Slices of Life from the Obit Beat

[gentle music]

Jenny Pederson: Hello, everyone. Welcome to today’s History Sandwiched In. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. To the reason you are all here today. A quick note that opinions expressed today are those of the presenter, and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the society’s employees.

It is a pleasure to welcome author and longtime reporter George Hesselberg, who is presenting Dead Lines: Slice of Life from the Obit Beat. His presentation today is based on the book of the same name, published in 2021 through the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Before we hand over the microphone, I am excited to share just a brief biography of our speaker. George Hesselberg, author of Dead Lines: Slice of Life from the Obit Beat, was a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal for 43 years. He covered every beat, wrote hundreds of news obituaries of the famous and the not-so-famous, and was a columnist for 18 years. Please join me in welcoming George and enjoy the presentation.

[audience applauding]

George Hesselberg: To answer your first question… I am standing up.

[audience laughing]

Thank you, Bonnie.

Generally, I don’t stick to a script or notes. I have notes and they’ve asked me for them, and I had to laugh and say, “Well, you’re not gonna figure these out.” But…

I’m gonna go away from the script right away because it’s October, the week of Halloween in Madison. And since this is a history lecture series, and since I covered every damn State Street Halloween there ever was… [audience laughing] …starting in ’77, I thought for the fun of it, before we get into dead people, and animals, and bears, and tarantulas, and dogs, and donkeys, I would just read a little bit from Halloween on State Street over the last, since ’77, just because it’s History Week, and this is a history lecture, darn it.

So, it turns out, in ’93, I wrote, up until that time, I wrote a compendium of my favorite times on State Street during Halloween. And before cell phones and before digital. And what I would do is I’d fill my pockets with quarters, and in my other pocket, I’d have the telephone numbers of every single telephone booth up and down State Street, including the numbers at the Memorial Union.

And so, I’d go down there for the first part of the night, when, just, all hell was not breaking loose yet. And then, I’d get back to the office, the newsroom, in time to write for the first and second editions. And while I was writing for the first and second editions, I’d be calling all the phone booths up and down State Street.

Now, you know you cannot walk by a ringing telephone. [audience laughing] It’s just not gonna happen. So, somebody would walk by and answer it, and I’d say, “What’s going on now?” And they’d say, “Oh, they started burning up the Red Rock Inn,” or something like that. And then, I’d go back, and I’d finish writing for the first and second editions. Then, I’d get back in my car and zoom back down, park behind by the limnology lab, and get back up on State Street, and get enough stuff in time to write for the final, which, in those days, was 2:00 A.M. And that’s how I would cover State Street on Halloween.

[audience laughing]

Okay, I’ve been to all of ’em. I was there when the kid fell from the roof of McDonald’s and he died. I was there when someone stole the keys to the city ambulance. I was there when someone took a loaded gun from a cop. I was there when naked ladies danced in the windows, when every State Street intersection had a bonfire, and every bonfire had some idiot trying to run through it or trying to push somebody into it.

I was there the year of the big toga party, when the university set up a big tent over at lot 60 to draw people away from State Street, and when buses hauled sheeted students from Langdon over to the Toga Festival, and then they came back to State Street. [audience laughing]

I was there when the university tried to move the whole party to the Field House, when the police chief wore a pig mask, when a man dressed as 10-foot female genitalia. [audience laughing]

I was there when the band was on the Library Mall, when the band was on Langdon, when the band was on State Street, when the band was at the top of Bascom Hill. I was there when beer was legal, when beer was legal only behind a snow fence, and when police clamped down and the gutters overflowed with malt liquor and cheap schnapps.

I was there when chartered buses came to State Street, when the police set up a command post in the Historical Society library building. When the Wisconsin Student Association party organizers took their profits and they all went to Smoky’s for dinner. [audience laughing]

I was there when every single light pole, every light pole on State Street, was slathered by the city with axle grease. Not by vandals, but by city employees. The year before, the people at Halloween had climbed the poles, and I remember watching this, had climbed the poles, and dangled like fish at the end of cane poles from these poles! They swung over crowds that filled State Street until the street was like a sausage on a grill, with the skin eventually bursting into sizzling squirts of hot juice.

I was there for more than a dozen Running of the Dunderheads. Does anybody remember what Running of the Dunderheads was? A crazy, hilarious, happy, sad, head-shaking exercise in lunacy.

The Running of the Dunderheads, it happened every Halloween night on State Street, at midnight, it would rain and the dunderheads would start at the top of the State Street and run down State Street in the rain.

Too drunk to effectively debauch, the costumed, uncostumed, decostumed, and civilian-clad dregs of the evening hurdle and stumble out of control down the street, banging their heads and stubbing their noses on steps and curbs. This happens, usually, right after it starts to rain, and it will rain, it really will rain, it always rained at least by midnight, when the street was already filled with broken glass, ripped beer cans, soggy fake ID cards, cheap wigs, deflated plastic marital aids, and every form of footwear.

I’ve seen too many Blues Brothers, too many sets of crayons, too many humans dressed as tampons, too many Saturday Night Live knockoffs of wild and crazy guys, and too many students dressed as bunnies.

I have seen fishnet stockings on people who, on any other day of the year, would have been arrested for it. I have seen costumes so elaborate, so clever, so animated, that trick photography couldn’t recreate them and no one would have believed even a real picture of them.

I have seen people so anonymously, innocently, soberly happy that halos appeared above their heads. Or maybe they were just dressed that way. I have seen a mermaid.

I was a few feet away when a student was beaten senseless by a couple of athletes who fled like rabbits. I saw a man dressed as Bud Man come to that student’s rescue, and I saw a cop kneel, bent over that unconscious student with a look of dread that no mask could disguise.

I have seen inhibition-free night of fun and creativity evolve into a dangerous, even deadly, booze-fed night of nastiness. I have proclaimed the night of the dead to be dead on several occasions, only to see it rise again with some spark.

I got young, I got old, and I got young again watching State Street on Halloween. Generally, I would be leaning against a window by the Goodwill. There was a Goodwill on State Street, in the basement. I’d be in that alcove, usually. I would always wear my grandpa’s old hunting jacket, a brown wig, blue eye shadow, rouge, bright red lipstick, and a sprinkling of sequins in my beard.

I would have a bag of candy, a pack of smokes, and a can of Budweiserremember, it was a hunting jacket, so I had lots of roomin those early days, in my back pocket, waiting for the rain, waiting for the dunderheads.

One more, one more short one, and I won’t read the whole thing I said. It’s from November 1, 1986, one paragraph. It’s the last line.

“With halo askew and underpants clearly visible, State Street greeted Halloween with a burp and a bump Friday night. For some, it was just another chance to show off some pretty sophisticated scuba gear. There were many, many female impersonators. How many? No one knows. But the figures were clearly inflated.”

[audience laughing]

[audience applauding]

Anyway, that’s part of the history of Madison. And I’ve been around a long time, just covering the history of Madison, starting out as a night cop reporter, a guy writing two or three-paragraph briefs in a newsroom on Carroll Street on Remington typewriters with triple carbon copies. And one of my jobs every night as the youngest one there was to collect $1.10 from three or four of the copy editors and run over to the Shamrock and buy the Old Milwaukee six-packs and come back to the newsroom and get the damn paper out. So…

While I did that, I learned how to write obits. We were the youngest there, we were ordered, our job was to write obits that were called in by the funeral homes, and we were given specific instructions on how to write those obits. They had to be a certain way.

We use that, I use that, as a way to get more of what I wrote in the paper because the orders from Fred, Fred Kerr, the night city editor, the world’s greatest city editor. He’s a tiny guy, about like that, had a paper cup of beer next to him the whole night. And just sipped it. Anyway.

We… He said to all of us, young, college, I was in college, “If they look at this obit, take what the funeral home says to you, go double-check the name in the morgue, see if it lines up with somebody who’s important or did something, or is a crook or anything, and if you can get an extra paragraph or two, write me a news obit as a side.”

So, that was our key to getting into the paper, aside from the usual obit. So, we would look for stuff that would make it stand out. And you move from the obit desk to writing briefs to, in my case, going on as a cop reporter, crime reporter. And that was where I started looking for the unusual in all the stories I reported.

And there’s, I’ll give you a key to… People say, “Where did you get all your stories over these 40 years?” Or “Where did you find out about this?” In my acknowledgments, I list people I thank for helping me out over the years. Here’s what, you know…

I didn’t just roll off the hay wagon and start writing obits. You have to get out there. You have to write, and write, and write. And here are the people I thanked. Cops, coroners, funeral home directors, investigators, photographers, deputies, doctors, lawyers.

That was a rolling of the eyes, that was a rolling of the eyes. Social workers, librarians, friends of friends, homeless peoplelots of homeless peoplebeat reporters, and always somebody who knows somebody who might know somebody.

That’s where all the stories came from. And I would work nights on cops. And in those days, I could walk into the police station, go behind the counter, and they’d have a book of the calls. They’d also have a container full of reports of the day. And since I was alone, nobody else was doing it. I’d say, “Can I look through these reports?” And they’d say, “Yeah, look through these reports.” And I’d go through ’em one by one, by one, by one, looking for interesting stories.

And with that, I started my own column called “Street Scenes” that was in Sundays that we snuck in on Saturday nights. Literally snuck in on Saturday nights when we first started, because the editors would read the paper the next day and say, “Where the hell did this come from?” And soon, soon they accepted it.

But I would see somebody died or there was a death investigation. And usually they’re not stories, but sometimes there’s a little bit more that you can find out about that person that might make it a story or something interesting. And I used that to start writing obits.

I got off the schedule again, I’m sorry.

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

That’s a quote from a neuroscientist and author named David Eagleman. I open with that because it’s that bit, where when your name is spoken for the last time, that convinced me to put this book together, because the people in this book are not captains of industry, they’re not big politicians. They didn’t give a lot of money to whatever. They’re what some people might call ordinary people, but they really aren’t ordinary.

One night, I came home from my job as a daily newspaper reporter and my son, Esmond, asked me, “Pops, did you write about anybody alive today?” [audience laughing] And “I’d say, no, not today.”

One day, you will die, and few, maybe no one, will know that you were a good tickler. Or you were that rare female mechanic on the pit crew of a Le Mans race car driver. Or you once stood on your hands in inappropriate places, dangerous places, or you love to teach mathematics to people who hated mathematics, or your bones probably will never be identified. We’ll get back to that. Or you lived on the street, wore a matted old red wig, and spoke French fluently.

In this book are stories about the lives of those dead people, a few dead animals, one dead tarantula named Eensy, of course. These are not words of sorrow. There are also stories here about people and animals who are not dead. There’s two of my favorite stories. A guy called me and said, “George, I’d like to report I’m not dead.” [audience laughing]

But who were thought to be dead. A cat. A Vietnam vet. A man the government was convinced was dead but insisted was not. These stories were written between 1977God, that’s a long time ago, and 2017 for the State Journal morning daily newspaper.

In here is a man who repaired Jackie Kennedy’s shoe. You know, the great thing about that obit of Fauci, the shoe repair guy. John Kennedy came by because Jackie had broken a heel on this shoe and they opened up. It was a Sunday. They opened up the repair shop and he fixed the heel. They never paid him for it. [audience laughing]

A man who always wanted to be a great unknown poet. And he was successful. [audience laughing]

A woman who always ordered one hot dog at the butcher shop. A group of retired touring Illinois chimpanzees that makes an appearance when one of its main performers dies at a final bow in Madison. Also one of my favorite stories.

There’s a farmer here who dies, having talked sparingly about his days of deprivation in a German POW camp.

As a general assignment reporter, a crime reporter, a columnist, I got the murders, I got the mysterious deaths, and the deaths that often happen in the background and sometimes are pushed onto the front pages. It could have been timing or space or a well-known man, name, that moved the story forward. It’s, a lot of times, it’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Aside from being dead, of course.

Many times, the story is a breaking story or a spot news story that is news because someone died. It could be a fatal fire, a traffic accident, a tornado, a flood. None of those stories are in this book. Instead, these are the sort of people who populate any city or village. They are often quiet lives of inspiration, or the sorts of lives that are seldom recorded beyond birth, marriage, and death, and a list of memberships and survivors.

In this book are stories of people who populate the periphery of our own lives, to which they contribute in a thousand unrecorded ways. Not all of these lives have happy endings.

The temptation is great. It is always great for all of us to tie everything up in a nice bow. But that is not the goal of a news obit. These lives are worthy of mention because of circumstances or because a detail or a memory may have jumped out and called for attention. Here are lives we may have always wondered about. Mysteries sometimes solved, silences explained. Mixed in are other tales of immense sadness.

I guarantee I will cry once in the next half hour. I guarantee it.

Joyful memories, all connected in some ways with a topic that brought it out front: death. Missed pets, that beloved tarantula, a miracle survival that I still don’t believe happened. The most important criteria for inclusion in this book is it has to be a good read. It’s gotta be a good read.

So these are all newspaper stories. Almost every one, all but one written on deadline. In other words, I got the story, I looked it up, I checked it out, I reported it, and I wrote it, and I was done with it. So that’s a newspaper story.

And that’s why if you get the book from the library or wherever, and you go through this, you can open it to any page, the first paragraph is written so that you read the rest of it. In other words, it’s a newspaper story. We want you to read the story, so we have to get you in that first paragraph. And I’ll read you a couple that’ll show that.

Okay.

Someone once pointed out to me that if you have to point out irony, it is not. [audience chuckling] There may or may not be some of that in these profiles, too.

I am of a mind these stories about people who died, obituaries, properly written, can make you happy, inspire you, make you want to live a better life, look inwards and perhaps be a little bit more grateful that you are here and that these people were, too. Did I write about anybody alive today? Well, yeah, all of ’em.

The pandemic… And I have to bring this up here because that’s gets me going. You don’t wanna ask me in a bar, “What do you think about the pandemic and obits?” Because I’ll just, you’ll be buying me beers all night.

The pandemic taught us a lot. Not just about masks and elbow greetings. It caused the delay or cancelation of many funerals or get-togethers of friends and family. Those events are where the stories are told, the acts of kindness and folly are recalled, the memories of sacrifice and serendipity brought out one last time. Grudges are revealed and buried forever. Missed opportunities are recounted. Romances are relived and exaggerated. Trophy bucks are chased away, or was it a six-pointer or a ten-pointer?

In their temporary absence, the importance of taking time to pause and reflect becomes even more apparent. We must not hurry past these lives without noting the little things that set us apart from one another, or pausing to appreciate what we all have in common. An important part of the human existence is sharing it.

That’s what I try to do here. So let me share a couple.

I know oh, I have to say, I think you already said it. These are my opinions, not the historical society’s opinions or anybody else’s. It’s possible my opinion could be different tomorrow if you asked me the same question, but it would be mine. So I’m just saying.

All right, ready? Also, I might jump around in here if I remember something that’s really fun, okay?

This is Cornelius. Cornelius, I used to see him walking around around Vilas Park many years ago. He’d wear a bucket hat, and he didn’t have a beard when I first saw him, but he’d walk around with his hands in his pocket slowly, and he would always return to an old Winnebago parked outside of Vilas Park. Sometimes he parked it in a grocery store parking lot.

And finally, I had seen him so often. And this is what’s one of those curious things. If you see something that doesn’t make sense, and you’re a reporter, you ask about it and then you find a story. Sometimes.

Once I was walking on campus and I saw all the UW workers pulling vines from theivy vines from the science hall, and I said, “Geez, aren’t university buildings supposed to have vines on it?” So I asked, and they said, “We’re pulling all the vines off because the vines have these tendrils that grow into the mortar of these old buildings, and that expands when it gets cold and it wrecks the mortar. So we gotta pull all the vines off.” It was a good story, just because I was curious.

Anyway, Cornelius was walking around, so I stopped and I said, “What’s the story, Cornelius? You’re here all the time and I see you year after year.”

Well, it was, it turned out to be a great story. He was retired. He had his Winnebago, which was, was held together with twine and wire. He said, “I drive between here and Florida. And I used to live here, and this is what I do. And I walk around and nobody bothers me and I don’t bother anybody.” He’s just an interesting guy to chat with. His father had been an aviator, barnstorming pilot.

So we talked and I got some background. I wrote a little column about him ’cause he was just an interesting part of the background of our lives. He was there. This explains one of those things. So I kind of kept track of him over the years.

And he, I got a call once from Texas from a hospital saying, “Do you know a Cornelius?” Yeah, that was the guy. Anyway, I got a call from Saint Mary’s because everybody knew him in that area, and Saint Mary’s saying, “Well, there’s a guy here who’s just died. You think you may know him?” I said, “Well,” and it was Cornelius.

So I had a nice chat with the people over at Saint Mary’s. And it turns out when I talked to him years and years before, his mom was in the back of that Winnebago, and she never came out, so he was just driving her around.

And also, of course, this is the best part. When he was walking around Madison with his hands in his pocket, you know what was in his pockets? Walnuts. And he would walk a block or half a block, pull a walnut out, drop it, push it into the ground, and walk away. He must have planted thousands of walnuts all over Madison in those years. And that’s what his legacy was for Madison. And that was Cornelius. He was just one of those guys. He was cool.

Angel, anybody know Angel? Remember her? Angel Richardson. I used to hang on State Street because as a cop reporter, that was where I got to know what was happening part of the time. And during the day, anyway, I would run into Angel. You can’t see it there. She wore an auburn wig, same wig for, like, 20 years. She was, like, this tall, and she was over like a question mark. I talked to her occasionally. We got… We just chatted because street people I talked with. But I never went into her background.

When I heard that she had died, I started looking into it and I wrote. I ended up writing a long, one of the longest, the longest news obit story and story I’ve written ever. Because her story was almost unbelievable.

She… [clearing throat] How to say this. She had a, she… She was once, her full name was April Fuller Babcock Richardson. Fuller, if you know Madison, there’s a Fullers Woods over in Maple Bluff, that Fuller. Babcock, if you know Madison is Babcock. Angel was part of those families.

Before World War II, she was reportedly in France with her mother and was doing some work for the resistance. She spoke fluent French. She got married in Madison and she had twin boys.

After that, she had postpartum syndrome, which was not a thing then that they identified. So they took her boys away from her and put her in an institution, and she was told her boys were dead, and the boys were taken to the West Coast, and she got some secretarial jobs. But that was about all.

She smoked all the time. And she would go to the Memorial Library and get a book, usually a French novel, and sit there and read the book. And she would go up and down State Street, and she would stop in the usual places. She didn’t bother anybody.

But she wasn’t really pleasant, she wasn’t a chatty person, but she was part of that background of everybody’s life. And the more I tracked her, after she died, the more interesting she became. She would, at some times, she had angels following her. She had angels following her.

There was a social worker who knew her and who followed. Who literally followed her. There was another guy who was on another social work team who followed her to make sure she didn’t get in trouble. She knew cops, and there were cops who kept an eye out for her.

Every month, she would walk in to the front desk of the Madison Police Department, go behind the counter where nobody’s allowed, and walk over towhat’s his name? Jeff Reno’s desk, Sergeant Reno. Great guy. She’d open the desk drawer and there would be a $20 bill, and she’d take the $20 bill out and put it in her pocket, and off she’d go. A couple of weeks later, after she got her check, she would come back, go to that drawer, put a $20 bill back in there, and leave. And that was Angel.

She was rescued by all those angels. She ended up in a nice place in Sun Prairie, where she had a sunny place to smoke and read, and she died quietly there in 1997.

And nobody knew about her until I wrote about her. And we tracked, with the help of a Norwegian genealogist, actually, who was just a good genealogist, we tracked her sons down to the West Coast and found a granddaughter, and connected up that way.

And she has a very nice little stone in Glenview with Angel Richardson written on it. And she, to me, she was an assignment made in heaven for me. She was great. And there’s a full, long story about her in there.

The details of, you know, I don’t wanna go into details because these are all different stories.

Mark Maida, 2005, died in Iraq just before he was supposed to come home. I knew his mom and dad. I know his mom and dad still. I was there in their house right after they found out. He had just been promoted to sergeant. And Ray, his dad, was a police detective. His mom was an emergency child pediatric cancer nurse at UW.

And I talked to them right away afterwards. And here’s the last paragraph.

“Ray remembered receiving the news last Thursday night after he and his wife and son, Chris, went out to eat and listen to an Irish band. ‘It was about 10:00 P.M. and I went into the bedroom to lie down. Diane went to get a book to read and she said, There’s a man in uniform at the front door and he asked to talk to both of us.’ ‘The message was brief, the sorrow immediate and inescapable. I didn’t want him to leave. I kept asking him to please stay here. I kept touching him. I kept grabbing at his coat.'”

[clearing throat]

Kenny Oh, Cecil Burke, Cecil Burke, Cecil’s Sandals. The original Cecil’s Sandals. The guy who started it all. Just a really nice guy. And his legend. You can’t really say legend because that would be misusing the word because legends don’t really exist. He was a star.

He and somebody working with him helped him. A woman came in and said, “I want a pair of sandals. Can you make me one?” He says, “I don’t make sandals, I repair shoes, but okay.” So he made a pair of sandals. The guy working with him said, “We could find a way to attach these cords and make ’em stay on the feet, and they look cool,” and that was the start. And this woman came back with 10 more friends. And that was what started the Cecil’s Sandals.

Then Cecil’s son took it over and Cecil became just a star. And he was the nicest guy. And that was Cecil’s Sandals. He’s in here, too.

Kenny Stout. That’s him after he had a wart removed from his nose, about that long, that long. Kenny Stout, I met Kenny Stout the day his mom died while they were watching Johnny Carson, and she froze to death while they were watching Johnny Carson in their home in Verona.

Their home was in an area that had nice houses right off the main drag there, but they didn’t have any walls in this house. It was all falling apart. They had one electric cord. It was going to their TV, and they had a little coal-burning stove which kept them warm. This is in cold weather.

And they would watch Johnny Carson every night with their feet up against the coal stove. And they had 23 cats. And she, one night, she just froze, and they took her to the hospital and she didn’t live. So I was there the very next day.

And as they say, you know, if you’re not there and you just see it or you hear or read about it, you aren’t gonna believe it. You just aren’t. But I was there, I saw the cats, I saw Kenny. I saw the coal stove. And I saw the single electric cord.

And the world’s greatest photographer, L. Roger Turner, was there with me. He took, like, a landscape photograph of this thing. It was just, you could count the cats. It was hilarious, they’re all over like this.

And I talked to Kenny, who was a little bit challenged. He’s well-known in the community. He drove a bicycle with a windscreen on it, and one year, he froze part of his nose, so he had this long, long wart on there. And he didn’t know what he was gonna do. He was just beside himself.

So I said, “Well, to hell with this. I’ll throw caution, objective journalism caution to the wind.” And I went from his place over to Miller’s and bought a bunch of cat food and a bunch of food for him. Came back, and then we sat down and chatted.

And this photo was taken a year after that. He had moved into a boarding house in Verona. We found out that he had no money. He had his collection of silver coins. What is it about old guys and they’re collecting silver coins? My dad did it, I’m doing it, it’s just… [audience laughing]

Anyway, so we foundand I got a hold of a social worker, a Dane County social worker. Another angel. I know they come in for grief once in a while, but, boy, they can show up with wings fluttering sometimes.

They found, and I wrote about and found that Kenny’s dad, long dead, still had part of his teacher’s pension coming to him. So he got that, they sold the lot, which was derelict, and to pay for the taxes that he owed. And he was looking through the phone book one day in the library, and he said, “This looks like a good place to be.” It was Hawaii, of course.

And so he took his money, he got a bus ticket to the West Coast. The bus had an accident and rolled over on the way, but he survived. I was keeping track of the guy, and he got to Hawaii. And then I lost track of him. And then he died.

Happy, I guess, because he was working at a job as a park guy doing the lawn, and was just happy as heck. He never thought he’d end up that way, I’m sure. But Kenny was a good guy. And the circumstances of his mother’s death were not good. But he got some money, he got his wart removed. He was happy, so win-win.

This is Oddvar Karlsen. First time I met Oddvar Karlsen, I was sitting at his table, dinner table. He and Gerd in Eidanger, Norway. And I had been briefed by his daughter, Elsa, that if I wanted to make an impression on her dad, I should read both Time and Newsweek, because he’s a stonecutter, but he read both of those magazines every week.

That week in Oslo, I picked up copies of Time and Newsweek. I read through ’em and memorized ’em all, and we, and it was the first time I’d met her parents. And we’re sitting, I can still see it. I’m sitting there right to the right. He was right here, I’m right there. And we were sitting there like that, and I put down my fork and I said to him, I said, “Well, did you read in Newsweek this week…” Oh, it was like, it was like I had just saved his family, you know?

And it was my first meeting with Oddvar Karlsen, a stonecutter. He had hands like this, like that, a real stonecutter. He had a one man, one-and-a-half-man stone cutting business in Eidanger. His daughter Elsa, who tripped me and beat me to the floor, just a wonderful person who I was married to for many years and is still my totally best friend. In fact, we just got back from Italy last week.

So anyway, he was so influential in teaching me that everybody, you can’t judge people by their looks. And he was a hardworking ex-seaman worker guy. And he was very self-educated, and he taught me and our sons some valuable lessons in life.

He came to Madison once. I love this story ’cause he’s a stone guy. And I said, well, “Let’s go up to the Capitol,” which of course is filled with 30 kinds of marble, right? And this guy, he walks into the rotunda. He looks around, and he goes to one of those big black columns, and he puts his big hands on it and he says, “Pen stein.” “Pen stein,” which means “beautiful stone.”

And these columns were the big, black, reflective columns that were imported from Norway back in early 1900 by Magnus Swenson’s gang. And I mean gang, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, he was that kind of guy, and the last I saw of him, he was teaching me the right way to make a whistle out of a tree, a tree branch for the boys ’cause I was making it all wrong. He just took a jackknife out of his pocket and hammered on it and stuff like that. Anyway, he’s in here.

That’s Charlie the cat. I gotta read you theremember I said you want people to read what you write, so you gotta get ’em in the first paragraph? So that’s Charlie, my cat. Charlie, 33.

Okay, here’s the first paragraph.

“March 5, 1996. It was so warm a week ago Sunday, I almost buried Charlie, our frozen pet cat.”

Don’t you want to read the rest of that story? [audience laughing]

That’s my son, Ivan, and Charlie. Anyway, his obit’s in here, too.

That’s Mary Ostrander. Mary is a fireplug. She looked like a fireplug. She was that high and she was a fireplug. She was Madison’s first policewoman. She paved the way for every single policewoman in this town.

And when she started, she was given no… They gave her no quarter, and she gave them no quarter back and said, “We deserve this, we deserve that. I’ll sue you if you don’t do this.” And she beat ’em every time.

And I met her when I first started as a rookie cop reporter. And she was a detective. Before that, they couldn’t make women detectives, of course. But we got along just great. Two fireplugs talking to each other all the time. And her, when she died, I’d already talked to her before that about the cases that she wished she still could work on that were never solved. But she was good, good people. Good cop, too.

Okay.

Simon Sparrow. Anybody recognize him? One of the great outlier Madison artists, but a great outlier artist, too. He could make anything out of anything. That’s one of his artworks behind him. He was also a street preacher, a concerned man about children, had opinions very big, very high, very high opinions of a lot of things. And he’s in here, too, because he deserves to be here. Good guy, good stuff. If you can find any of his stuff, good luck, ’cause you’ll take you a year just to examine one of his pieces. He’s in here.

Chief!

I don’t know where to start with Chief. Some of you may remember him. He was the main attraction at the Henry Vilas Zoo for many years. One day on a Sunday morning, somebody jumped in to his exhibit, and a cop just happened to be there. The cop jumped in and had to shoot Chief dead.

And of course, the cop took all kinds of grief, but he did only what he could do. And that was it. Except that I saw this, and I thought, you know, I should write Chief’s obit. And he was And so I did a lot of research on it. I tracked down where he came from. He was a cub in Canada, in fact. I found out his transport papers, talked with the people who knew him.

And I use “him” for an animal because we’re not allowed to do that unless it’s got, you have his name, otherwise it’s an it. But anyway, Chief was a him, he was nobody’s teddy bear. He never was. He was a and polar bears are angry, mean bears. And he was an angry, mean bear. Everybody who knew him said that. But he was just being a bear. So he got killed for being a bear. And I thought that was a good obit on Chief. He was… He was missed right away. He was missed right away.

[chuckling] Jan Rapacz. This guy used to smuggle pig organs in the bottoms of aerosol shaving cream for his research at the UW. People sometimes don’t recognize this, but the UW is full of incredible, unusual people. I mean… [audience laughing]

Really, you know, I’ve been covering the UW since I was a student there in ’69, ’70. And there are people you just don’t believe exist. They are, they used… [laughing]

But John, Jan, actually, was an expert. He’s responsible for us knowing about cholesterol today. He did his research at Arlington Farms, and he was a really good guy. I drank wine with him too many times, I guess, and his wife, also a great researcher.

He found out that pigs are the way totheir hearts will hold cholesterol and you can measure it and things like that. His background was, he was, he spent a boyhood in the woods because the Nazis had taken over his village, and joined the resistance there as a child. His teachers told him he would never amount to anything, and he proved them wrong, which is almost a clich these days.

But he, if you look at him, you know, he’s a funny, happy guy, and he ended up at the UW and was just a good guy. The one story I remember about Jan, I don’t think it’s in the story, is that one night I was covering cops, I think, and there was a big fire out at the Arlington Pig Farm, which is a big research facility, huge, international.

And there are fire departments all over the place, and we almost put this in the paper that at the UW, it was a day of swine and hoses. [audience laughing] Would that have been great? [audience laughing]

This is Hamlet, a 95-pound pork-bellied pig. I wrote his obit because he was the direct competitor with Jimmy the Groundhog. Every year, Cottage Grove would have a dinner for him, and they’d raise money with breakfast. It was a hilarious story. His name was Hamlet. He also had a side job as, you know, when principals say, “If my students do this, I’ll kiss a pig?” He was the pig. [audience laughing] That a great, what a great background. Great background.

So, and then we got Chimney Skeleton. We all, this was written a long time ago. I was there when they found the bones. Me and Kim Schneider at the Good’nLoud Music store on University Avenue, next to the old Doctor Inn. Now we’re talking history. Nobody remembers the Doctor Inn. [indistinct chatter, laughter]

Anyway, this is the Smithsonian rendition of what the guy should have looked at, would have looked like. He was the pile of bones found at the bottom of the incinerator at Good’nLoud Music by the owner. And at first, they thought it was a woman because of the clothing and the brooch and the shoes and the shift. And then a couple of weeks later, they said, “No, this is a guy.”

And then, ever since then, and that happened, what year did the Chimney Skeleton happen? ’82, ’81, ’82?

The thing is, nobody gave a damn about this guy. They could not find out who he was, what he was doing there, how he got there, what his background was, how old he was, anything, because of the circumstances in which he was found, and nobody really…

And every year after that, every damn year, every September, I would write a column about this guy and say, “Who knows who this is?” He’s somebody’s brother, father, uncle, son, something. Who is there? This is, Madison’s not a big place.

And nobody, and every year, I’d check with the cold case guys and nothing. And DNA things change. And I finally wrote an obit for him years later. But then two years ago now, last year, they identified him. But the circumstances of his death are still quite the mystery. Who took this body and shoved it down a pipe that big around? And why?

Why, what was he doing? Was he a, what we used to call then a cross-dresser? And I don’t know, nobody knows. And then when they finally identified him, one of the reasons it turns out that they had difficulty identifying him, this they just found out, was because he was adopted. And so those records were all screwed up. And he had had two families, neither of whom reported him missing.

So not only was he not missed, nobody wanted to miss him. So it’s a really, really sad story. And I wrote about it lots.

Okay, Casey the chimp. [laughing] Casey was part of a traveling circus, of course, based in Rockford. This guy just took his gang of chimpanzees out on the road and would perform. They’d smoke cigarettes and ride bicycles and stuff like that.

And finally, one day, the owner said, “I’ve had enough. I don’t wanna do this anymore.” And he managed to convince Vilas Park Zoo, Henry Vilas Zoo to take all his chimpanzees. So, and of course, he didn’t tell the chimpanzees this. He brought the chimpanzees up to Madison, dropped ’em off, and that was it.

Well, it’s not the end of the story. When Casey, the last of them, died, I found out about it. So I started looking into the background, and I found this terrific story. It may have been apocryphal, but I don’t know, but there were stories written about it at the time.

This guy, the Rockford guy, came back up to Madison to visit his chimps. And he walked into the chimp cage place, and Casey was standing there, and Casey saw him, and Casey did this This is a true story. Casey looked at him, and he did this [audience laughing]

Is that hilarious or what?

And I have, I know we’re running out of time. I could do a lot of these, but I have two I might tell you about.

One is a long story. I’ll make it short. There was an accident on the interstate outside of Tomah, many years ago, and I covered it. I covered it, it was a double fatal. Car went underneath a semi, took the top off, killed the couple. The state troopers came out to do the investigation. And it’s winter, there’s snow. One of the troopers is a pregnant woman. Which is, which is not, which is important.

So they’re searching around in the damaged stuff and the woman finds a sippy cup. And then she goes back to the other guys and she says, “Was there another? Was there a child in this car? Are there any other bodies?” They said no. She says, “There’s a sippy cup here. Let’s go look.”

So they went to the ditches on the interstate. What did they find? A little girl just in her socks in the snow. Healthy as a fish. And to me, that’s the miracle story in this book. And I wrote, I remember writing the accident story. And then I decided to keep the story as an obit story, not because of the, I never, it’s because the girl survived.

Years later, I did track her down for this book. Not to write about her, but to make sure everything was okay, and she’s fine and she’s in Minnesota. To me, it was a miracle story.

So, okay, my last story. And that’s because to me, this is the epitome of a death story, because, I didn’t even get to the mayor of the nude beach, Charlie Wise. Boy, that guy was interesting.

I write it because it’s this short, okay. October 2009. I’ll just read you the first graph, then I’ll tell you the story.

“Last week, George E. Wood, 81, got tired, found a place to sit down out of the rain, and died.”

It’s only one page long. He died in the lobby of Witte Hall at 615 West Johnson Street. He had come downtown on the bus, had no children. UW, worked for the state of Wisconsin as an urban planner, but he came downtown to shop.

It was raining, so he sought refuge in the lobby. He went shopping, it was raining. He sought refuge in the lobby, sat down on a couch, and had a heart attack. What was he shopping for?

He had been at the university bookstore where he bought a calendar. Now, think about that. Is that a picture of hope for the future? You’re 81, you buy a calendar. The very essence of the future is to buy a calendar. It’s like saying you can tell if a society is governable if people are standing in line for something because they have hope, they have hope. They’re waiting for something. They’re hoping something will happen. They’re hoping something will happen.

Anyway, that was my favorite little one in that book.

I tell you, I covered everything in this town for a long time. Politics, scandals, consumer swindles, murders, births, you name it. And this is Halloween week. I don’t know what they’re doing on State Street. And I stopped going to State Street one year because I was standing there in my getup, and this guy walked by. This kid walked by and he said, “Hey, Pops.” I looked and it was my son. [all laughing]

That was it, no more State Street for me. All right, I’m done.

[audience laughing and applauding]