A New Golden Age of Bizarre Behavior and Criminal Invention....Only In Wisconsin

A Blogger from Illinois has been keeping track of the increasingly bizarre behavior of Wisconsinites. He believes that we are embarking on a golden age not seen since the days of Ed Gein. I have to agree.
In light of last week's Penis Glueing Incident, it's clear that our medieval villagers are strutting their stuff for the world to see. The results are both amusing and pathetic. Read here.

PS I would love nothing more than to write an in-depth post on the passing of Les Paul,but my work schedule continues to be full with no signs of letting up. I'll be back when I can...hopefully with something better than what I just posted. In the meantime, here is a great post about Les Paul and what he meant to the world.

Oscar Meyer Weinermobile Crashes Into Home Fun Facts

A few things everyone should know when reading today's #1 news item...Oscar Crashes Into Home.

#1 The Weinermobile was designed by THE industrial designer of the 20th century, Milwaukee's own Brooks Stevens (more here).

#2 The first person to play the role of "Little Oscar" and the first to drive the first Oscar Meyer Weinermobile was rural Watertown's Meinhardt Raabe, better known as the Coroner of Munchkintown from the classic film "The Wizard of Oz" (more here).

#3 The Oscar Meyer plant in Madison's east side is a symbol of that city's nearly forgotten past as somewhat of a blue collar town. But that was long ago.

#4 Todays big news from Wisconsin....Oscar Meyer Weinermobile Crashes into Home.

Wisconsin Death Trip....the movie

This film was a sensation on the international film festival circuit. Europeans seem get a kick out of our dark side. Let me just say that Wisconsin Death Trip is simply the record of the effects of a major economic depression on a mostly foreign born population during a time (1890's) when there were no safety nets. In the wake of this depression - the explosive growth of social reform and the progressive movement.

Happy Birthday!......... Les Paul turns 94

Les Paul - inventor, electric guitar pioneer, master showman, father of the multi-track recorder and godfather of 70's hitmaker and fellow Wisconsinite, Steve Miller - turns 94 today. Check out his site....
http://www.lespaulonline.com/index.html

The King of Comedy....Eddie Cline

Eddie Cline was one of the greatest comedy directors in motion picture history. During a long and prolific career, he played a key role in the best work of Buster Keaton and W C Fields. Today, he is a forgotten man. He was born Kenosha (a town famous for being the hometown of another director, Orson Welles). In his late teens, Cline migrated west and began a career in Hollywood as one of Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops. As a cop, he took his orders from Chief of Keystone Police, La Crosse native and Wisconsinology logo icon, Ford Sterling. Cline, a natural comic with an incredible sense of timing, was soon assisting Sennett as a co-director and gag writer. By early 1916, he was directing two reel comedy shorts - the life blood of the Keystone operation. And then he met Buster Keaton. The two became inseperable. As a comedy writing and directing team they made history. Cline co-wrote and co-directed seventeen of Buster Keaton's shorts, a series of timeless classics that stand up today as the best comedy films of silent era - The Playhouse, The Paleface, The Boat, Cops,,The Three Ages and so many more. At the dawn of the sound era, Cline began a decade long association with W.C. Fields. In 1940, he would direct Field's penultimate film, The Bank Dick. Eddie worked constantly through the 40's and well into the television era of the 50's. The picture below, a directors ad from the 20's, best sums up Eddie's daily state of being...

From the Life archives, Shemp Howard hands Eddie a phony Oscar.

At the top of the page - Eddie and Buster Keaton take a break during the filming of "Cops" in 1922.

Pabst, Miller, Blatz, Schlitz...... in black and white

Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO: The Guggenheim and Falling Water

These are amazing, and, may I add...it's about time. A nice tribute to the world's greatest architect - just one of Wisconsin's endless line of brilliantly raging egomaniacs.




The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets. The LEGO Group and Adam Reed Tucker of Brickstructures, Inc. officially introduced the LEGO Architecture line in 2008. The line currently consists of six buildings – now including two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous and recognizable buildings, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and “Fallingwater.”
Both exclusive Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO Architecture sets contain booklets that feature traditional building instructions along with exclusive archival historical material and photographs of each iconic building.

Get yours here...$55 shipped.

The Rocketeers...Madison West Trumps Nation in Rocketry Challenge

This makes me happier than any Packer victory, and almost happier than most Badger victories. Last year Wisconsin hosted the first ever
rocket race and the city of Sheboygan is already a future NASA spaceport site.
After their graduation, we'll probably lose these kids to other states. Like I always say,"Wisconsin provides the talent, ideas and brain power that keeps those other 49 pitiful excuses for states running."
Of course, the ones who stay home drink themselves into a stupor,go pioneer on us, and commit the weirdest acts of insanity and abnormality ever recorded in US history. But I digress,read on...

West Rocketeers Win National Event
A team from Madison West High School took first place at the Seventh Annual Team America Rocketry Challenge Saturday, taking on the title of national champion.
The four-member team won the rocket competition after spending months perfecting their rocket design. The Team America Rocketry Challenge kicked off last September with hundreds of teams from 45 states and the District of Columbia vying for a chance to compete at the finals held today outside of Washington, D.C. with the top 100 teams.
“Hard work, perseverance, teamwork, and custom electronics are the reasons our rocket performed well today,” said Ben Winokur, team member. He added a key component of their rocket’s success was, “a very intricate active parachute ejection on ascent.”

The team, one of three from Madison West High School, logged the winning score of 20.54. Each point represents a deviation from altitude and time aloft targets, so the lower the score, the better. Festus High School from Festus, Mo., took second place with a score of 25.92 while New Site High School from New Site, Ms., placed third with a score of 36.3
This year, student teams were asked to design, build and launch a model rocket to an altitude of 750 feet with a flight time of 45 seconds and a raw-egg payload situated horizontally to mimic the position of an astronaut. The egg had to return to earth unbroken in order for the launch to qualify.
The winning team will compete this week for international glory in a fly-off against the winners of the UK Aerospace Youth Rocketry Challenge from Royal Liberty School in Essex.
“The students today were absolutely outstanding,”Blakey said. “Each and every team demonstrated a superb grasp of the fundamentals of rocketry using physics, math and teamwork to launch their rocket and spur a terrific competition. This is an encouraging sign that there is a promising pipeline of future employees for our industry.”
The Madison West High School team wins a trip to the International Paris Air Show in June, sponsored for the fourth year by Raytheon Company, a major supporter of the competition. The winning team shares a prize pool of more than $60,000 with other top finishers. Lockheed Martin Corporation provides $5,000 scholarships to each of the top three teams, and teams also will receive an invitation from NASA to participate in its Student Launch Initiative, an advanced rocketry program.
Members of the Madison West High School team are: Jacqui German, Tenzin Sonam, John Schoech and Ben Winokur. Their mentor is Dr. Pavel Pinkas, an engineer, and their teacher is Chris Hager, who teaches biology. The team of high school juniors was sponsored by the Madison Wisconsin community through fundraisers held by the Madison West Rocket Club. The Club opted to raise contributions in the low-tech manner of raking leaves.

Frank Lloyd Wright Lectures Disney Artists...February 25, 1939

The best analysis of art, film, animation and music I've ever read. Our Mr. Lloyd Wright delivers
once again...he even admits to being surprised by the sometime intelligence of the unwashed masses. Read on...http://www.mouseplanet.com/8788/Why_Frank_Lloyd_Wright_Disliked_Fantasia

Thanks to mouseplanet.com

Only In Milwaukee...."Dookies"

Only in Milwaukee, a city well known for it's unique slang, are Nike Air Force One shoes called..."Dookies".

John Muir Shows His Inner Pee Wee Herman...

This is John Muir's clockwork desk. He built it while attending the University of Wisconsin in 1862. "I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term. I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study."
Muir had a way with gadgets. Among his many creations was as "early-rising bed" - an alarm clock device that would raise the sleeper to an upright position at the appointed hour.

John Birch Society Still Fights The Cold War, Socialists, The Federal Reserve and Themselves.

Hey everybody, I'm back and I've collected quite a pile of Wisconsinology related items to blog about. To begin with, I Found this article in the Appleton Post Crescent www.postcrescent.com. It's a good follow up to an earlier Birch post featured in this blog. I love comedy. When it comes to big laughs and endearing pratfalls, the Birchers rule. A toast: May they live long and may their conspiracies multiply...and most of all, may they remain as they are - utterly harmless.

John Birch Society members still fight the Cold War
Political organization brought its headquarters to Fox Cities 20 years ago this spring

By Ed Lowe • Post-Crescent staff writer
GRAND CHUTE — The young couple sipped chocolate milkshakes in a front-window booth at Culver's, unaware that the low-slung brown office building across the street was command central in the war to save America from a godless conspiracy. By summer, the leafy lower branches of a maple tree will obscure some of the building's silver letters, but on this spring evening the sign was clearly visible. "The John Birch Society," it read. Never heard of it, the couple told a reporter. "Does it ring a bell to you, Staci?" Jesse Van Dera, 22, of Freedom, asked the woman seated across from him. Staci Bogenschutz, 21, also of Freedom, smiled and shook her head. Fifty years after the John Birch Society was founded to thwart a feared communist takeover of the U.S. government, the politically conservative organization's once-high national profile has eroded to little more than a historical footnote.
"My impression is that it is largely ignored (today), having been superseded on the right by think tanks on the one hand and neo-Nazi groups and conservative religious groups on the other," said Pamela Oliver, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor who in the 1980s co-authored a study of media coverage of the John Birch Society. Though the organization has continued fighting communism even as terrorism has supplanted the Cold War as America's primary security concern, Birchers are prone to battle each other nearly as often as perceived enemies of the United States. Declining membership, financial struggle, political irrelevance and even internal insurgencies that suggest conspiracy theorists themselves are not immune from conspiracy have greatly diminished the organization's place on the American landscape.

But 20 years ago this spring, when the John Birch Society moved its headquarters to the current location west of Appleton, home of then-chief executive officer G. Allen Bubolz, the group was hard to overlook — its unassuming small-town base notwithstanding. In Grand Chute, the society's new headquarters shared a hometown with one of its best-known heroes, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Like McCarthy, the Birchers achieved notoriety for an obsession with exposing communist infiltrators during the Cold War. The organization is named for John Birch, a missionary and Army Air Force surveillance officer killed by communists in China 10 days after the end of World War II, making him the first American casualty of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the John Birch Society branded President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, as a "dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy." Years later, the group derided President Ronald Reagan, also a Republican, as a "lackey" of the perceived communist conspiracy.

Communist agents infiltrated or manipulated every level of the American government, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch claimed.

Art Thompson, the organization's 70-year-old chief executive officer, believes the John Birch Society saved America. Thompson, a widower turned newlywed in March, possesses a deep voice, a hearty laugh and a genuine fear that democracy poses a fundamental threat to the American Way.
"If it hadn't been for the John Birch Society, the United States, as we know it, would no longer exist," he said. "John Q. Public has no perception of that because we fought so many battles behind the scenes. It would have be a more controlled society, a less prosperous society. We probably would have lost the Constitution already."

Thompson, who became chief executive officer after a purge of other key Birchers in 2005, has a head full of secrets he is sworn to protect. "We don't want to let the enemy know our strengths or our weaknesses," he said. "The enemy" includes communists, socialists and most federal agencies, which Birchers would dismantle if they could.

"The progressive income tax? That was a communist plan," Thompson said. "The centralization of credit in the hands of the state, that's the Federal Reserve."
Birchers maintain that both measures were taken without the authority granted by the Constitution. Democracy too, they argue, represents a corruption of the founding fathers' intentions and a recipe for mob rule.

The subterranean passageway linking the John Birch Society's headquarters to its research and publications center stretches 72 feet. The eastern wall of the corridor features 48 framed photographs, 37 are black and white. All the photos show the organization's late founder, Robert Welch, the candy-company magnate who in December 1958 rallied 11 businessmen to join the counterinsurgency he would lead. Current President John F. McManus, 74, the society's featured spokesman for four decades, said its influence has never been greater, thanks largely to the Internet. But influence alone doesn't pay the bills. "When we say 'growing influence,' we'd like to say that it is all translating into a strong growth in membership, but it's not," McManus said. McManus now is halfway through a 45-city speaking tour targeting Federal Reserve monetary policies and knows the pitch by heart. "The combination of the government and the Federal Reserve are destroying the dollar and setting us up for world currency, world control, world government," he said.

The motive?

"Power," he said. "History is filled with people who wanted power over mankind."
For its members, like David Stertz, 38, of Clintonville, a mechanical engineer at Metso Paper in Appleton, knowledge of the great conspiracy is simply a fact of life.
"I've been working here since '96, so everyone here knows if something sounds alarming coming from stranger, it's not alarming when it's coming from me," Stertz said. " 'It's just David talking.' They're used to it, I guess."
But for all his vigilance, Stertz is among a dwindling breed. The John Birch Society's rigid organizational structure, featuring top-to-bottom communication lines, has undermined its ability to grow, Oliver said, citing research gathered in the 1980s. The structure the John Birch Society used then was of the type used by clandestine groups seeking maximum security. It stifled interaction and coordination opportunities among Birch agents in the field, she said.
"It's hard to mobilize large numbers of people when you don't know whom you're supposed to be working with," Oliver said.
Chip Berlet, the senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a think tank near Boston that observes right-wing groups, said the John Birch Society remains despite its resistance to stray from its founder's playbook. "As far as external indications go, it looks like they're still moving forward with their agenda of proving to the American people that a giant conspiracy controls all world history," said Berlet, who has studied the John Birch Society for 30 years.

In 1989, as staffers at the former Birch headquarters near Boston prepared for the move to the Fox Cities, Berlet stopped by. Berlet identified himself as an archivist, he said, and asked for the chance to poke through the discarded printed materials in the overflowing Dumpster outside. Permission granted, he told of a few of the discoveries in an alternative paper, the Boston Phoenix. The stacks of paper revealed an internal revolt in 1974 causing the John Birch Society's section leader in Illinois to resign and then send letters to other members alleging fiscal misdeeds among administrators. The episode fueled "scores" of resignations in Minnesota and Illinois, he wrote. Berlet also uncovered a foot-thick stack of printouts bearing the names of "all 24,000 Birch members" on file in late 1987.Over the years, membership has varied, topping out at nearly 100,000 in the mid-1960s. Members and former members share a disdain for government and the establishment. "The problem is they think a secret elite controls the banks, the colleges, the media and their job is to inform the public," Berlet said, referring to Welch's belief that a sinister conspiracy was afoot long before the communists arrived on the scene. "Whether (the John Birch Society targets) the Rockefellers or the Illuminati or the Jews or the Muslims, it's toxic to democracy.
If you believe your opponent is part of this secret, nefarious plan on behalf of evil, if not Satan himself, there is no … compromise possible in the public square."
Welcome to Appleton
The society's pending arrival in the Fox Cities was announced in The Post-Crescent on March 7, 1989. "We chose Appleton because it was my hometown," Bubolz, the Appleton businessman who brought the John Birch Society headquarters to his hometown, told The Post-Crescent earlier this month. The move to the Midwest also was a cost-cutting move, allowing the John Birch Society to vacate offices on both coasts.
Bubolz was then second in command at Appleton-based Secura Insurance Cos. when he took the top post at the John Birch Society in 1988, knowing the organization was millions in debt.
Secura, faced with irate customers, publicly disassociated itself from the John Birch Society and Bubolz, who had worked at Secura for 37 years, soon resigned.
As head of the John Birch Society, Bubolz's first major order of business was trimming headquarters staff by about half. In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed and much of the world celebrated the perceived death of communism itself, the Birch executive board pushed Bubolz to step aside. "They said I'd put everything back into the realm of possibility well enough that they thought they could go on without me," Bubolz said.

Bubolz remains a John Birch Society member, but identifies more closely with a new rival, the Freedom First Society, founded by ousted Birch leaders and led by the deposed CEO.
The leaders of the new society, which also follows the rigid course set by Robert Welch, contend they left the John Birch Society in October 2005 after learning it faced "an imminent coup orchestrated from within."

The accusations of past and present administrators are shown in disquieting detail on the Web site maintained by Don Fotheringham, 82, a former Birch officer, who claims his former employer has strayed from Welch's absolute vision, compromised its ideals because the new leaders are now "more interested in popularity than purpose."
The site, www.donfoth.com, which is rife with words such as mutiny, coup and revolution, mostly in internal memos and letters dealing with sensitive personnel matters, suggests just how far a Welch disciple will go to expose a conspiracy, real or imagined.
One letter, addressed to "Dear Fellow Patriot," concludes:
"(A)s Robert Welch wrote in February 1974, let's do 'what we can do to restore some sanity to a world that seems to be losing both its mind and its heart.'"

Written by Ed Lowe elowe@postcrescent.com

Thanks Post Crescent! www.postcrescent.com

Gone Looking For Sunshine...See You April...

Republican Senator Needs a Geography and History Lesson

State Senator Mike Carrell (R-Washington) tried to undermine Senator Karen Keiser’s universal health-care bill at a hearing on Capitol hill by grilling her star witness, State Senator Jon Erpenbach(D-Waunakee) from Wisconsin.
Senator Carrell tried a little scare mongering. He brought up the right wing’s shorthand for socialism. “Given that Wisconsin is on the border with Canada,” Carrell began harrumphing, “doesn’t your plan parallel theirs?”
Senator Erpenbach laughed, gave Carrell a geography lesson and appropriately Carrell’s loaded analogy quickly came unglued. “No, it doesn’t [parallel the Canada model] except that everyone is covered,” he quipped getting another round of laughter at the geographically challenged Republican’s expense.
The Republican Senators stupidity does not lie so much in his lack of geographic knowledge as it does in his lack of historical knowledge. He didn't need to mention Canada at all. He should know that Wisconsin is the cradle of socialism in the United States, and that FDR's "new deal" was a Wisconsin idea long before it was introduced. Social relief, old age pensions (the forerunner of social security), paid days off,unemployment checks, workmans comp, entitlements of all kinds were already here or soon to be. When it came time to write the Social Security Act,the chore was handled by (among others) University of Wisconsin professors Edwin Witte and Elizabeth Brandeis. We were the "enemy state" in WWI. Was it because we had such a large German population or was it that America's old guard was aghast that we sent duly elected Socialist Senator Victor Berger, a German Jew from the mostly German Socialist city of Milwaukee to Washington? Berger was the first Socialist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1919, a year after the armistice, he was convicted of violating the Espionage Act for his anti-militarist views. As a result, he was twice denied his seat in the House......... I wonder if Senator Carrell even knows that his own political party was born here. I doubt it.

Here Comes Hildegarde...again

Here she is, the small town Wisconsin girl who became the #1 cabaret performer in the entire world. It is said that Liberace borrowed heavily from Hildegarde and when one notes the addition of a candelabra atop her piano in the late 1930's, it all becomes clear. They had many similarities: both Wisconsinites, both at the very top of their fields, both household names in their own lifetime and both gay. I've given Hildegarde her own category and wrote about her here. Interesting note - not too long after this film was made her love of long white gloves ignited an international fashion craze.

Brooks Stevens...Designer of the 20th Century

"Total worldwide income generated by products emanating from his Milwaukee studio exceeded 5 billion dollars a year..There were few places on the planet that Stevens could visit without encountering at least one product that he either designed or influenced."

"By the mid fifties it seemed that everything - and I mean everything - from the alarm clock on your night stand, all the cookware in your kitchen, the car you drove,the toys out on the lawn, the logo and the bottle of your favorite beer, almost everything you would see or use from the moment you got up until you went to bed was designed by Brooks Stevens."

Just as Frank Lloyd Wright is not a merely "an architect" and Orson Welles is not merely "a director" and Harry Houdini is not merely "a Magician"...Brooks Stevens is not "an industrial designer".... he is, for all practical(take note you effetes out there, I said practical) purposes, THE industrial designer.
He designed the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile (first piloted by the original Little Oscar, Wisconsin's own Meinhardt Raabe click here, better known to one and all as the Coroner of Munchkintown in the classic 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.) Like Orson Welles, Brooks was the son of a successful inventor who created a number of major innovations in the early days of automobile production (I'll say it again, Detroit merely assembled cars...most of the parts and pieces and major innovations were first created here). He could not have born in a better place. The variety, invention and vitality that was Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century was unmatched. America's Machine Shop, America's Toolbox, The City That Makes Things..... all well deserved monikers. Stevens was devoted to his hometown. Like so so many others (don't get me started on them), he could easily have set up shop in New York or Chicago. Instead, he made Milwaukee his lifelong home, and it was in Milwaukee that he became the first industrial designer in America to have a museum retrospective. Among his initial accomplishments are numerous "firsts" - the first motor home, the first electric clothes dryer with a glass window, and the first electric steam iron. He designed the new look of the Miller Brewery from the ground up - everything from the buildings to the logo. He introduced colored cookware and appliances to the kitchens of 1950's America, designed numerous automobiles and coined the dreaded phrase "planned obsolesence". Evinrude and Johnson outboard motors, Lawn Boy mowers, Cushman scooters, carts, and motorcycles, the Willys Overland Jeepster, and the 1949 Harley-Davidson Hydra-glide motorcycle....
The 1962 Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk...

The Toastalator...

And what a great meeting of Wisconsin minds - Milwaukee's Brook Stevens and the Hamilton Mfg Company of Two Rivers, Wisconsin - inventors of the electric dryer....
The grill of a 1959 Chrysler Scimitar Wagon...
...A tiny sample of his work, I'd like to close with a Brook Stevens quote concerning the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile,"There's nothing more aerodynamic than a wiener." ...Clifford Brook Stevens, 1911-1995.

Hawaiian Guitar Students, 1937

1937. The Wisconsin branch of the Honolulu Conservatory of Music. The popularity of the steel guitar was at its peak and the Ohahu teaching method made it accessible to the entire world. The instrument was introduced to the mainland through the chautauqua circuit. Hawaiian bands and solo artists traveled across the states playing tent shows in rural areas and vaudeville theaters in larger cities. It was the first electric guitar and very first instrument to be heard in a sound film by a paying audience when multi-instrumentalist Roy Smeck appeared in a Vitaphone short that preceded the 1924 feature production of Don Juan. If a solid body electric steel guitar was too expensive the alternative was a cheap and easy deal - A 25 cent metal bridge placed on the neck of a cheap six string acoustic guitar raised the strings to a sufficient height and converted any regular six string guitar into a steel guitar. Add a metal bar to slide on the strings and finger picks and you were ready to go. Wisconsin has produced many unique steel guitarists - from the Goose Island Rambler's Smokey George Gilbertson(Madison) to Asleep at the Wheel's current steel man, Eddie Rivers from Beaver Dam. Click on the picture, it's huge, and let me know if you recognize anyone.

Death Comes To The Naturalist......and so does a Hockey Mom

Wisconsin has a long history as a stomping ground for Naturalists. (Come to think of it, our state has quite a history of producing noted Naturists as well) John Muir arrived as a young child and was raised in the Badger state through his college years and Aldo Leopold spent the last half of his life here. Charles Leslie McKay was born in Appleton in 1855. He was part of the very first generation of children to be born in the city (then town), a group that included "the genius of 19th century surgery", John Benjamin Murphy. He grew up in a time of rapid change. The town was growing, foreign born residents (among them a newly arrived child who would eventually take the name Harry Houdini) outnumbered the native Americans, the Fox River locks opened the the great waterway to shipping and new lumber based industries were emerging. McKay spent his young years roaming nearby fields, endless creeks and deep ravines, observing and collecting plants and animals. In 1873, he began his undergrad studies at the Appleton Collegiate Institute, a new college that was attracting what, in years to come, would be regarded as an all star faculty - among them was David Starr Jordan, naturalist, ichthyologist, pioneering ecologist and future President and Chancellor of Stanford University in California. Jordan was young, informal and enthusiastic about his work. His only rule being that he and his students did their work in the field. Together, Jordan and his small group of students roamed the Fox River Valley collecting specimens and observing the workings of the natural world. McKay immediately proved to be the most gifted of the group and Jordan took him under his wing. In spite of a very successful first year, a fast growing national financial panic forced the closure of the fledgling institute. Its buildings and property were eventually handed over to the towns other college, Lawrence University. Jordan had to move on. McKay followed his mentor to Butler University and then Indiana University. He eventually graduated from Cornell and found an opportunity for his line of work in the US Army Signal Corps.
Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian Institution was selecting Signal Corps Officers for assignment to remote stations. Officers were chosen based on their level of scientific training. McKay proved to be an ideal candidate.
In 1881 he was assigned to Nushagak, a remote post in the Bering Sea on the north side of Bristol Bay in Alaska. He plunged into his work with an overabundence of enthusiasm and skill. For the next two years the young scientist sent back specimen packed crates and volumes of notes to the Smithsonian. In 1882 he sent back a pair of birds that would forever bear his name....McKay's Bunting. In April of 1883, after a hard winter and alone in a canoe laden with supplies, he eagerly embarked on a spring collecting trip. He was never heard from again. Some accounts mention horrific late winter weather conditions that lead to his "native built canoe being overturned in a stormy river". Others mention his death as being the "result of foul play". It remains a mystery.

August 2009. From an interesting Scottish bird blog post entitled Sarah Palin and Charles McKay.(click here for original post)
There are only about 6000 McKay’s buntings in the world. They only breed on two islands in the Bering Sea; St. Matthew Island and Hall island. They winter on the coast of Alaska, and can be found in Bristol Bay.
Breeding on two Arctic islands McKay’s buntings could be threatened by global warming as the Bering Sea rises due to melting icebergs and the icecap.
Bristol Bay, the very area where Charles McKay first discovered these buntings, is now under threat from a proposed Gold and Copper mine that would be sited in the area called Pebble Mine.
Bristol Bay is also the site of one of the world’s biggest salmon fisheries. This is also at risk from the proposed mine. And its this very place that Sarah Palin wants to see the Pebble Mine located. The most worrying thing is that both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama were against Alaska’s Proposition 4 which would have prevented mining companies dumping their chemicals into the state water supply and rivers; it may have even prevented the Pebble Mine being built. It narrowly was defeated recently giving the mining companies a huge boost. Indeed, it seems Sarah Palin even broke the law to campaign against Proposition 4. The door is now open for the Pebble Mine.

....and perhaps, so much for McKays Bunting.

A short list of Famous Wisconsinites with Scottish Ancestry - Douglas MacArthur, Arthur MacArthur, Billy Mitchell, John Muir, Charles McKay, Alexander Mitchell (Billys Grandfather,Mitchell Park, Mitchell Street,
Milwaukee Road Railroad, Marine Bank,etc etc.)

Buddy in Wisconsin.....Eau Claire January 26, 1959

Buddy, Waylon,guitarist Tommy Allsup, Dion and the Belmonts and Ritchie Valens in an amazing set of photos taken by Joanie Swenson during The Winter Dance Party stop in Eau Claire at Fournier's Ballroom.






More photos, including pictures from Kenosha, Racine and Green Bay legs of the Winter Dance Party tour can be found at this site.

Front Page, Sheboygan Press...December 10, 1929

This is a huge file. Click on it and read. It's 1929, the financial ball has been dropped and the great depression is ramping up...