In Memory of the Union

The Memorial Union on the UW-Madison lakeshore opened in the fall of 1928, dedicated to the men and women of the University who had served in wars.

Inside the Student Union, der Rathskeller and der Stiftskeller feature murals done in a German beer hall style. My favorite is the one called "The War Between Wine And Beer"

Original

It's hard to appreciate the detail in that photo. More detailed photos are here. That mural is not that old (1978) and is an inspired copy of the original at Munich's Rathskeller. The fight is not just an imaginary one between beer and wine but also a metaphor for the age-old fight between the wine-loving French and the beer-loving Germans. A history of the murals is here

The Posh, Posh Traveling Life For Me!

My kids are very close in age (16 months apart). When they were little, they were small enough to fit together inside a wicker laundry basket and we'd always play a little game together before bedtime. I'd hoist them in the basket high up in the air over my head and give them a "balloon ride" and sing that Lionel Jeffries song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  They knew the song because that movie was on a seemingly endless loop at our house.  Kids love routines--especially when they're so little. It was just all part of the safe little bubble that fathers create in families. My dad did similar things. He had a white canvas mail sack with a rope closure. My brother and I would fit inside (one-at-a time) and he'd whirl us around outside in the yard before he went off to work at night. When we got too big for the sack, he'd hold us by one arm and leg and spin us around so we could pretend we were airplanes. It was something moms wouldn't do then--not because it took physical strength--but because what if you banged into a tree with a kid or something?

Today, I'm flying the kids back to Wisconsin to visit my mom in Madison and my brother who lives up near La Crosse. I had a whole slew of half-finished things to post here but they'll have to wait. I'm working on some new sketches too.

La Dolce Salsa

Cross-posted at Trooper York, a speakeasy blog (invitation only) I frequent:

It is sarsa time in Madison. The hot August sun has ripened the tomatoes, and Monona Bay that skirts 'Little Italy' seems congealed in silver silence. It is the season before the gnat invasion.
All along lower Regent Street, in adjoining backyards and open spaces off Milton Street, Italian housewives are vigilantly guarding the sarsa boards from the threat of rain. Within the homes the kettles are boiling—big kettles filled with sliced red tomatoes. When after an hour the cooking has turned the bubbling pulp into a thin red sauce, the contents are strained. Then the squishy mass is poured on clean white sarsa boards and placed in the sun to evaporate. Every hour, or oftener, the thickening nucleus is spread and respread until it takes on a richer shade and becomes a heavy relish. As it is packed away in jars, olive oil is poured on top—enough to form an air-proof covering. The finished product is then ready for use—all fall, all winter, all spring—until another crop of red tomatoes can be harvested.

~from Old World Wisconsin by Fred L. Holmes, published in 1944. Other nationalities are at the "Old World Wisconsin" tag.

"Sarsa" is Sicilian dialect for salsa.

Here's a link to a photo of a woman preparing "sarsa" in Madison. link

I especially like the simple trick of pouring oil over the sarsa to keep out air. That's exactly how commercial sodium and potassium metals (both air and moisture sensitive) are sold--submerged in oil to protect them.

French Wit And Wisdom

Years ago while living in Cleveland, I signed up for a "correspondence course" to teach myself French. In the pre-internet days, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a number of such courses.  They sent me assignments which I completed and sent back through the mail.  I haven't done this sort of thing recently, but back then at least I had the feeling of connecting with a real person.

The French course had two textbooks, both written by a UW-Madison professor, Joseph Palmeri. There was a grammar book with exercises and there was a companion reader entitled French Wit And Wisdom:

The book is a real treasure. You can see how well worn mine is. It's clearly Palmeri's labor of love and reflects a lifelong harvest of pithy French wit on all of life's salient topics.

Here's the table of contents:

Click to enlarge

The book is bilingual, having the original French on the left-hand side (along with author and citation) and Palmeri's translation on the right. This is a sample page set concerning work and happiness:

The book is available on Amazon. Check out the review by his grandson: link

Are The "Last Letters From Stalingrad" Forgeries?

At Christmastime I like to revisit the Last Letters From Stalingrad. I did this last year. In a sense, I'm carrying on a Madison radio tradition begun in the late 1960s by George Vukelich.  I wrote about that here and even put an audio recording on YouTube beginning here.  You can read some of the letters I did last year here: link

Doubts about the authenticity of the letters are scattered around the Internet. Amazon reviews of the book here touch on the controversy (note also how pricey the out-of-print book is too). The German language link at Wikipedia link has much more on the topic than the English one. I've translated the relevant portion concerning authenticity:

Historians and media professionals first began doubting the authenticity of the Last Letters from Stalingrad in the 1960s. They claimed that they were either manipulated by a sole agent or were even outright faked. Initially, the evidence for this was a certain uniformity of style. Later, more and more comparisons were made to other letters found in Volgograd, in the Army Post Archives at the Museum for Communication in Berlin, or those collected from opened Russian archives and indexed as War Letters from Stalingrad.

Further:

The legal philosopher, jurist and Hegel-scholar Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, who himself participated in the Battle of Stalingrad, vehemently questioned the authenticity of the Last Letters from Stalingrad in one of his last publications. He spoke of 'great concerns...against the volume.' In this book, many things are true but probably not all. In addition to a 'uniform style,' Beyers also considered topics dealt with in the letters to be more than questionable. He considered the whole project an imitation of the book War Letters of German Students (1915). Also, the facts and figures and certain confessional outpourings of the letters did not coincide with his own experiences.

Despite all the doubts about their authenticity, Last Letters From Stalingrad ultimately remains controversial, especially whether and to what extent the letters, first published in 1950, are edited, manipulated or falsified.

I'm not very good at spotting "uniformity of style" (If I were I'd be dead sure about sock puppet identities amongst Althouse comments). I've read the letters several times and I don't really see that. However, having read and transcribed my own father's wartime letters home, I am struck by the near perfect grammar and similar punctuation of these letters -- all from different authors! I ascribe some of that to there having been a sole translator. Anyone who's ever done any serious German to English translation knows that a fair amount of syntactical rearrangement is involved. A sole translator might have recurring idiosyncratic tics. Perhaps the similarities are more evident in the German language edition (which I don't have but would like to own).

In my opinion, the best reason to doubt the authenticity of the letters is the lack of supporting original letters or transcripts. Allegedly, the original seven sacks of mail were ordered destroyed by the Nazis. But something survived the war to be transcribed and published in 1950. Where is this now? If the letters themselves did not survive the war then where are the original transcripts used to compile the collection? There is a chain of custody problem here regarding the extant evidence. Still, no one yet has proven that they are fake.

For me, the best reason to believe that the letters are real is just their extreme poignancy and their universal appeal: i.e., their effect--a few of them can still move me to tears, and this is certainly enhanced by authenticity. They just make life make more sense. Much like faith. 

Deconstructing Karleton Armstrong

Badger Ordnance, target of antiwar aerial bombers in 1969

In the film River's Edge, a former student radical-turned-middle-school-teacher bullies from his pulpit: "We stopped a war, man".   I've been rethinking a nostalgic post I wrote back here last spring about the Sterling Hall bombing in Madison. Not rethinking in the sense of changing my opinion, but rather deepening and wishing to augment what I wrote then. This was prompted by my reading up on the Kent State shootings.

Karleton Armstong, Sterling Hall bomber/ring-leader, has stated that the Kent State shootings were the catalyst which turned him violent later that summer: linkage Fellow bomber David Fine also stated:

Really, after Kent State [in May 1970], I think people's viewpoints really changed. They saw people shot and that sort of upped the ante, or so we thought. That was the real motivating factor.

I dissent from that opinion based on facts:  Kent State occurred in May of 1970, after Armstrong et al. had attempted to bomb Badger Ordnance from a Cessna aircraft on December 31, 1969.  It was that attempted bombing which gave the bunch their name, the New Year's Gang.

Can one argue that the attempted bombing of Badger Ordnance was somehow less violent-that accidental deaths would not have occurred?

It's reasonable that they were thinking that Badger would shut down that New Year's Eve and everybody would be home or out celebrating. But such a place was never empty-empty and someone like a night watchman could have died had their unexploded aerial bomb gone off.  Would Armstrong and Fine have reasoned that such a death was justified? Who knows.

Kent State was a horrific event which needlessly accelerated unrest. But but I'm still not buying Armstrong's motivational reasoning, based on chronological facts.

[added:  My brother reminded me the other day of a story my grandfather passed down through an uncle. My grandfather worked at Badger Ordnance in the 40s and 50s.  At the time there were strict no smoking rules defined according to area (they were handling mostly gunpowder).  Apparently, there was an explosion on site back in the early days, caused by a careless worker who had ignored the rules.  According to urban legend, all they ever found of him were his boots.]

Sorry Mr. Wright, Cash And Carry Only

My stepfather told me a great story.  In 1948 he was working at a department store on the Capitol Square in Madison. In those days, there were no malls and all the major stores were still downtown on the Square. My stepfather was about 18 or 19 and was working his first job. He worked on the third floor where dry goods were stored and unpacked before moving them down to the retail space on the ground floor and second story. It sounds kind of inefficient but the customers didn't want to climb to the third floor (where it was also hotter in the summer) and so it was used in lieu of a basement for storage.

One day, a rather odd-looking man (a dapper Dan my stepfather called  him) came in with a couple other younger guys. My stepfather's supervisor nudged him and said:

"Hey you know who that is?"
 
"No" 

"That's Frank Lloyd Wright" 

Wright had driven over to Madison on Highway 14 with a couple students and was shopping for housewares for the school he ran back in Spring Green. Wright was dressed in a full-length overcoat and "that hat" (my stepfather called it a "sombrero" and recognized "it" when I showed him the photo that I pasted in above).  [Aside: I'm not sure if that hat was really so different from what other distinguished men wore at the time-Robert Oppenheimer for example was famous for his pork pie hat--so famous that the journal Physics Today honored him by posing a photo of just a pork pie hat for its cover in 1948 (link)].

Wright must have been about 80 years old in 1948. He came up to the third floor, avoiding the retail space and went to where houseware items were stored.  Wright carried a cane too and used it to point out things that he wanted as he moved amongst the shelved housewares. He selected three or four wicker basketfuls of dishes--cups, saucers, plates, silver, cookware, etc. My stepfather watched him and then packed up the stuff for him. Afterwards, his boss nudged him again and said:

 "Watch, I bet they make him pay in cash." 

And they did. Wright had an awful reputation for not paying bills. It seems that in his lifetime, the little people were never grateful enough to forgive him his pecuniary trespasses. Just as well. The townspeople in Richland Center dithered for decades before deciding to even recognize their native son. They still haven't put up any kind of civic memorial that I know of--they're still waiting for the memory of unpaid debts to fade.  So far as I know, the best memorial is the one Wright made himself: the old German Warehouse, which I saw and wondered at many times as a kid when we visited that town.

Rock 'in' the 70's

Nothing Is Cooler Than Ice Diving

A favorite old family photo of mine.  My wife had it framed and gave it to me several years ago. That is my late father (seated) and a dive buddy of his getting ready to go under the ice in Lake Monona in Madison sometime during the '60s.

I remember the guy standing. My dad taught him how to dive. He was deaf and mute and he worked as a printer with my dad at the newspaper. He'd come over to hang out and they'd communicate using sign language. That guy might had been deaf and mute but he sure wasn't dumb. And sign language was obviously handy underwater.

Wish I knew who took the photo and what year it was from but there it is.

The Pail And Shovel Party

Sorting through old negatives the other day, I came across this one.  That is Leon Varjian (l) and Jim Mallon (r), VP and President of the Wisconsin Student Association, posing for me ca. 1979-80.  Varjian and Mallon were the clowns who first brought the Statue of Liberty to Madison and also the pink flamingos to Bascom Hill.

The War At Home Through The Eyes Of A Child

This August is the 40th anniversary of the bombing at Sterling Hall in Madison. Sterling Hall houses the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin (I had a year of physics there as part of my undergrad chemistry curriculum). The street shot linked above shows the stately western facade of the building. Around the back of the main building is an annex which houses laboratories, and until 1970, the Army Math Research Center.

Army Math was targeted by the bombers with a truck-load of fuel oil and fertilizer (the same concoction used 25 years later by the Oklahoma City Bombers). The bombers did over $2 M in structural damage, hurt 5, and killed one: Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral fellow working through the night on a physics experiment unrelated to the AMRC.

Some news reports said that the blast was heard up to 50 miles away. I was 10 at the time and we lived about 8 miles directly west in Middleton.  I don't remember the blast (it was the middle of the night) but I sure do remember the next day. I vividly remember the TV news reports that night on CBS and even recall that Walter Cronkite had a substitute that evening (Walt must have been vacationing). Oddly, this event was the first time that I fully realized that my insular little childhood world was part of a greater violent and news-hungry world.

The bombers terrorists dubbed themselves the New Year's Gang and were a small circle of students and local misfits. There is good background info at Wiki, and also here. The same bunch also tried to bomb Badger Ordnance using a stolen Cessna plane which took off from the Middleton airport. That bomb failed to explode and was found with fingerprints that ultimately connected back to the Sterling Hall bombers. Of the four Sterling Hall bombers, three were caught but one of them, Leo F. Burt, still remains at large.

Only much later did I appreciate what Fassnacht must have been doing there that night-I did similar things years later as chemistry researcher. Sometimes you just had to pull those all-nighters to get the data. But unlike me, Fassnacht was married with kids, which must have made it even worse. Science graduate students and families are typically poor, and are banking on the breadwinner landing a real paying job one day. It must have been just devastating for his family. I'm cheered to see that part of the community arose to help that young family back then the next day. But part of the community didn't react that way then and now I'm even wondering whether vestiges of that community still linger on.

Fast forward about ten years. In 1979, as a UW undergrad, I attended a premiere screening of The War At Home, an Oscar-nominated documentary which regales the anti-war movement in Madison. The screening was held at the Union Terrace Theater. The film "starred" ring-leader Karleton Armstrong and a number of Madison political luminaries, some of whom had morphed from local student radicals into a local mayoral administration. Some of them were even in attendance, whom I recognized because I was involved with a now defunct newspaper called the Madison Press Connection.

The film itself was mediocre (of course it had a great sound track-just like the 60's did) and it caught some critical flak right off the bat because the filmmakers had overdubbed the thudding sounds of police billy clubs hitting student bodies into some of the historical protest footage (you, know, so we'd feel their pain better).  At the time I was considerably more neutral politically and even more tolerant than I am now. But what struck me then (and what I'll never forget) is the closing or penultimate scene in the movie when the mug shots of the four perps are shown. The filmmakers had the audacity to interject a blacked-out photo frame instead of Burt's mugshot during this sequence as if to say: "we're covering for you man; we're not gonna give you up man." Worse, many in the audience erupted in cheers and applause at this gesture.

I'm not sure that Madison has ever had full closure with the events of almost 40 years ago, nor whether it is even possible. The same student newspaper that instigated the belief that Army Math was somehow complicit in war crimes still foments trouble. The Sterling Hall bombing is like a festering scab on Madison's history. Not until 2007 was there even a plaque or memorial commemorating the event, though the physical scars have long been evident (I found them as a student and would often contemplate them as I walked between buildings).

I await the events of this coming summer and whether somebody will step forward and claim more responsibility for the insanity of 40 years ago.

Last Letters From Stalingrad: Special Audio Edition

The Battle of Stalingrad has been called "the worst battle of the worst war in human history." In early 1943, around 270,000 German 6th Army soldiers--surrounded by the Red Army--were either annihilated or imprisoned. Of those men, only around 5,000 ever returned home to Germany. 

Last Letters From Stalingrad, first published as Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad in 1950 in West Germany, was purportedly written by German soldiers who knew they were doomed and could write to their families just once more. The thin anthology became an international bestseller, and an English translation appeared in 1962.

Each year around Christmastime in the 1960's, a local Madison radio personality nicknamed "Papa Hambone" would read selected letters live on the air. Years later, I happened to catch one of George "Papa Hambone" Vukelich's last times ever reading of the letters in 1988 (he passed away a few short years later).  I don't recall which station I recorded this from but it was most likely WORT-FM.  The late Erwin Knoll, host of the show "Second Opinion," was a Madison legend too, having been the long-time editor of the magazine "The Progressive" and having been named on Richard Nixon's enemies list.

Here I successfully converted an audio cassette tape recording made back 1988 into my first ever YouTube video.  I had to split the tape into three parts to conform to Google's 10 minute limit. I made the original analog-to-digital conversion using "Sound Studio," first making an "aiff" file and then converting that to an mp4 file using iTunes. I apologize in advance for the poor sound quality- I tried to filter it a bit, but had I known I would be converting this 20 years after the fact I would have taken better care all along.

The total listening time is about 30 minutes.  George Vukelich gives a great introduction and historical background for the letters and then goes on to read four of his favorites.  I hope that his voice and spirit can live "on the air" by my posting them into the ether.

Enjoy!

Last Letters From Stalingrad Part 1 (background)

Part 2 (letters begin)

Part 3 (letters continue)  <--- The best one but has the fewest views

______________________

IMO, there are three further levels of interesting discussion belonging to these letters:

(1) The extreme poignancy of some of the letters.

(2) The charge that the letters were forgeries and what possible motives would exist for or against such charges.

(3) The extent to which the left used these letters, year after year, to bolster the anti-Vietnam war movement, especially in Madison.