by Matt Weiland
Last year, my Aunt Mary and Uncle Bill (also Willard Walker) sold their house of more than forty years in Racine to move to the twenty-third floor of one of downtown Milwaukee’s few high-rise condominiums overlooking the lake, to be near their children and grandchildren. They were the last Walkers, after 133 years in Racine, to go. It was not a huge surprise, since Walker Forge—the business my grandfather, Gordon, started in 1950, which was passed on to my uncle and now to his son (Willard Walker again, or Young Bill)—moved the last of its plant operations out of Racine in 1992 to a 280,000-square-foot facility in Clintonville, near Green Bay. There, around 275 employees use 850-ton to 4,000-ton mechanical presses to produce such forgings as gear blanks and wheel spindles used by John Deere and Caterpillar.
Before last year, I hadn’t seen Racine since a gray day in January, 1996, when I attended my grandmother’s funeral at the Episcopal church on a deserted Main Street (the same 142-year-old church made of cream brick where I was baptized, my parents were married, grandparents married, grandfather baptized, and so on and so forth). Determined to fill in some of the missing pieces of the story of both the city and my family, I flew back to Milwaukee, and on a sunny November morning, I headed south with my mother as my guide and my baby daughter in tow. We exited I-94 (the United States’s northernmost east-west interstate that runs from Montana to Michigan) at Hwy. 20, a road whose progression in the course of ten miles to downtown Racine tells a story in and of itself. It begins in the heart of farm country; small houses, with old trees beside them, barns, and fields line the divided highway’s roadside. A few miles along, a small billboard nestled in leafy branches shows a closeup photograph of a pretty, if weary teenage girl with the words, DEPRESSION HAS MANY FACES. RECOVERY IS POSSIBLE, a resonant slogan in a city that was the second largest manufacturing center in the state and now has its highest unemployment rate, at 10 percent.
The farmland gives way to business parks and car dealerships. Then the inevitable strip malls begin unfurling in a dim parade of Starbucks and Oodles of Noodles and the like. We pass an ur-pawnshop called American Coin, and Washington Park, where my mother learned to play golf, and whose green hills were sculpted over massive, low earthen burial mounds produced by the Indians known simply as the Effigy Mound culture a thousand years ago—among them a 130-foot-long panther. The only undisturbed Indian mounds left in Racine are modest ones among the settlers’ and their descendants’ graves in Racine’s Mound Cemetery, established in 1852, adjacent to the park. After a residential area, we enter West Racine, with its bars and kringle bakeries (kringle is the super-sweet Danish pastry ring that Racine FedExes around the country at Christmastime). My mother points out Schmitt’s Music Store, where she used to walk after school to take French horn lessons—still in business, if a little worn at the edges—then we bump over a railroad track to the shining Golden Rondelle Theater that was part of the Johnson Wax Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, and where a short documentary called To Be Alive! is projected in a curved band around the room.
We have arrived in time for the weekly tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings that were commissioned by H. F. Johnson, known as Hib, the third and most colorful of the five generations to lead the S. C. Johnson Company (makers of such utility closet staples as Off!, Windex, Glade, Raid, and Pledge). As we enter the administration building’s carport area, a familiar claustrophobia that I remember from visiting Wright’s home, Taliesin, west of Madison, presses down on my head. Then, suddenly, as we step into the “The Great Workroom,” the two-storey-high ceiling springs up like the sky itself, supported lightly by tapered, “dendriform” columns (radical in their time for being narrower at the bottom than the top). The still-functional National Historic Landmark is a peaceful, rigorous, and delightful building—delightful for the apparent mania it must have taken to create it. A pizza delivery man appears at the front desk with five boxes, coincidentally in Wright’s signature colors of beige and “Cherokee red.”
When I was growing up, the Johnsons were peripheral figures—my grandparents’ neighbors and fellow denizens of Lake Owen where we all spent holidays. Now “The Wax Company,” as it’s called locally, and its offshoots dominate Racine. Even a quick drive around town suggests that if the family, with their businesses and philanthropy, were to up and leave (which they seem to be far from doing), it would be the end of the place once and for all. Main Street alone is home to a Johnson Bank, the Johnson Outdoors headquarters, and the Racine Art Museum, a contemporary jewel box housed in a reimagined bank building that is the near single-handed work of Karen Johnson Boyd, a bright-eyed octogenarian and passionate collector, who laughingly told me her friends call her an “art fart.”
In the basement archives of the Racine Heritage Museum, between frequent trips to the bubbler (Wisconsin’s finest linguistic contribution, meaning drinking fountain), I pore over articles in manila folders labeled “Walker,” “Walker Manufacturing,” and “Walker Forge.” I learn that my great-greatgrandfather William Walker was the son of immigrants from Yorkshire, England, who settled in Ohio by way of New Orleans and St. Charles. He met his wife Margaret Goff (also the daughter of immigrants from Yorkshire) at a Universalist Church Convention in Buffalo, and the two of them moved to Racine in 1874—thirty-three years after it became an incorporated village, and twenty-six years after President Polk made Wisconsin the 30th state—when the area was beginning to change from agricultural to industrial, producing threshing machines, baskets, and boots.
William worked in the real estate office of a relative, and as a postal clerk. Later he owned a shoe store where his twin sons Willard and Warren worked. In 1908, he and his grown sons gained a controlling interest in Economy Spring, a wagon spring manufacturing company, changed the name to Walker Manufacturing, and began producing car jacks and, later, mufflers. In 1950, my grandfather, then vice-president of sales (the family lost controlling interest in the late 1930s), started his own company, Walker Forge, with sixteen workers in a neglected factory in West Racine, a company that never saw the success that Walker Manufacturing did, but that has weathered the years, privately held, and even flourished in recent times.
In this fly-by tour, I was looking for a clue to what had once been, an idea I had gleaned less from stories I’d heard (there aren’t a lot in circulation) than from time spent at that third point on the long, skinny, obtuse triangle, Lake Owen, where Racine’s captains of industry and their descendants have migrated seasonally for the better part of the last hundred years. At first, it was for summer fishing trips; then in the fall for hunting deer and “upland game” such as pheasant, partridge, and ruffed grouse; and finally in the winter for cross-country and even downhill skiing, thanks to an alpine resort called Telemark, built in the 1940s, around an unlikely 350-foot hill.
The Racine decampments started about a century ago when businessmen were regularly invited to the “Horlick fishing camp,” located in a small bay where bald eagles like to roost, at the north end of the ninety-foot-deep, nine-mile-long lake, not by the Horlick brothers (among the first internationally known Racinians for inventing malted milk, one of America’s first processed foods), but by a subsequent owner from Racine named Al Barnes. An old photo I saw recently shows a group of men on a porch at the camp being shaved by a visiting barber with a straight razor, and that the great Northwoods—the dense and dappled forests of hemlock, fir, pine, aspen, birch, maple, and oak that I’ve known for nearly the last forty years—were little more than a collection of stumps and scrappy seedlings.
The Rust-Owen Lumber Company had already done its work, cutting down the virgin white pine forests around the lake, starting in 1882, floating the trees down the lake to a dam at the north end, and sending them by sluiceways to the mill pond in Drummond (named for the company treasurer) before the timber was sent out by rail. In 1930, when the operation sent its last tree through the mill, 80,000 acres, and almost 1.3 billion feet of wood, had been cut down in the area. Lake Owen’s shores w
ere lumbered out earlier though, and so the company began selling land to private individuals and to the government, which in turn established the Chequamegon National Forest. The first family to build a house after the Owens themselves were the Sturgises from St. Paul, one of whom apparently palled around with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then came the Racinites (as the Sturgis matriarch supposedly called them, pronouncing it Rassinite with a little hiss of irritation): the Johnsons of Johnson Wax, which back then was still about making “any floor a danceable surface;” then the Battens, whose company Twin Disc made clutches that wouldn’t “pop the farmer off his tractor,” starting in 1918, according to third-generation CEO Michael Batten. The Battens sold to their friends the Erskines (whose Racine Hydraulics manufactured power saws) on one side, and the Modines (of radiator fame) on the other. Last to join the camp in the woods, in 1932, was my great-grandfather, Willard Walker.
In 2004, when I was pregnant with our first child, there were two things I was absolutely certain of. One was that she was a girl, and two was, if by chance I was wrong, there was no way I could name him Owen. But when the boy arrived he was nobody but Owen—the sweet roundness of his head, the lake-blueness of his eyes, even the first sound he made, a nice full, “O!” My husband and I tried out Eamon, but it was too complicated to spell, and our connection to Ireland is tenuous. We flipped through pages of the baby-name book in the hospital room while our checkout time loomed, until I looked up and asked, “Can we name him Owen?” When I had ruled it out months before, it was because of an unspoken, seemingly irresolvable rift among the older generation that meant I hadn’t been to the lake in thirteen years, since I was twenty-one. Before, I thought naming my son Owen would be a painful reminder of that, but here he was, pure joy, and so Owen he was.
When he heard the name, my uncle readily offered us the house for ten days in August, and five weeks later, my husband, son, and I flew to Minneapolis and drove four hours to the lake to meet my family there. The car trip I’ve always known is from Milwaukee. The road from Minneapolis is less exciting. We passed a number of depressed Wisconsin towns, ho-hum farmland, and plain-Jane little lakes. But then we got to Hayward, the heart of this “playground of the Middle West,” according to the WPA Guide, where:
Girls in shorts, sun-blacked youths in slacks, women in khaki shirts, and pink-faced men mopping their bald heads, jostle on the streets; occasionally a couple of lanky backwoodsmen slink diffidently along the edge of the sidewalks, thinking perhaps of the days when only Hell, Hurley, and Cumberland could match Hayward for hard-fisted bravado.
There’s a Wal-Mart there now, unsurprisingly, but also an organic food store. Turk’s Inn Supper Club, with an Aladdin genie on its sign, is still there, as is the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, with its remarkable two-storey-high fiberglass muskie—you can climb up the interior to a balcony in its mouth. At Cable, the nearest town to Lake Owen, the nearly 100-year-old grocery store, Rondeau’s, was unrecognizably modernized, and the crossroads looked different, but soon enough we were on Lake Owen Drive with its nauseating twists and turns through low forested hills surrounding the lake, until we turned onto the familiar crunch of the gravel driveway, and finally there was the house itself. I walked right through it to the porch, which, because of its perch on the hill, looked through the treetops to the setting sun glittering on the lake, as big swipes of orange and pink glowed above the dark treeline. There was Loon Island in the middle, and all the marshmallow-sticky memories of cookouts and skinny dipping, chicken pox and snowstorms, capsized sailboats and marathon swims to neighboring docks, came flooding back.
Swimming through the silky, cool water the next day with little waves lapping at my face, for the first time as a real adult, I was aware more than ever that this place of extraordinary beauty—unpopulated as it is, in an era consumed by development—is inflected by a deep form of privilege, and that it is pure chance that I was born into it. At the same time it is part of who I am. My parents, Robert and Polly Beal, met on a porch here in the summer of 1965, and the story goes that when a few days later my twenty-three-year-old mother navigated the boat home in a thick fog, my Bostonian father thought, “This is the girl for me.” Forty-three years later, the young man who was transferred by Pan Am to work in Milwaukee, “knowing only,” he confesses now, “that it was one of the Twin Cities,” is still there.
When I think about this coming summer, the first where my four-year-old son will truly be able to take in the place, I wonder, Why is it so important that we make terrariums from moss and lichens called British Soldiers, or that we go kayaking in the early morning when the lake is still glassy? Because without the pileated woodpeckers and puffball mushrooms, the boat rides and the Northern Lights, and without this sense that due west of New York is a whole world that grew me up, living at the center of intellectual thought and culture wouldn’t mean the same thing to me. My mother’s older sister, Suzanne McNear, another ex-pat Wisconsin writer, sent me an email about my family and our state recently:
When I went away to boarding school in Connecticut people were fascinated to learn where I was from. Wisconsin was never entirely clear to them, as a place. It was the same as or very near Michigan or Minnesota. Yes? And when I asked my father why people made fun of the Midwest he said, “We are the heart of America. The roots. The producers.” Later, he wrote, “Once some years ago at a dinner in New York I found myself the only manufacturer in a group of ten, perhaps twelve other men. All of them spoke as though life away from Wall Street did not exist, and yet, I said to myself, and yet, where would they be without us? Without men such as myself, there would be no Wall Street.”
It’s not just that there would be no Wall Street. For me, New York without Wisconsin would be like having a head with no heart, and my guess is that some part of this idea is the source of the word “heartland,” even if the state is hard to locate for people from the coasts. It’s true that I don’t live there and even that it’s difficult for me to imagine moving back, but I know that without Wisconsin’s ballast I’d be lost.
WYOMING
CAPITAL Cheyenne
ENTERED UNION 1890 (44th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From a Delaware Indian word meaning “mountains and valleys alternating”
NICKNAME EqualityState
MOTTO “Equal rights”
RESIDENTS Wyomingite
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1
STATE BIRD western meadowlark
STATE FLOWER Indian paintbrush
STATE TREE cottonwood
STATE SONG “Wyoming”
LAND AREA 97,100 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Fremont Co., 58 mi. ENE of Lander
POPULATION 509,294
WHITE 92.1%
BLACK 0.8%
AMERICAN INDIAN 2.3%
ASIAN 0.6%
HISPANIC/LATINO 6.4%
UNDER 18 26.1%
65 AND OVER 11.7%
MEDIAN AGE 36.2
WYOMING
Alexandra Fuller
A cowboy I met—well, now he fixes washing machines and installs stoves and has gut-rot and hemorrhoids from all the bad coffee he drinks staying awake to do it, so I don’t guess he’s much of a cowboy anymore—told me how once he came to see the whole history of Wyoming in the course of a single cattle drive. He told me it was hard to explain exactly how it happened. He said, “It’s like how the smell of branding smoke in your nose brings on the taste of whiskey in your mouth. Do you know about that?”
I said that I did, because I do.
He said, “Well, it’s something like that.” Then he told me if I didn’t want my washing machine breaking down anymore I had to check the pants pockets before I did laundry and it was amazing, he said, how few people did because not only was all this loose change clogging up the works of my machine but that was seventy-five bucks right there to have him come all the way out to this cabin in the middle of nowhere to tell me something my mother should have set me straight on a long time ago.
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br /> Our cabin, with the washing machine so full of loose change it makes a sound like Las Vegas every time I turn it on, is tucked up here near the western edge of Sublette County, which, in turn, is inclined toward the west middle of Wyoming. Sublette has a population of less than six thousand people and, when I got here, it had no stop light. Until recently, the people of Sublette didn’t need a robot to tell them when to stop or go. And they didn’t need the government or the cops or just about anyone else to tell them how to live or die. Freedom—like the kind you used to find in Sublette County—isn’t the kind you send other men’s boys off to die for. It’s the kind you die for yourself.
So.
I told the cowboy-turned-washing-machine-repair man that his stories were worth it.
He laughed and said he didn’t guess anyone’s stories were worth that much, given they came free with any campfire or barstool.
“Tell me about how you came to see the whole history of Wyoming in a flash then,” I said. “I bet that’s worth a buck or two.”