University Reunion Brings Back Youth and Gratefulness

Madison, Wis. – The blurry black and white picture from so long ago, I am standing on a chair in an A-line skirt with the bunched hem held up by a few pins.

          Decades have passed since that photo, probably from Peg’s instammatic camera. Don’t recall ever even seeing the picture before.  Don’t know who was measuring to make sure that hem was even.  Peg has brought a handful of such photos along to share with the rest of us, back for the first time all together again since graduation in 1965 at our alma mater, the University of Wisconsin. Peg and Sue,  I and Shari.  (Shari actually graduated the year before us, but joined us for this 50^th alumni weekend since so much of our life on campus had been spent together).

That picture at our dorm, Slichter Hall.  It records our enthusiasm when we discovered we could make our own A-line skirts. Don’t know where we got the sewing machine but we could have this richness, an entire wardrobe of A-line skirts for so little money, just the cost of material and our own efforts.

The memories flood back. Here we are all together again, only now we all have at least some white hair and wrinkles. Here this blustery fall day for the alumni reunion. I had forgotten how we were back then so long ago.  We were a pack.

And now we were once again.  For one rollicking fall weekend, in the same place where all our hopes and dreams were hatched nearly a lifetime ago.  Somehow, the combination worked its original magic and we were able down the long halls of time, to reach back and touch the girls we had once been.

I get ahead of myself.   Back to the old photos, that one with the skirt.  I am wearing a Norwegian print sweater, machine-made but my pride and joy. Doesn’t go at all with the cotton A-line skirt.  Me with thick darker hair, short and somehow curly before the rest of a lifetime of a bob and straight hair.

More pictures, that was how my hair was curly. A girl with a bonnet hair dryer,  one of the triumvirate of true prizes in the dorms along with a popcorn popper and a typewriter.  No cell phones,  I-pads, laptops or television sets.  We all shared one phone on our floor and you were lucky to have a record player and alarm clock.  I remember the pain, if you didn’t have a hair dryer,  brush rollers poking your head all night long while you tried to sleep.

Like I said, we were a pack. Photos of us everywhere, striking model-like poses next to a tree, girls on the verge of emergence as young women.  Dreamy with so much future ahead of us.

For me, my first time away from home except for a short stint at summer camp. For the first time, I was finding myself without family and all the duties of a much younger brother and working mom and dad. No comparisons like before with an older sister. No nights of babysitting.  The feeling of freedom, all these new friends to make. Both Shari and I had to reform by second semester after our grades suffered from too much socializing.

And now we were back, each of us traveling from afar, me the farthest, the West Coast.   We jump up and down in the hallway at our hotel, the Lowell Center, a former lady’s dorm. Causing a ruckus of noise, squeals of delight at seeing each other after so many years. Sue from Minneapolis, a retired social worker. Shari a ph.d in psychology still working in Pittsburgh. Peg a retired elementary school teacher from a small town near Philadelphia. And me, a retired journalist from Vancouver, Wa.

Excited, we head off to the  main drag, the nearby State Street.  The  first impression, still the same commercial zone of bars and coffee shops and the university bookstore.  But the kids, so young and so many, so concentrated. We order teas and coffee in a shop and sit out in the wind.

The parade of youth before us.  We laugh and laugh at each other’s jokes.  Each recounting their trip here.  The vagaries of plane travel today. Only Sue drove  from her home.  Where the weather is often way worse. I recall a visit eons ago when it was 30 below the morning I left in  my car, worried when the door slammed shut and Sue already off at work. Would my car start?

That was when I told her, “you live in a crapola place.” Innocent words directed not at her home but the climate. It became the catchword among us for the rest of the trip.  That I said she lived in a “crapola place.”

“When I get home, I shall have to send you all pix of my condo,” she says. A cascade of laughter.

The pack is back. We march to Bascom hill, the steep hill that ends in the old center of the campus at  Bascom Hall and the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln. Graduates now take their picture in his lap.  But we only walk around the bottom of the hill, aching hips and backs, the wind so fierce this October day.  We enter an ancient hall with stained glass windows where on fall afternoons each of us at some point listened to chamber music. I can recall the sense of peace it gave, plus the nearly free extra credits.

But this is just the start of the whirlwind weekend that will pass too soon, a time when place and company help bring back a moment’s taste once again of being young, of being so hopeful. A time of nostalgia. A time when we took for granted having friends, having family, all around us. So much of that, especially primary family, now gone.

We realize the preciousness of our group. In the whole wide world, the four of us together are probably the largest concentration of people who remember each other’s mother. We walk past the University club, the UW band playing inside. The music, State Street, the early darkness and wind. We are back.

The next day, the alumni association has a “day of learning”  which they have had to stage at the newer south union, the main one we knew and loved under major renovation. We assemble with the few hundred other alumni to hear from various departments. How music changed since the 60s, how we can try to get enough fuel for the future, how will we feed the 15 billion people the world is expected to have by midcentury. All bemoan the loss of public funding, but say they reach out and will somehow continue through private donations.

Sitting and listening once again to profs.  Sitting together and taking notes.  Afterwards, we walk to Babcock hall, famous for its dairy plant and single ice cream cone that was actually three whole dips. Hey, this is Wisconsin.  We crowd in where there used to be just one lady to a real store with counter and tables. Order up our cones. Still so good, still so big.

Then onward to our old dorm. This side route is much flatter we all note than marching up from the bottom of Bascom Hill.  Steps matter these days though all four of us are dedicated walkers. A rush of wind and we are at Slichter hall. The same square stone faced building. 

A young man opens the door for us.  Like all the youngsters we met, so polite and willing to talk and help.   He tells us boys live now on one side, girls on the other. All girl when we lived there. The students don’t share bathrooms, he says, much to our sigh of relief. We try to remember what floor and room we were in but memory fails. We do remember though how you could get late minutes and campuses and even get thrown out of school for violations. The necking that would go on at the doorway before those last minutes ticked away. And now the boys and girls live in the same building.

Onward to what used to be the Pine room, cherry cokes and blond brownies of our past. Now a reception area. Then Van Hise dining hall, the same dining hall no more.   We all worked there once, amazing that you could pay for your schooling that way instead of today’s massive debts. We all worked the scrape table, pulling off the dishes and leftover food. The starched pink uniforms we had to wear, how we’d sneak the hems up from around our ankles. The required hairnets and the “W’s” on the plate edge we had to position just so. The hall, now something different, wasn’t open to visit.

Then along the lakeside path.  Choppy waves, the blue Lake Mendota. Stories I recall about a mental home on the other side, bodies that might float up. All just stories.  The lake and adjacent woods are beautiful. We all remark, how lucky we had been. This campus, the opportunity our families gave us. Each of us except Peg the first in our families to graduate from university.

Peg, always gentle, her head down as she moves forward in thought just like before. I always felt safe with her. Even when she took me out in one of the little sailboats they still rent out on Lake Mendota down near the main student union.  I’d never sailed before, didn’t know how to help with the sail when the winds changed. I dodged and somehow we made it safely to shore.

 Sue with her analytic mind. Perfect for a social worker, her life’s job. How we would sit on her bed and parse what someone had said and what it might mean. Shari, always practical and moving forward,  she got us going on the A-line skirts.

Saturday the big game.  We get our picture taken with the UW mascot, Bucky Badger. Heck, he is 75 this year.  Grab up some cheerleader pompoms, the characteristic red and white. A mountain goat climb to our seats. Our delight when the student section does this new tradition, jump around and the entire student section, hundreds of kids in the red and white school colors jump up and down. Our old knees allow some wiggle.  The pompoms help. The man in front of us, another alumni, says I am Medicare, uses our shoulder to hold him up as he goes by. We lose the game, a blunder at one yard from goal, but even so we stand with gusto to sing “Varsity,U rah rah Wisconsin” with the characteristic hand wave at the end.

The next day early we all peel off, back to our respective lives. But Sue says it all for us, “Growing old is not easy but having connection with those people with whom you share a past can help ease the pain.”

So much we shared. So great to touch upon it all again. This sense of gratitude for all we had once and still have.

Vintage Beer, Bronze Fonz Add Nostalgia to Milwaukee Visit

            Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- the city once famous for its beer-- has come full circle. Not only is the original Schlitz now available but Pabst, too, will soon be back on tap here with its vintage  recipe.  Full bodied brews that put later production in the 70’s to shame, those weaker looking beers that led to sales slumps and years of  brewery closings, takeovers and mergers.

The decision to bring back the two beers here, at least in token amounts, to me is emblematic of what I found on my recent visit to the Wisconsin city where I lived and worked some 40 years before.  I was delighted at how Milwaukee has embraced its history and resources, transforming its downtown area into a vibrant commercial and recreational hub. 

Talk about nostalgia. The city built a nearly three-mile RiverWalk along the Milwaukee River complete with a “bronze Fonz,” the life-sized statue of the Milwaukee-based Happy Days character that was portrayed on television by Henry Winkler.

Back to the beers.  The Schlitz original brew is served, $2 a pint, all day every day, at the Brown Bottle, north of downtown in the former Schlitz brewery complex, now largely used for offices.  Only one major brewery, MillerCoors, itself a merger,  remains in the city.   But many of the old brands, including Schlitz and Pabst are now owned by Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings, headquartered in Los Angeles.  It contracted with Miller-Coors to brew the original Schlitz.

By summer 2016, Blue Ribbon plans itself to microbrew its original Pabst Blue Ribbon beer right in Milwaukee, at the site of its former brewery on the west side of downtown.  The company also plans a tasting room there.

The new Pabst facility will join numerous other microbreweries already in the Milwaukee area.  On my visit, I went to the Lakefront Brewery, www.lakefrontbrewery.com, just north of the downtown in what is called the Beerline neighborhood. It is named for the fact that breweries used to have their supplies shipped there along the Milwaukee River. The area is now a vibrant urban development of condos, apartments and businesses, flanked by the start of the RiverWalk.

 Lakefront, which dates to the 80s, helped lead the way to Milwaukee also becoming a microbrew beer town. Housed in a former power building for streetcars, it is known for its fun tour, where visitors for a small fee receive four tokens, for four samples. My favorite was the eastside dark. But then amber and pumpkin were also good.

New-old Milwaukee by this time had me captivated. I remember back in the 70s toasting in Christmas at one of the breweries in an old wood paneled room with longtime Mayor Henry Maier. Want more nostalgia from beer town?

Take in like I did one of the Milwaukee food and city tours, www.MilwaukeeFoodTours.com. I went on the Old World Third Street tour along the RiverWalk.  We enjoyed authentic German food tastings at places like Mader’s restaurant, try spaetzle and sauerbraten, as well as stopping at a saloon with the longest bar east of the Mississippi, cheese tastings and a late night visit to the Fonz. The gold tinted statue is short, five feet six inches, the same as Winkler. Even in darkness, its nose was shiny from all the good luck rubbings from visitors. Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli from the sit-com based in the 50s era in Milwaukee. The show ran from 1974 to 1984. A public campaign raised the $85,000 to erect the statue which was dedicated with Winkler present in 2008.

  The RiverWalk is festooned in good weather with flowers and plantings in pots, lots of benches and tables and places to sit and enjoy the river scene. The walk goes all the way down into the former warehouse area, the Third Ward, now home to a public market, chic shops and high rise apartments.

            You want even more nostalgia. Try the Pabst mansion, farther to the west near Marquette University. www.pabstmansion.com.The Flemish renaissance revival mansion was one of several owned by prominent industrialists of the late 19^th century back in the so called Gilded Age when Wisconsin Avenue was known as Grand Avenue.  The stately home, built in 1892 for the Pabst family and decorated in historical furnishings, was subsequently owned from 1908 to 1975 by the Milwaukee archdiocese. It was set for the wrecking ball to make way for a parking lot until it was saved and taken over by the not-for-profit Wisconsin Heritages, Inc.

          

  The heavy drapes, rococo Victorian insides with a fireplace in every room despite central heating (to prove Pabst could afford luxury), take you back into the 19^th century. Family portraits throughout add a haunting feeling to the rooms.

            I rounded out my brief visit to the city with a performance of Dream Girls at the Milwaukee Repertory theatre, www.milwaukeerep.com.  The city also offers a full performing arts center and numerous other theater and museum venues. Old and new Milwaukee, all so centrally located and accessible, I will have to return if only to taste that original Pabst.

For more information, see www.visitmilwaukee.org