we moved from Utah too soon. However, abolishing the private club requirement has a negative side for snobbish drinkers. In the good old days, one could buy an annual club membership for $10 or $12, and the club repaid the fee with a free birthday dinner or some such ploy. So membership really was a freebie, and there was a certain aura of intrigue about presenting a card at the door of a local hot spot—something like entering a speakeasy during prohibition, I suppose.

The other nifty thing about the club system was that people on the lower end of the economic scale could pretend they were among the wealthy. At one time, we belonged to three or four clubs in Ogden. It was fun to say things like, “I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Ben Lomond Hotel, and we can go up to my club.” Or, “We could hold the party at one of my clubs. Just pick the place.” To similarly impress people in Michigan, I would have to pay real dollars, and quite a few of them, for club memberships. Oh well, it is said that freedom has its price.

It is amazing that Huntsman was able to twist enough Mormon arms to remove some of Utah’s restrictive liquor laws. He may be just the man to talk the Chinese into allowing a little personal freedom in their repressive society.

A Flash of Stupidity

It would be unfair to say that Chrysler management always has been stupid. After all, the founders outperformed many domestic auto competitors to become one of the “Big Three.” And, when things went awry in the 1970s, Lee Iacocca rode in on his white horse to save the day with timely product redesigns, “straight talk” advertising featuring himself, and the ability to persuade federal authorities to guarantee massive loans.

Since then, however, Chrysler leaders have committed more errors than a Little League team in its first practice game. Perhaps the residents of the executive suites were too busy counting their multi-million-dollar compensation packages to make a fumbling attempt at good management.

When I worked at The West Bend Company in 1964 as Sales Promotion Manager for the Direct Sales Division, I was privy to enough details of a Chrysler business decision to be confident that someone in the automaker’s top management had a flash of stupidity similar to some of the recent blunders.

West Bend was prosperous at the time. It was the world’s leading manufacturer of coffee makers, and near the top in various other types of cookware and small kitchen appliances. The company also was among the top five outboard motor manufacturers in the U.S. West Bend outboards were not well known because most were made for Sears and sold under the Sears name. West Bend didn’t emphasize sales under its own brand in the U.S., but sold small outboards successfully in other countries, especially Canada.

Unfortunately for West Bend, Sears’ execs decided the company had to have big outboards. Despite spirited resistance, West Bend was forced to retool its Hartford plant at heavy expense to get 80- and 100-horsepower outboards rolling off the assembly line or lose its largest customer. The deal allowed West Bend to sell the big motors under its own name, but they did not sell well. They did not sell well under the Sears name, either.

West Bend was stuck with an expensive, unprofitable plant. Company leaders started quietly looking around for a buyer for the outboard motor division. Chances of it continuing as a viable business were very low. Potential buyers expressed little interest, until Chrysler suddenly came forward.

As a department head, although mine was a very small department, I sat in on monthly marketing meetings conducted by Vice President Bob Lockman. Lockman was a tyrant when it came to meetings. He started exactly at the scheduled time. He once told a manager to get out and shut the door behind him after the unfortunate fellow arrived at 10:01 for one of the 10 a.m. marketing meetings.

Thus, it was surprising when Lockman was not at the podium at 10 a.m. on a monthly meeting day. We all waited, of course, and the wait extended to about 20 minutes. Then Lockman breezed in smiling broadly between puffs on a giant cigar.

“Guess what guys,” he said. “A Chrysler vice president just phoned and threatened me. He said if we wouldn’t sell them our outboard motor division, they were going to build their own plant and drive us out of the business.”

After a long drag on the cigar, Lockman chuckled. “I told him the offer was highway robbery, but since Chrysler had put our backs to the wall we had no choice but to accept.”

Lockman emerged from another cloud of cigar smoke with a laugh. “That Chrysler exec really was a tough negotiator. He forced us to take about double what our division is worth.”

Waltz into Wien

The Geezer avoids endorsing services and products (except for his own books!), but the situation in Vienna cries out for a recommendation. The historic city describes itself as “the capital that looks like a capital,” and it does. Cathedrals, palaces, theaters, museums, government buildings, and parks were designed and built on a grand scale in the days the city was a center of empire and the arts.

Unfortunately, Viennese prices are equally grand. You can skimp and put you and your spouse, lover, or good friend into a modest hotel room for a night for 150 Euros ($198) or treat yourselves to more upscale lodgings for a mere 400 or so Euros ($529 or so). Be sure parking comes with your room, because spaces are hard to find in the central city and carry a hefty price tag (up to 40 Euros for a long day). Some guidebooks suggest lodging costs are mitigated because tourists can take a walking tour from downtown hotels to the major attractions in a single day. Hogwash. Olympic sprinters might make it, tourists never would.

You can, however, get a good overview of Vienna in one day and cover all the important places in three days, and have a few Euros left in your pocket for several glasses of the acclaimed local wines. Do that, or have coffee or tea if you prefer, because Vienna’s sidewalk cafes are great places to people-watch. Just be a visitor who does not stay. Stay in Baden.

Specifically, stay at Pension Elfy, at No. 11 Karlsgasse (www.tiscover.at/pension-elfy). There, you will find immaculate rooms, some with kitchens, a patio for enjoyable breakfasts in good weather, a lovely garden from which you can clearly see remains of an ancient Roman viaduct, and a fine hostess. Elfriede Pusitz, will load you up with good food at breakfast and lots of information on what to see in central Vienna, which is only about 12 miles away.

Take the train for a few Euros. You will disembark right behind St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of the tourist attractions. Then, making sure your driver speaks English if you don’t do German, rent a horse-drawn carriage for about 10 Euros per person. That may seem extravagant, but it gets you around to the main attractions efficiently, and you’ll get good insights about what to return to later for detailed explorations. Besides, clattering over cobblestones in a carriage is a lot of fun.

For lunch, do what the locals do. Walk to the flea market and buy bread, pretzels, cheese, sausages, and something to drink from a huge selection. You can feed four people in style for about 12 Euros, less than the cost of one lunch at most Viennese restaurants.

You might want to hang around for a bite of dinner if the mid-day meal has left any space for that, or visit a wine tavern for a sing-along (those haughty Viennese don’t frequent beer taverns). Or, you could return to Baden to dine where Frau Pusitz will assure you of finding plenty of good food at good prices.

Baden, a spa city in Roman times, itself is an interesting place to visit. It provided vacation homes for Austro-Hungarian imperial families and such artists as Johann Strauss and Ludwig von Beethoven, who was inspired to write most of his Ninth Symphony there. Nowadays it serves the same function for wealthy Viennese, but you don’t have to be a wealthy tourist to stay there.

In mid-April, we paid 60 Euros for a first-class double room at Pension Elfy, breakfast, taxes, and good advice included.

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.

Prosit, Herr Schmidt

Wyman Schmidt was a leader in silvicultural research in the vast Northern Rocky Mountain area for 34 years. His studies and those of the group of scientists he led were directed at many tree species—western larch, ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, whitebark pine, and others—and forest ecosystems at a wide range of elevations.

Schmidt was recognized as an excellent research program planner and manager. He effectively led a unit whose members were scattered over a wide geographic area and organized several international technical conferences attended by hundreds of scientists and resource managers. He also deserved honors as an entertainer.

The forester became a barbershop singer as a teenager. During Air Force service in the Korean War, he often was assigned to Special Services to provide entertainment at bases throughout the U.S. When fellow Forest Service research personnel met in Bozeman or Missoula, Montana, where Schmidt’s unit had offices, you could count on him to have arranged musical or audio-visual shows to help fill off-duty hours.

We had two major laboratories in Missoula, and two people in the unit I supervised were stationed there. It never was a chore to visit Missoula; I enjoyed the city. It just seemed to be a place populated with genuine, down-to-earth people like those I grew up with in the Midwest. It also had some pretty down-to-earth eating places, among them the Missoula Club (the Mo Club), the Oxford (the Ox), the Montana Club, and a pizza place whimsically named “Red Pies Over Montana” after a movie about forest fires and smokejumpers titled “Red Skies Over Montana.”

Schmidt knew how to take advantage of what was available locally to entertain a visitor, sometimes in novel ways. Around midnight after one lengthy Missoula meeting, he invited me to head downtown with him for a bite to eat. He picked the place as one with an unusual menu that included breakfast items served at the bar at all hours.

I ordered scrambled eggs. Schmidt poked me and whispered, “Watch this.” He told the bartender he wanted an order of brains.

The bartender whirled around and yelled to the cook at the top of his lungs, “He needs ‘em!”

Schmidt made several trips at the invitation of governments in Europe to provide expert advice on forestry activities. After a visit to Germany, he put together a slide show describing his trip. He offered it for viewing as an evening activity at a Montana meeting of fellow Research Station employees. The last slide pictured Schmidt raising a stein at the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich during Octoberfest. He claimed his visit just happened to end in Munich.

Schmidt got a lot of razzing about that. He was accused of arranging a boondoggle trip that allowed him to avoid work and spend most of his time in beer halls. He took all the kidding in stride, and figured out a subtle way to strike back.

Sometime later, Schmidt was sent to what was then Yugoslavia as a technical advisor. He again produced a slide show describing his activities, and attendees at another Research Station meeting were invited to a showing. The last slide showed Schmidt again toasting the audience--from a table in the Hofbrauhaus! He refused to answer any questions about how Munich had been relocated to the Balkans.

We stopped in Munich last month. Of course, we made a special visit to the Hofbrauhaus. Of particular interest was the wall of beer steins there, where personalized mugs are locked away for use only by their owners. Alas, we couldn’t find Schmidt’s stein. All were identified by numbers, not names. A few had pictures of the owner. Perhaps Schmidt’s was removed to be enshrined in a Munich tourist hall of fame somewhere else, but certainly not in Serbia or Croatia.

Raus, eine kurze Hose (Out, Short Pants)

They’re not just for show, although holidays and festivals bring them out of closets in droves. Lederhosen often could be spotted gracing the frames of Teutonic men during our recent four-country auto tour from Baden to Switzerland and Liechtenstein and across Bavaria and Austria.

Lee has been fascinated by the leather shorts for several years. When we reached Salzburg on April 12 he found just the right store and after an hour or so of expert advice from the Austrian shopkeeper and Karen and Sandy, he was outfitted in elegant style.

Lederhosen are among the most versatile forms of clothing. The leather pants come in various lengths, from very short to those that cover the knee. They can be worn with or without suspenders or belts. Any sort of shirt is OK. Men wear them to work on farms. With linen or other expensive coats or jackets, men wear them to work in offices. Men, sometimes sporting ruffled shirts and ties, get married in them. But, men never wear them in Vienna’s State Opera House. We learned that the hard way.

Lee received admiring, and occasionally quizzical, glances (when he spoke English) as he wore his Lederhosen throughout a full day of sightseeing in the old imperial capital. We planned to cap off a grand day by attending a ballet version of “Die Fledermaus” at the historic opera house.

As we waited in line for admission, a uniformed attendant tapped Lee on the shoulder, pointed at his pants, and intoned, “Lederhosen, nein.” We had driven in from the city of Baden, and left our luggage there. Sandy saved the day. She remembered stowing some of her dirty clothes in one suitcase in the car.

Lee and Karen hustled away to see what was available in the laundry as Sandy and I held our places in line. They returned with Lee wearing a pair of Sandy’s slacks. With a six-inch gap between the top of his shoes and the bottom of the slacks, he wasn’t a pretty sight, but he passed the opera house’s pants test.

As our line moved forward, the attendant administered the shoulder tap to a young German man just ahead of us who was wearing regular walking shorts. “Shorts, nein,” was the command this time. The young man promptly stripped to his underwear, pulled a pair of wrinkled trousers out of a backpack, put them on, and smiled in triumph at the official.

Another tap and, “Packs, nein,” wiped away the smile. Everybody got in eventually. The ballet was wonderful. Everyone in the audience wore long pants.

Lee is not the first Klade to run afoul of short pants sanctions. In 1987 I was with a half dozen fellow Forest Service employees who were led by a local to “the best Mexican restaurant” in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a day of meetings. I had completed my freshening up process before dinner by changing to a pair of walking shorts.

The doorman said I could not enter the restaurant. Plaintive pleas by me and my associates, which were elevated to the manager level, did no good. Shorts were forbidden, whether worn by men or women.

The manager finally said he had a way to solve the problem if I would go along with it. He produced a gaudy embroidered skirt, one usually loaned to women who showed up in shorts. It was a dazzling Hispanic red, yellow, and white creation, with a “one size fits all” elastic waistband.

I put the skirt on, entered with the group, and all sorts of innovative comments about my appearance flew about throughout our meal. The climax came when one of the more fun-loving Forest Service men loudly asked me for a dance, and we got a round of applause after a few whirls around the small floor in the center of the restaurant.

When we left, we moved through the door in a tight group concealing me in the center. The manager was leaning against a pillar a few feet beyond the exit. “All right,” he said, “hand over the skirt. I knew you Forest Service guys would try to sneak it out of here.”

The Pub Was the Place

The songwriter’s line, “On State Street, that great street,” could have applied to the site of some of Madison’s zaniest antics in the 1950s just as well as it fit Chicago’s busy thoroughfare. Many University of Wisconsin students spent a lot of free time on the street that ran from the State Capitol to the lower edge of Bascom Hill on campus.

The State Street ambience was light hearted; the students and business owners who catered to them made it so. A Rennebohm drug store, a favorite place to gather for coffee and chit-chat, was called, of course, The Pharm. Creative students often chose the sidewalks outside The Pharm as places they could entertain a big audience with their hijinks. As part of one of our Sigma Nu initiation stunts, a pledge was required to stand at the busy intersection for an hour eating popcorn out of a Kotex box.

Nearby, two bookstores faced each other across the street. In the student newspaper, The University Co-op’s ads said it was “across the mall from Paul.” Paul’s Book Store gave its location as “across the loop from the Coop.” University enclaves seem to inspire inventive names as well as prose. When our son was a University of Minnesota student, he took us for a beer at “The Improper Fraction,” where U of M students hung out. The bar was nothing special, but its name struck me as memorable.

State Street bars didn’t have cutesy names, but I thought they had distinct personalities. I was not a regular in the taverns as some students were. Most regulars flunked out of UW in a semester or two. But I visited all the State Street taverns at one time or another.

The Kollege Klub, where locals and visitors mixed with students, attracted noisy, and sometimes unruly, crowds. Two of my fraternity brothers who were on the boxing team worked there part-time as bartenders. Now and then they also functioned as bouncers.

The Brathaus, a favorite hangout of law school students, had much quieter patrons who actually were interested in the food as well as the drink. The grilled “brats” would have been classified as Polish sausages anywhere else in Wisconsin, something that still mystifies me. Brathaus “brats” definitely were not on menus in Sheboygan.

The Varsity Bar was a dimly lit smaller place, where young men took serious dates for a bit of hanky-panky in the booths. Things could get very serious at the “Var Bar.” Fraternity brother Don Tubman and his steady girlfriend Sue Mickeljohn took to spending considerable time there. Don and Sue became Mr. and Mrs. Tubman after their junior years.

The Pub was something special. There, I enjoyed my first State Street beer as a 17-year-old freshman after gaining admittance with a poorly altered draft card saying the bearer was 19. All the beer bars had their special stories. Tales of events at The Pub probably could fill the pages of a lengthy book. I heard a lot of them because Jack Peters, my best Sigma Nu buddy, tended bar there for a year or more. Jeff Weir, another Sigma Nu good guy, poured suds at The Pub before signing on for an Army tour and again in 1961-62 when he returned to UW to finish up work on a degree. Weir has a good memory, and lately has been sharing a few of the better Pub stories through e-mails. He became an attorney, and has practiced law for more than 25 years in Door County.

The Pub was the scene of “phantom dates.” Whether by house rule or just an accepted rule of conduct, coeds never entered the bar alone or in groups of females only. So those who wanted admittance badly hung around outside until they found a non-threatening male walking by who would agree to escort them in. The understanding was that the man would not have to stay, and many didn’t.

The Pub was home to one of the craziest characters in Madison history. Cy Butt lived for several years in an upstairs apartment. His roommate, Bobby Hinds, was a heavyweight boxer on the UW team who also was known for strange behavior. Butt gained fame by staying enrolled as a UW student for nearly 30 years. That happened because a family will provided him with a comfortable living as long as he was a student in good standing at Madison. Accounts vary, but one holds he stayed in the Law School for the last 12 of the 30 years, before the rules were changed and he was forced to graduate.

Butt, known as the “Sage of State Street,” was good at thinking and drinking, according to a writer who knew him well. He bombarded Madison’s two newspapers with letters to the editor advancing outlandish ideas. He once fired a pistol inside his apartment, and when a Madison police officer showed up to investigate, Butt said the explosion helped him with his writing. A favorite Butt antic was to walk up State Street tipping his hat to any female he passed. A few were said to faint when they got a close look at the live mink Butt was carrying on top of his head.

I encountered Butt only once--in The Pub. He came in wearing an old gray sweater with a bulge under it. He ordered one 15-cent beer and shared it with what I thought was a cat snuggled in the sweater. Maybe it was the mink!

I no longer remember the exact number who received law degrees with him, but when Butt finally graduated in the summer of 1955 I was in summer school and clearly recall reading the news. The Daily Cardinal headline proclaimed something like: Cy Butt and 87 Others Graduate From Law School.

The Pub was a bar and grill. The menu was interesting. Weir recalled serving Yummies (hamburgers) and Chummies (cheeseburgers). He said a Chummie with Swiss cheese was known as a Swummy. Fritos were an order of “Vegetables,” because you had to have them for a balanced meal.

Weir said the regulars at the Pub loved to sit near the front windows, park their beers on a ledge, and tap on the window panes when an especially attractive coed walked by. One regular noticed holes in the metal sidewalk elevator cover that was opened when kegs of beer were delivered. He welded a half dollar to a bolt and attached it to the metal panel. Gales of laughter swept through the bar whenever an embarrassed girl realized she couldn’t pick up the coin after bending over to grab it, and the regulars were watching.

Rumor had it that some student bartenders contributed to sort of a Pub welfare program for thirsty, but poorly financed, buddies. An early version had guests plunking a couple of nickels and dimes loudly on the bar when the regular bartender wasn’t watching. Their pal behind the bar would serve an 85-cent pitcher for the “wholesale price” payment of 30 or 40 cents, and help cover up the ruse with a loud, “Thank you,” as he rang up the sale.

Later, The Pub’s owner installed a cash register tape mechanism to thwart any conniving by student bartenders. Some were said to occasionally beat that system with an ingenious scheme to ring up receipts in a way that balanced the till and the tape totals, yet helped a few special friends satisfy their thirsts at reduced rates. Most transactions at The Pub, however, were known to be strictly on the up and up.

The Pub was the place to be on St. Patrick’s Day. Green beer flowed after the bartenders injected vegetable dye into the kegs. A lot flowed—Weir said as many as 35 half barrels were emptied over the three-day weekend.

When I visited The Pub about 40 years ago as an old grad the floor spaces where the regulars once positioned themselves to observe pretty girls walking down State Street were occupied by pinball machines. I quietly turned around and left. It just wasn’t the place to be anymore. I could envision the ghost of Cy Butt frowning.