University Place

Today we are pleased to introduce Matthew J. Prigge as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Matthew J. Prigge is a freelance author and historian from Milwaukee and the host of What Made Milwaukee Famous, a weekly local history segment on WMSE 91.7. His work has been featured in both local and national publications and has won multiple awards including the 2013 William Best Hesseltine Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Since 2011, he has led sightseeing historical tours of Milwaukee's rivers and harbor for the Milwaukee Boat Line. In 2013, he created the Mondo Milwaukee Boat Tour an evening historical tour of some of the city's most infamous sites. The Milwaukee Mayhem is his second book. He writes a history blog for Milwaukee Shepherd Express and has also authored several articles for the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Here today to tell some strange, engaging, and chilling tales from the early and often forgotten times in Milwaukee history. Please join me in welcoming Matthew J. Prigge. (audience applauding) Thanks. All right, good afternoon, everyone. The sound is good? All the corners? Oh, okay, well. My name is Matthew J. Prigge and I'm here to talk about my book, Milwaukee Mayhem. It just came out a couple of months ago. I'm going to get into some of the stories here. I'll also talk a little bit about the process, just talk about the book a little bit. First off, has anybody gotten it yet? Has anybody read it? Oh right, my publisher. Awesome. (audience laughing) She's very familiar with it. Okay, well, to let everybody else know... This is a collection of short historical stories, some of the stranger events in Milwaukee's history. They're organized into categories of murder, accidents, disaster, and vice. So why do this, I guess, would be a good question to start off with. I've always been very interested in Milwaukee's history. I've gotten a lot of things written, a lot of pieces on it and over the last several years, I was always coming across these odd items in the newspaper and I didn't really know what to do with them. So I just was kind of collecting them for a while. And I guess really the nexus of this book was the Mondo Milwaukee tour that was mentioned a couple moments ago. 'Cause I do boat tours, sightseeing tours, of the city on the rivers and the lake and there are always these things that I looked at, these sites, and I knew all this strange stuff that had happened there but it really wasn't appropriate to drop into the middle of a sightseeing tour. So I put them all together and I put together this weird tour talking about famous murder sites and the red light district and things like that and that kind of birthed this idea here to try to put these together. And I open up the book talking about the bridge war in Milwaukee and some of you might be familiar with that. That was basically the way Milwaukee is situated there was an eastern ward and a western ward on each side of the river. Solomon Juneau founded the eastern ward, a guy named Byron Kilbourn founded the western ward and they had this really odd and intense rivalry early on and it ended up, when they started actually building bridges, there was this couple month period where each side sort of took turns sabotaging the bridges the other side preferred and after a couple of weeks four of the five bridges in Milwaukee had been destroyed and the people on the east side had commandeered a cannon and pointed it at Byron Kilbourn's home. And the story is, anybody who's familiar with Milwaukee's history knows this story, and it's always told from the point of view of east versus west and I always understood why the two ward founders wanted to go to war with each other, 'cause they had a lot at stake over this. It got me thinking in terms of these stories here was just the rabble, the people on each side. The people who were actually destroying these bridges and mounting canons at each other. They'd only been there a few years. This wasn't the Montagues and the Capulets. All the people who'd come to this place just happened to end up on one side of the river or the other but it got so fevered that they were ready to actually spill blood over these loyalties that had just kind of developed. And I got interested in just that rabble 'cause there's these histories of Milwaukee, either they tell the stories of the specific founding fathers and the business leaders or more recent ones get into labor movements and civil rights movements. All that's valuable and all that's good but I got interested in people, not necessarily the people who were fighting for an eight-hour work day, but the people who didn't want to go to work. Bums, drunks, prostitutes, thieves, murderers. These people all lived here, too. There's a story in the book about a woman named Rosina George, she ran a dance hall in the 1870's and was constantly being arrested for running this hall without a permit 'cause hers was one of the few places in the city where black and white people would drink and dance together and she also served, she had no restrictions on age, she served children. And just the noise and just the unsightliness of this hall, the city kept going after her but she kept winning these battles. The news articles on it say she makes a carpet of the mayor, she walks all over him so regularly. And she became kind of this folk hero for just doing whatever she wanted to regardless of what the city officials tried to do to her. And that, she was an interesting, somebody who always stuck with me. And nobody ever mentions her in a history book and she was as much a Milwaukee-an as the mayor or the president of the common council or whoever. So that's kind of what I'm aiming at here. In the intro I use the term "orphans of history" to describe these people and these stories. The story of Rosina George or there's another story in here on just this rash of suicides in, I think it was 1874. These aren't necessarily important in long-scope histories of the city but they're interesting on their own and the people in here were very much Milwaukee-ans. I'm going to start out with, I'm going to read part of one called "In a Violinist's Hands". This is from the murder chapter and it happened in August 1884. Professor William Moebius, well-known classical violinist and music instructor, stumbled out of a Grand Avenue gambling parlor, a loaded British Bulldog revolver in his pocket and death on his mind. It was just past 2 p.m. on a Sunday. As a child, Moebius had been a musical prodigy sent to the conservatory at Dresden at age nine and touring Prussia by age 14. He had played in orchestras in France, Spain and Italy. After immigrating to America, he played in New York City and led his own orchestra in Louisville before returning to tour the grand concert halls of Europe. In 1879 he brought his wife and eight children to Milwaukee. There he taught music and performed with the city's Bach orchestra, but he also took to gambling. A string of heavy losses forced him into a state of horrid dejection. Nearing the foot of the Granite Avenue bridge, he pulled the gun from his pocket and fired a single shot towards the dirt. The professor was not familiar with firearms. He had purchased the weapon and a box of ammunition only an hour earlier from a West Water Street gun shop. The weapon was so foreign to him that he returned to the shop a few minutes later and asked the clerk if he would be so kind as to load it for him. From there, he hastened to Grand Avenue and played his last 10 dollars. He lost. The volley into the ground was a practice shot. Satisfied he could operate the piece, he placed it to his chest and squeezed off four shots. The gunfire drew the attention of the midday downtown traffic. A crowd had already begun to form around Moebius when a nearby police detective placed the still-breathing, greatly stunned and entirely unharmed professor under arrest. The gun Moebius placed to his heart with the intention of ending his life had been filled with blanks. The clerk who had sold Moebius the pistol was so disturbed by the professor's peculiar behavior in his shop that he had pocketed the bullets Moebius had purchased and loaded the gun with harmless imitation ammunition. At the police station, Moebius said he appreciated the clerk's deception and that he was glad to be alive. He also expressed concern over a small bundle of letters he had dropped in a mailbox just before his failed suicide. (audience laughing) They were addressed to various family members and friends explaining his plight and detailing his intention of self-murder. Before his wife collected him at the station, he asked if anything could be done to prevent the letters from being delivered. He was told there was not. It was expected they would be delivered sometime the next week. So that's kind of an example of what you'll find here. This one I think probably has the happiest ending of all the stories in the murder chapter. (scattered laughing) Then again, Professor Moebius is something, it's very, very hard to find any information on him but he was for this one day one of the most famous people in town. And of course, I've gotten most of the sources from this book come from the old newspapers. They have proven to be an incredible resource for putting these together. Kind of started off just as the easiest place to go. The old Milwaukee Sentinel papers, for most of the 1800's, they're all indexed very meticulously, so I was able to pick out every murder that they reported on there. And then through the Google news archives I picked out a lot more and just got into pulling threads. Using the newspaper started out as a necessity but then, as I got further into the book, I made the conscious decision to stick almost exclusively with the newspapers because I wanted to present the stories in the way people would have absorbed them at the time. Some of these don't necessarily have an ending 'cause some of these stories didn't really have endings. They just sort of faded from public view. And also the newspapers back at that time were really, really great just to read. They had this really florid and graphic prose and did not shy away from anything really. Even, I mentioned the one about the suicides, they report on suicides, they print the addresses where the people lived and they talked to the neighbors and figure out the reasons as to why this happened. Working that into this as well, the interest in this book, I think, is nothing new because people got it every day back then. There was a very gossipy style to the newspaper. That also sort of backed up this idea that these people were, in my head, that these people were significant in their own time because they were, even the respectable people, city fathers, business leaders and everything, they got the same newspapers you can find in the archives now and they would have been, I think, probably just as interested in this stuff as anybody else. So I'm going to read a part of another story that I think really highlights just how the newspapers talked back then and I thought of it as this sort of trashy and alarmist poetry of the 19th century of Milwaukee media. This one is a story called "Mashers" from May 1881. So it starts out where there's two girls walking home and these two young flirts approach them and ask them to walk them to their front door and the father of the girls is terribly offended and this is actually from a letter to the editor to warn about mashing. They said the father of these two girls was perambulating the streets with vengeance depicted in his countenance and a rawhide in his coat sleeve looking for these two guys. The insult upon the girls was the work of mashers, young male flirts who threw their affection at female passersby in the main commercial district of the city. The look of the masher was one meant for an unmistakable indication of his intentions. He wears a jaunty little hat on one side of his head, the Sentinel wrote, grasps a slender cane and always carries the paraphernalia of his guild in the shape of showy handkerchiefs, buttonhole bouquets and other fascinating and fancy trifles. By early evening, the paper claimed, the streets were so thick with such brutish-looking and fantastical apes dressed in the very latest agony, that women could not venture out unaccompanied without being subject to their insults. The typical habits of these dainty darlings of the dive was to sally forth beginning in the late afternoon along downtown's Grand Avenue and Broadway. Finding a pretty girl, the masher would follow a few paces behind. Once he was confident no male companion was nearby, he would quicken his pace and begin his pitch but these lifted hats and blown kisses of the masher usually had no effect on the more respectable women of the city. They do not reap much of a harvest, the Sentinel claimed, until after the supper is over, the dishes are clean and the housework done up. When the cook's servants and chambermaids come out to have flirtations with their social vis--vis. Writing with a decidedly alarmist tone, one article was titled "Kill the Masher". The Sentinel noted that summer was very near and that soon the mashers at the lake front park would be as thick as gnats at a country cow yard. A problem, the paper asserted, would get worse before it got better. (scattered laughing) So that's, well that one's great. One of my favorites, just the source material for that. But that's how they wrote back then and it was, like I said, just the proof that just the fact that these articles were so prevalent back then and covered this huge period of time really from the 1850's up into the '20s and by the teens it's pretty well faded away. But to me that's proof that this was what the reading public really wanted. When you picked up a newspaper, you went to the gossip column or the crime page. But the two I've read so far are on the lighter side of what's in the book. There's also some kind of gruesome stuff and there were some decisions I had to make in terms of what to cover, what to include, what not to include. The time span for the book. The Cream City's first century, so 1840's to 1940's. That was less-so to put it into a 100-year time span and more to give it some space between anything that might happen here in the present. I thought, especially with some of the more gruesome stories, it might be a little more palatable if there's a little more time between the reader and the event. Also it was kind of strange, I actually found myself toning things down in places from the way they described it in the newspapers. One interview I'd done, someone asked me about in terms of how race is addressed in the book. You know there are some stories that talk African-Americans in Milwaukee but the person said, "Well, there's nothing about the native populations there." And that was, aside from there just not being a lot of material for that, also these newspapers at the time they wrote very condescendingly about non-white people and even within white people, certain immigrant groups. There's that balance of trying to be true to the source material and trying to present this well and in kind of the raw style that they used but also to not be too much of a downer in any area and especially with the way that the minorities were addressed. Not that that's not worth looking at but just not the direction I wanted to go here. And the next story I'm going to read is about a woman found in the lake, a dead body and this one gets to, again that style of journalism but also it speaks to another theme that I was going at in the book, was just how the public reacted to these things as they happened. Crime scenes, disaster scenes. You'll see people on the internet talking one way or another about appropriate places to take selfies, whether this historical site is OK or this is not, or funerals or whatever. Just reading about people, specifically people in Milwaukee back then and how they reacted when a building burned down or when somebody died and there was a murder in the street or something. I can assure you, if they had had the means, there would have been selfies at these crime scenes from those people, this is not a new phenomenon. And if anything, I think people have gotten better about it. But this one is called "The Woman at the Breakwater" from June 1898. I'm not going to read the whole thing but basically, there's a man who rents a paddle boat from a lakefront stand. He has a woman with him. They go out onto the lake. They come back in a few hours, the woman's not with him. He says he left her at the beach. A body washes up a few days later, they determine that it was this unknown man who took the woman out onto the lake, murdered her and tied a horse hitching weight around her waist and tossed her in the lake. But if the police had a general idea as to how the crime was committed, they had no clue as to the identities of those involved. Hundreds of Milwaukee-ans were drawn to the display of the garments, and I should preface here, the body fell apart when they took it out of the water so the only evidence they had was this horse hitching weight and the clothes, the undergarments that the woman was wearing, and they put them on display at the central police station, hopefully to get someone to come forward to break this case. Hundreds of Milwaukee-ans were drawn to the display of the garments including curious ones who were, in the words of the Milwaukee Sentinel, impelled by a morbid interest in gruesome things and inspected the discolored garments with an evident pleasure. Scores of tips revealed dozens of women, either Milwaukee residents or visitors, who could not be located by loved ones. One woman feared the departed to be her daughter whom she had not heard from in some time and was quite unhappily married to a man who had threatened on several occasions to kill her. Another tip told of a woman who had taken up with a married man. When the situation turned sour, the man told a friend of the woman that he had gave her some money and she had left town. The missing woman's friend suspected he would not tell the truth. One man told police his wife had run off on him and was last known to be living in Milwaukee. He asked for and was given a piece of the lace from the underclothes found on the body. He refused to give his name but promised to return the next day with more information. He was never seen again. A Chicago man made the trip north and said the clothes looked very similar to those owned by his wife who had walked out on him some time ago. Examining the teeth from the corpse, however, he became convinced the body was not that of his wife. He was fairly unmoved during the process, telling the police he was merely curious as to the identity of the body and did not care one whit if his wife was alive or dead. (audience laughing) Despite the case's publicity, no positive identification of the body was ever made. Three days after the woman at the Breakwater was recovered, she was buried in the Potter's field at the county poor farm along the south bank of the Menomonee river to be forever eulogized as "Name Unknown". And there are, especially through the disaster chapter, I didn't even really intend to do it, but reading through these as I was putting them in order, I found that there's this theme that there's always these huge crowds of people who gather around when something goes terribly, terribly wrong. This one quote that I just love came from, they're launching a ship in Milwaukee's inner harbor, a wooden ship, and they dropped it into the harbor. The water displaced, rushed up onto the shore and knocked over a viewing stand that people were crowded onto and I think two people drowned but the next day everything was in ruins, the next day there were these throngs of people everywhere and the Sentinel quoted a peanut vendor who had set up nearby and was doing very good business and he described these disasters, this interest in it, he called it, "It's an ill wind that blows nobody good." And I think that is one of the best ways to get at this interest in these awful things. So dealing with this there's also, I mentioned trying to find that balance between what is OK to talk about or what will fit in the book and what won't and just to share kind of a personal story from this. In doing these, I think there's about 80 stories in the book but there were some that I left out just 'cause there wasn't room or I didn't really like them but then there were others that I started on and never completed, and again when you're finding these, you find this story of a missing person and then you look into it and it turns out to be nothing. About halfway through the process, I was looking for some good kidnapping stories 'cause kidnapping stories usually fizzle out and I found this one of a teenage girl who was kidnapped in the early 1880s and it was really interesting because she went missing and the mother said there was some suspicious man who'd come to their house the day before and they were looking for this man and they're looking for the woman or the girl, they didn't know if she was murdered or if she'd been kidnapped or run away or what and I was finding this very long trail of articles, much longer than you usually find and I found one in the index, the card catalog of the Sentinel articles. I changed around my search terms a little bit and finally found one more article after not being able to find out anything. It was that the girl was found and she was OK. And I remember just being like, "Oh". (audience laughing) I had a couple seconds there where I was just like, (disappointed sighing) "Oh, man." (audience laughing) And if you deal with this for so long and I think that might be a part of the reason that the newspapers wrote in the tone that they did. 'Cause yeah, I did this really intensely for maybe a year but these guys did this every day and there's this very gossipy nature of the newspapers and there was a very definite gallows humor that they used. There was one, in the story about all the suicides there was a man, he hung himself I think, I don't know or he drowned but anyway they had the body and they didn't know who it was and then a couple people came forward and they said, "Oh, it's such-and-such, we know him." And so they printed the next day that such-and-such was found dead, he'd killed himself and a day later there was a news item that said this guy had come forward, he'd taken the train into Milwaukee, he was living somewhere in the outskirts. He said, "Well no, this isn't me." (audience laughing) And the Sentinel, they mention this and then they close the article with something like, "Well, if he's unable to prove that the corpse "is not his, he might be charged with perjury." (audience laughing) And this is still a story about a suicide. There was also another one where, this is from the 1850s where they found a body in the river and it was a fairly gruesome murder. No, they'd found a head in the river, excuse me. And they hadn't found the rest of the body and it was also another one of those where I just wasn't able to follow the story through really to the end, but they wrote about the boy, he was boating in the river, he pulled in the head and then the Sentinel, they closed it by saying, "Well, we weren't able to identify the body. "Inquests were not the order of the day." Meaning, whoever wrote that just didn't feel like going and finding out who it was. So I think I've got time. I'm going to do one more and this one-- This is a kidnapping story. It's typical of the kidnapping stories I was able to find and it's actually one of my favorites. I think it's a good way to try to wrap things up. Kind of an uplift, if you will. So it's called "The Runaways" from September, 1898. On a street corner near the Wells Street train depot in Chicago, two Milwaukee children approached a police officer. "Take us to our Uncle Adam", John Matthews, aged 10, told the cop. At his side was his eight year old sister Louisa. When the officer told the kids he had no idea who Uncle Adam was, John offered an alternative. "Well, take us to our Aunt Polly then." The pair ended up at the police station. When asked how they had come to be so far from home, John told police they had been kidnapped. According to the boy, the pair had been approached at Milwaukee's Chicago Northwestern railroad depot, the big house by the lake, as he put it, by a well-dressed woman who asked them if they would like to take a train ride. They said they would and she purchased three tickets, loaded them aboard a southbound train and sat with them all the way to Chicago. Upon arriving in the city, she told them to wait at the depot, left and never returned. The police contacted the children's frantic parents who had not seen them since sending them off to Sunday school that morning. Their father, William Matthews, rushed down to Chicago to retrieve the children and sat with them as they recounted their fantastic story to a Milwaukee police detective. The children went on and on about the Chinaman and all sorts of funny people they had seen in Chicago and the cross woman they had encountered at the Chicago police station who was saying horrid things because she did not like the bread she was given to eat. But their description of the kidnapping was evidently lacking and both the police and the children's parents agreed that the pair had simply run away. Evidently John had been punished by his mother for lying the day before and had determined to skip town. Police sent the kids home with their parents who punished both for their flight to the south. But once again, little John Matthews felt that his penalty was undue. The very next day, he and Louisa again walked to the lake front depot, boarded a train and, despite declarations that they did not like the city, disembarked in Chicago. There they once again claimed to have been kidnapped and were held at the police station to await their father. Mr. Matthews had no idea how the children had managed to make the trip twice without paying and without drawing the suspicion of any adults aboard. He told the newspapers that his son was likely next bound for an industrial school. (audience laughing) And I brought one more along, so I think we'll do that one. We've got a couple minutes here at the end and then a little bit of time here and then we'll do some questions before we get to the book signing. This one is from the vice chapter. I don't think I read anything from there. Well, the mashers would have come from the vice chapter but this one's also from the vice chapter and charting the vice chapter, there's these alarms, these panics that happen like clockwork. Basically, "What's wrong with kids these days?" That goes back probably as far as there's been children but this one is from January 1922 and it's called "With Bells On". The most recent fashion accessory of the Milwaukee flapper was causing concern among school officials in the city. Flappers, a teenaged army of pretty girls with bobbed hair, short dresses and rouged faces, per the Milwaukee Journal, were known for their slinky sex appeal and alluring perfumes. But this new trend was drawing attention for more than just the eyes and nose. The most chic of the flappers set was now adorning her outfits with small, jingling bells whose tinkle accommodates her promenade. By the time these jingling flappers were set loose on summer vacation, the Journal was already declaring that 1922 would go down as the year of the great flapper controversy. At 14, they look like grown women did before the war. At 17, they can pass for 24, the paper wrote. If you were a high school boy, you say they have snap and make keen dates and you were proud to walk down the street with one hanging on your arm. Of course, it was not high school boys who were worrying so loudly about these girls and their snap. The mobility and independence of the flappers seemed to some a fast road bound to ruin. Milwaukee flappers found idols at the movies and dressed to mimic their favorite female stars. They went with boys who drove fast cars, went to dance halls and road houses and spent the money of their companions, or even their own as many were, on cold drinks and hot jazz. The Journal talked to one young girl who had just the night before been out until 3 am at a country road house. The reporter asked if there was any adult supervision to her night out. "What did we want of a chaperone?" the flapper spat. "We knew the boys, and anyway, "a girl can take care of herself." The reporter found another girl who was also familiar with the back roads. "Do boys take liberties with me? "Not so you can notice," she told the man. "If I like a boy pretty well, I let him kiss me "if he wants to, and of course he always wants to. "If I don't like him, nothing doing." Seeing that the Journal man was taken aback by her attitude towards what had once been a fairly verboten subject, she continued, "Why not? "If you like boys, why not let them know it? "Why not have a good time as you go along? "There'll be trouble enough later on, "any movie will show you that." Despite the somewhat shocking behavior the Journal man uncovered, he was less alarmed by the flapper than others. "So why not let the flappers flap if they want to?" he asked his readers. "Their momentary eccentricities probably are "far more harmless than we choose to believe." As far as the flapper's jingling dresses, school officials said they would probably move to ban bells from acceptable student clothing. Their accompaniment, it's said, had a tendency to distract the boys from more serious matters. (audience laughing quietly) So if anybody has any questions now I'm happy to open things up. (audience applauding) Oh, thank you.