CHAPTER FIVE
Chilton was one of the small towns in that part of eastern central Wisconsin. It was a farm town surrounded by other farm towns—towns named Kiel, New Holstein, and Hilbert, among others. New Holstein was the closest town, about six miles away. The big businesses in Chilton were the K&T feed company and the canning factory, which did a lot of peas. Wisconsin wasn’t just corn, you know.
Connie grew up on Main Street in Chilton, about ten blocks from the canning factory. This may not sound like much in the way of news, but the location was a boon for the kids who grew up on that street. You see, most of the farm trucks would travel down Main to get to the canning factory at the end of the street, and when the peas were harvested in the middle of summer, truck after truck would drive by the house on the way to the factory. So laden were they with peapods still stuck to the vines that clumps of vines would fall off the trucks all the time.
It was easy pickings for a kid quick and careful enough to dash into the street to get them before a car squashed them. Sometimes the clumps were as big as a bushel’s worth and always yielded the sweetest freshest pods of sweet peas anyone could ever hope for. I know this for a fact because I was one of those kids who ran into the street to get them every summer while visiting my grandparents, Connie’s parents. I did just what my mom had done when she was a kid. I was the second generation of pea pickers who gorged on peas fallen off the cannery-bound trucks.
To this day, I can remember sitting on the porch with mom, discovering the joy of splitting a single fat pod lengthwise with a thumbnail, right down its dark green fibrous seam, then pulling the bright green halves open and marveling at the perfectly round peas that were not much bigger than a pencil eraser, each attached to a tiny stem. Like everyone else with an open pod in hand and the close-in promise of mouthwatering sweetness, the anticipation was keen. At that point, there was nothing left to do but run a sharp thumbnail from end to end on the inside of the pod, thereby separating every pea from its stem, and then pop them into a waiting mouth or lap or, for later, a bowl.
Not much on this earth tasted better than fresh peas off a farmer’s truck. I can experience everything about that memory as if I were right there this very minute, sitting as close to her as possible without officially being in her lap. Oh yeah. Sitting on the porch steps on Main Street eating fresh, sweet peas right from the pod while waiting for the next truck to drop some more was a mighty fun way for a kid to spend a summer afternoon in Chilton, where summers could be spent in perfect innocence. Bad things just didn’t happen to anyone in Chilton; it was so perfect.
Chilton was a great town to grow up in, an all-American small town; every one of the two thousand residents would have said as much. Above all, Chilton was an idyllic farm town, although it had enough commerce to have a main street that ran for almost ten blocks, lined on both sides with storefronts.
Connie’s family owned the town’s only movie theatre, where her mom played the piano for the silent films until the talkies took over. Connie learned to read at the silent movies before she even went to school by watching the movies with all their subtitles, over and over again. New Holstein and the other nearby towns didn’t have a movie house, so this one drew crowds of movie lovers from all over. This is another reason people in these small towns knew so many people in the neighboring towns. Connie’s parents also owned the livery, which took care of many of the town’s carriages and a constantly increasing number of automobiles when Connie was very little. Of course by her teen years, the back half of the thirties, cars were everywhere, and horses were becoming uncommon, although not entirely out of the picture.
Even so, Chilton was a farm town because it was in the middle of farmland—rich, rich farmland, fertile and perfect for crops and perfect for dairy cows. The town’s people didn’t think of themselves as farmers, but they all knew farmers, of course, and farmers in that particular part of the world were pretty well off. By 1946, there were rumors floating around that some of them were even rich—really rich—but true to their German heritage, no one really talked about money or let anyone know too much about what they had. Let’s say that no one was ostentatious about their wealth, farmers or not. But let there be no doubt that Wisconsin farmers had a good life working the land and didn’t have trouble sending their kids to college if they wanted to. A lot of topped-off silos took care of tuition easily enough, but even so, many children stayed and built their father’s farms into bigger, better, and more modern farms. Kids, like Connie, who grew up in and around Chilton and knew the Depression years firsthand, understood the value of a dollar, accepted hard work as a means to accomplish something, placed an inestimable value on faith in God, and nurtured an optimism that life would always get better, although it probably wouldn’t come easily.
Beyond the neighboring towns, about twenty-five miles to the north of Chilton, was Appleton, a good sized city for Wisconsin, perched at the top of Lake Winnebago, straddling the Fox River. Appleton was a city that was built off of the surrounding paper mills and mill towns. That’s where Carl grew up, the youngest of four boys in a family that owned one of the bigger pulp mills for three generations. Fond du Lac was another good sized city in Wisconsin, and it was located on the other end of Lake Winnebago, about forty miles to the south. Founded as a French fur settlement, it’s French for “bottom of the lake” or “foot of the lake.” Manitowoc was to the east, on Lake Michigan. The three shoreline cities formed a triangle, and Chilton pretty much fell right into the middle of that triangle. What about Oshkosh, you ask? Well, by gosh, Oshkosh was on the other side of Lake Winnebago from Chilton. I had to say that, in case you were wondering, by gosh.
Carl loved Lake Winnebago and practically lived on it one summer in his teens while he and his friends became the first kids in Appleton to water ski, which was a new sport at the time, one that was invented in Minnesota in 1922 by a couple of snow skiers. He loved the water and took to waterskiing because it appealed to the daredevil in him and helped him set himself apart from his older brothers.
Carl didn’t want to be like his brothers, who planned to work for their father, the owner of one of the big paper mills. He didn’t want to follow them into the family business. He had other plans—plans that actually spun out of another lake activity: ice fishing. It wasn’t the fishing that Carl liked—long hours sitting in the cold hoping to pull a fish out of a hole cut in the middle of an ice hut floor had no appeal for him. Nope, not enough excitement there.
As a boy, Carl loved being out there on the winter ice because he loved the ice shacks. Their simplicity reminded him of tree houses, which he loved as well. He found himself studying the various designs of the fishing shacks through impromptu visits to them. He knocked on doors fearlessly just to get invited inside, so curious was he to see how these small buildings might be made to work better in an inhospitable environment. It was this initial exposure to understanding buildings in the context of the environment that would be the basis for his devotion to Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of organic architecture, which suggested igloos would be ideal on the frozen water in the winter, but of course, that was only one possibility. By the time he was sixteen, he wanted nothing more in life than to be an architect, a love that he told his friends arose from his time exploring the ice huts on Lake Winnebago.
Lake Winnebago is only a little bigger than Lake Tahoe. But unlike that very deep lake in California, Lake Winnebago is only twenty-one feet deep at its deepest point and averages only fifteen feet, shallow enough almost everywhere to see the bottom. With a lack of depth and currents, the lake’s surface freezes quickly for a few months in the typically cold winters of Wisconsin. In very cold years, the ice is so thick that it sometimes has supported as many as five thousand cars and trucks at a time, all parked on the lake ice alongside their owners’ fishing huts or going to or from them. Indeed, the lake seemed particularly shallow to water skiers when they skied over the rusting wrecks of cars and trucks that had ventured over ice that hadn’t
been thick enough to hold them while trying to get to and from the fishing huts on less frigid years.
Carl never lost his love for waterskiing. He didn’t have much time for that, however, with the postwar rush in commerce and all the design work his architectural business was bringing in. His service in the Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific had taught him a lot about design, structure, and construction, but he didn’t like to think about the war. He preferred the memories of his childhood, particularly the last time he water skied.
It was a Saturday afternoon five years earlier, before he had enlisted. It was July 12th, the birthday of his childhood best friend, Stewart Gardner. Stewart’s parents had a big house on Winnebago’s northwestern shoreline on Hunter’s Point Road, a cushy street in Neenah where the houses ran like a string of pearls. Carl and Stewart had been waterskiing together off their dock since their early teens. After every spin out on the lake, Carl would laugh as he recalled seeing cars, sometimes one after another, submerged under his skis. It was even possible to see hundreds of them in one day of skiing. They were often no more than shadows, like blurred images of boulders, sitting on the bottom, like miniature sunken ships, all given up by their owners, never to be retrieved. Left to rot away, all were eventually reduced to rusty skeletons on the bottom of Lake Winnebago.
The graveyard of sunken cars and trucks after thirty years of people driving them on the ice, determined to get to the best fishing address on the ice, was substantial and, according to anyone who had driven on the ice, understandable. It was a risk every fisherman was willing to take. One minute the driver would be rolling down the ice roads on the surface of the lake, feeling all safe and secure, steering a vehicle slowly across the ice, and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, a crack and a plunk! The car would fall through the ice, gone forever. Sometimes it took the driver with it—not every driver got out of the vehicle in time and made it back to the arms of good Samaritans who were waiting for him at the edge of the hole. Most got out of the water, but some weren’t lucky, plain and simple. And, by gosh, just like that, a life snuffed! It happened a lot more often than people liked to think about. Nobody wants to remember accidents that took someone’s life, especially the life of a loved one.
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