Profile of Eau Claire County, "Wisconsin Communities"

[train blowing its whistle]

[train tracks]

ANNOUNCER: You've been away on a journey. You're going home now. The wheels clatter and the dining car rocks and sways. You forget about your cup of coffee, you stare out the window. You are almost home now. The hills, the sloping hills and ridges, the soft little valleys between, they seem to move like waves outside the window, moving, waving, welcoming you home. Ah, this is your countryside. You forget the dry, pinched, bitter smell of the train, the soot on the windows of the dining car. You can almost catch the scent of the pines. You can almost taste the tender birch trees, washed white and clean by the rain.

[train whistles]

ANNOUNCER: You remember you've been away too long. You wonder why it is--going 00:01:00away--the best part is always coming back home. You press against the window with a napkin under your sleeve on the dirty sill, straining to catch the first glimpse of your town. It will be there soon, around the next bend, your town. Around the bend and down the long grade you will see it soon in the valley. Watch for the river, the silver ribbon of the river, winding through the valley between the hills. The river winding through your home town, criss-crossed by bridges. Beautiful city of bridges and waterways. There she lies, nestled on the river. You're doggone right! The best part of traveling is always coming back home. When a man's got a home, a good home in this kind of country, that's the best part. When you hear the trainman coming through calling through the dining car:

CONDUCTOR: Eau Claire, next stop, Eau Claire. All out for Eau Claire.

ANNOUNCER: When you hear the trainman calling and he's calling your hometown. 

[organ music]

ANNOUNCER: The State Radio Council presents the documentary story of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the fifth in a series of programs about Wisconsin communities, an actual record of life in the cities and crossroads of our state prepared from tape-recordings made on the spot to bring you the real sounds and voices of our neighbors at work and at play. Now with our narrator Ray Stanley, we travel north by northwest across the palm of Wisconsin to the base of our little finger where the knuckle crooks westward towards the Minnesota border. Here lies the town of Eau Claire in the Chippewa River Valley.

[train sounds]

CONDUCTOR: Eau Claire -- all out for Eau Claire.

STANLEY: Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. The train pulls into the station on Barstow Street. Remember Barstow Street? Barstow is the main 00:03:00drag--runs parallel to the river. Within a stone's throw of two rivers, and its spring and flood tide, and the mighty Chippewa rose through the town washing the roots of trees under banks. The little Eau Claire River joins her rushing under the bridge at Barstow Street where you see the big sign of the Northern States Power Company, its windows looking out over the river. Ah, so this is the main drag--Barstow Street. You stand on the river bridge a block from the railroad station, and look into the heart of the town. Samuelson's Department Store, the Hotel Eau Claire, tourist information at the Indianhead Office, Walgreen's Drugstore, Meyer's Music Shop. You look back over your left shoulder up the Eau Claire River, and there stand the factories, the smoke stacks of industry. And your eye travels on, above and beyond to the green hills of the valley circling round, round this, your town, on the banks of the river.

[fiddle music]

STANLEY: A song is running through your head, a song mixed of the river and rushing water, a song of pine trees and valleys and the men who came on the river shanties, driving the logs down the stream.

MUSICIAN: (singing) One evening last June as I rambled

The green woods and valleys among

The mosquito's notes were melodious

And so was the whippoorwill's song

The frogs in the marshes were croaking

The tree toads were whistling for peer

The partridges 'round me were drumming

On the banks of the little Eau Claire.

STANLEY: A man from Eau Claire wrote that song, W. N. Allen, a song of your home town. You stand on Barstow Street on the river bridge, with the tune of the song running through your head. And you remember what they say, the folks who live in 00:05:00the town, folks who have been here through the years back to 1922, back to boyhood days, back as far as the turn of the century. Ask some of them about the town and the river. Ask how it used to be.

UNIDENTIFIED: When you go downtown to Barstow Street, and recall the buildings that were there in 1920, you will now find quite a change. I have had people tell me who have come back after a long absence that they hardly know the place.

UNIDENTIFIED: The river was here a long time before I ever got here, before my folks, who immigrated from Norway came to this community.

UNIDENTIFIED: The real lumber era really ended in 1901, when the Daniel Shaw Lumber Company sent its last raft of logs down the Chippewa River.

STANLEY: The voices push back through the years, back through the years to the 00:06:00days of sawdust. Remembering the town growing up around lumber mills, men that walked on the riverfront back in those days. The men in mackinaws and boots, the rivermen, the raftmen, the lumberjacks and the shanty boys.

MUSICIAN: (singing) He wore a red sash round his middle

With an end hanging down at his side

His shoes, number ten, were of cowhide

With heels about four inches wide.

His name it was honest John Murphy

His face was not troubled with care.

And he was as jolly a raftsman,

As was there on the Little Eau Claire. 

STANLEY: Big boisterous men, gone now. Gone with the big pines. Vanished, like the curl of smoke rising from the cook shack in the forest. But the town 00:07:00remembers. Go down Barstow Street past the jewelry stores, the Labor Union Headquarters, the parking lot by the river, cross over the bridge on Water Street where it spans the bend of the Chippewa. Old Water Street, past where the sawmills once stood. Take the scenic drive to Carson Park. Almost an island, it lies ringed about by Half Moon Lake. In the heart of it is a logging camp: bunkhouse, barn, cookhouse, and smithy. A camp and all its equipment, set up there by a town that remembers and will not willingly forget. There is no fire in the smithy's forge. The bunks are empty, the log sled stands idle in the barn. Birds are singing in Carson Park in the spring of 1950, and automobiles can drive up to the Paul Bunyan Camp door. But out of the doorway of the cookhouse comes a man, one of the vanished men, one who came back. He stands in his plaid jacket, gnarled hands empty, his mustache gray but his eyes as sharp 00:08:00and blue as the cold blue waters of Half Moon Lake. His name is Olaf Bergeson, and his was a young life spent in the lumberjack's woods.

BERGESON: More than twenty years. I just didn't know what to do with myself one time when I went up in the woods. I had a job cooking, and I kinda liked it, and I learned to cook, and I followed it up for twenty years afterwards.

STANLEY: Big boisterous men in mackinaws and boots. Hungry men. Ole can tell you what he cooked for their breakfast at five o 'clock, in the morning at thirty below.

BERGESON: Well, we had beef steak, fried potatoes, pancakes, couple kinds of cookies and cake, most generally two kinds of bread, coffee.

STANLEY: In the cookhouse, through the doorway behind Ole, you see the table and benches, the tin plates laid out for the meal. Ask him about washing up the dishes afterwards.

BERGESON: The dishpans we had there, I would judge, hold about fifteen gallons 00:09:00of knives and forks and spoons. Put a lot of hot water and soap in them, and shake the dickens out of them, drain them off good, and rinse them out again with hot water, put them in the grain sacks, one cooky on each end of it, and shake it, and shake it quite a bit, and then they are nice and dry.

STANLEY: Long winter nights with the fiddles playing in the bunkhouse. And then sleep, while the wind whistled outside and piled up the snow in the skidways. But then would come spring and river ice melting. The spring drive: men driving the log rafts down the Chippewa to Eau Claire. Ole and his cook stove went along in a riverboat.

BERGESON: That's a wanigan. We'd tie up about noon just a little ahead of the crew, feed them either first lunch or second lunch, as it happened to be, and 00:10:00suppertime tie up for the night. There would be two wanigans, the blanket wanigan and the cook wanigan. The wanigan men put up a tent for the men to sleep in, scatter a few straws of hay around there, and let them sleep on that and a blanket. 

STANLEY: This spring, this month of May, 1950, there is no log jam on the river, no mill pond above Eau Claire. You can't hear the saws scream as they bite into the lumber. The sawdust days are gone in the town. Ask Ole if he thinks those days were better.

BERGESON: I do. Yeah.

STANLEY: Why?

BERGESON: I don't know. Things were cheaper then, you worked harder, you worked longer hours, but still at the same time I don't know. A dollar then went further then than forty does now. If I was going to start logging here like I did fifty years ago around here, I don't think I could get a man that understood or know a cant hook from a peavey. And a blacksmith, that's a thing of the past now.

STANLEY: Yes, they are things of the past now. The blacksmiths, the ox teams, the cant hooks and the peavies. And Ole Bergeson is a man who came back, one of the vanished men out of the forests, and he finds no familiar thing to set his hand to in the town, save the empty pots and pans in the silent logging camp in Carson Park. But other men have gone out from Eau Claire, gone farther away than the north woods, to a different kind of camp, far from ice and snow.

RICHARDS: I put in thirty-seven months and a half overseas. First of all, I went to New Zealand. We was there for about a week. Then from there we went to New Caledonia, making arrangements to go to Guadalcanal. We was there, Guadalcanal, I guess I would say eight months of action. Then we had about two months of rest, and then from there we went back to New Zealand for another rest period. Then from there we went to New Guinea, I couldn't say how long, but until that was cleared up. Then from there we went to Ieshima, was there for about three 00:12:00weeks. Then from there we went to Okinawa until the war was over.

STANLEY: Yes, many young men traveled far. And of the many were some who came back. You wonder what it is to come back from that journey, to find again your hometown waiting for you in the valley. If it's winter, there is a new snowfall on the river, do you scoop up a handful of the cold crystals, and make a snowball of it, throw it, smash it against the pillars of the bridge to smash out of your mind the memory of jungles on Guadalcanal? But a man doesn't talk about these things now. He talks of the present and of his daily bread, of his wife and three children. His name is George Richards, heavy-boned man of thirty-one, big muscular arms and a clean blue work shirt, heavy hands, heavy eyebrows with a deep furrow between his eyes. And as he speaks, there is a roar of the machine shop behind him.

[machine shop sounds]

STANLEY: For George Richards, coming home meant coming back to look for a job. 00:13:00You can't have a home, or a home town either, unless you have a job. And to get ready for the job George is studying at the Eau Claire Vocational School. It's tough, going to school on the GI Bill of Rights with only $120 a month to support your family. But the Vocational School is training George for the job he wants.

RICHARDS: Now I'm doing a joiner, a six-inch joiner.

STANLEY: And how much longer before your normal course work is done?

RICHARDS: Well, I guess our course here is twenty-two months in the machine shop, unless we take up a apprenticeship.

STANLEY: What do you hope to do once your course is finished?

RICHARDS: Still stay as a machinist, I guess, in the machine shop. Time goes faster, and it is very interesting.

STANLEY: Down the school corridor from the machine shop is the electrical department, and you spot Keith Gullickson there: tall, rangy young man with an easy grin, wearing a crew haircut and a pair of army khakies. Keith's a farm 00:14:00boy, lived in the Eau Claire region all his life. He's married with a couple of kids of his own. You watch him tinkering with the innards of a radio, and you know this training at the Vocational School is going to help him set up an electrical repair shop of his own. Ask him why he came back. Ask Keith Gullickson how it was coming home, how things looked to him after the army.

GULLICKSON: Sure has grown up a lot since I left it and come back again. I think that it is going to be growing a lot more, now that I can get in there and start growing with it.

STANLEY: And you wonder what the chances are. Will Keith and George get jobs? Does the hometown need them? You ask their teacher Frank Wittbrod, instructor in the Vocational School electrical department.

WITTBROD: Well, we have a very fair placement situation. We have sixteen apprentices in the city of Eau Claire, and most of them started from their training program right here. We also have placements in Superior, in Duluth, in Rochester, Minnesota, also in La Crosse, Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and 00:15:00Milwaukee, and also in Green Bay. George Gelky at Anderson Electric, Herbert Smuhl, they are all journeymen. Jack Narty, by the way, had his picture in the paper recently [unintelligible].

STANLEY: And the waiting list grows. A waiting list of men who want a chance to learn, to learn a trade, to get a job, a job that needs doing in your hometown. You ask Frank Wittbrod about that waiting list. All the GI veterans who want to get in, you don't screen those guys out, do you? You go easy on them, maybe?

WITTBROD: This is not a soldier's home, this is a training institution. None of these boys, from my experience, are the type of fellows who want a dole system. They want to be able to know how to make their money and how to spend it. They don't want it free and they are willing to work for it.

STANLEY: Remember the voice saying that people hardly know the place anymore? 00:16:00Well, that voice belongs to W. L. Enge, director of the Vocational School. Came to Eau Claire as an ex-schoolteacher, turned out a mechanic in the Roaring Twenties. Began to teach other mechanics in 1932, helped the Vocational School grow out of house and home until it took over an old trunk factory in 1940. Now he's director of the school, and a man who knows his job can put his finger on just what vocational education means. 

ENGE: Well, vocational education can perhaps be summed up very briefly--five words would probably do it. It's to make an employable citizen. Vocational training in the Eau Claire Vocational School is divided into five different categories: trade and industrial, commercial or business training, training in distributive occupations, homemaking, and we also have a department in agriculture.

STANLEY: You think of the kids in the Chippewa Valley and the whole northwest, 00:17:00thirteen counties around Eau Claire. You know there's a lot of 'em, the kids sixteen to sixty, the kids who haven't gone on from high school to colleges of higher learning. Here's their chance, the school for them, and they come flocking from miles around. You like the idea, their coming to your hometown, and the Vocational School in turn joins in civic affairs.

ENGE: While the Vocational School does not have the facilities in the way of an auditorium or anything like that yet, we do participate in community affairs. Here is one instance. The Eau Claire Male Chorus, which has made quite a name for itself in this area, is one of the activities that we co-sponsor with the City Recreational Department.

[piano, male chorus singing]

STANLEY: Let's hear the Male Chorus--seventy-five men of Eau Claire, busy workingmen who like to get together evenings to sing a song. The director of the chorus is called Will Johnson, the song is "Cindy, Get Along Home Cindy."

[male chorus singing]

[male chorus singing]

STANLEY: Get along home Cindy, get along home. You cross over from the west bank of the Chippewa River. It's nighttime, a spring night on Barstow Street, and soon the workers on the swing shift will get along home.

[person whistling]

STANLEY: Lights are blazing up on the Eau Claire River. You cut off Barstow 00:20:00Street into Grand Avenue, past City Hall, past the hill on Dewey Street, to cross the Dewey Street Bridge. Lights on the bridge twinkle in the water. The night air is sweet, that sweet valley air you dreamed of on the train coming home. But now along the riverbank you can't see the hills, only a monstrous shape of bricks and steel, silhouetted against the sky. You turn toward it up Galloway Street.

HUTCHENS: The sales were five hundred and seventeen million dollars plus, for products that were made in forty-five different plants. The United States Rubber Company has forty-five plants located in the various parts of the United States. The total employees on the payroll of the United States Rubber Company and in all these plants is fifty-six thousand plus.

STANLEY: That is the voice of Big Business. Big Business on a nationwide scale. World famous Big Business--the U. S. Rubber Company. A chunk of this Big Business thrives in your hometown, sprawls along the north bank of the Little 00:21:00Eau Claire. Two city blocks and more of brick and steel, four stories high guarded by five big gates. You look up at the smoke stacks spearing the sky, and there in the spring night you can't help grinning. Big Business--well shucks, it's strictly homegrown. Hometown factory that made good, got into the big time; and the hometown folks are plenty proud of it. Take Howard Hutchens, the factory manager, that voice of Big Business you heard just now. Howard Hutchens is no outsider. He's been here since 1917, not long after a local businessman got the idea of making tires. Gillette Rubber Company, they called it back in those days, and Howard Hutchens can tell you how it happened to settle on Eau Claire as the place to build its plant.

HUTCHENS: The Gillette Rubber Company located in Eau Claire for the reason that there was an ample supply of low-cost power at that time. There also was ample water supply, which is important in tire manufacture, and an abundant supply of 00:22:00good people to perform the operations of building a tire.

STANLEY: The river water, and power, and the people of the river valley. Good reasons for a factory here. In 1930 it joined the family of U. S. Rubber plants. But big business didn't change the home folks or their jobs in the tire factory. Early in the war they switched their skills to making ammunition, and won the Army-Navy "E" Award. Then Eisenhower mapped his plans to cross the channel and invade Europe. Orders came from Washington to get top tires rolling off the assembly lines again, heavy-duty tires for trucks and machinery. Ask Howard Hutchens what it meant to reconvert the factory to making tires.

HUTCHENS: In the early part of 1944, we started reconstructing our tire plant so that we could get back into tire production. The plant was completely rebuilt, doubled in size, and we were able to take advantages of all of the latest and 00:23:00most modern tire-making equipment, so that the final result was the world's most modern tire plant, which we have in Eau Claire today.

STANLEY: Let's talk to the home folks on the swing shift. Take Lewis Coyer, a young fellow, his father worked for the company back in the '30s. He belongs to the union, CIO. Ask Lewis Coyer about the union, about labor's problems at the plant.

COYER: It doesn't make a lot of places where they go on for a long time. If you have any trouble at all, why, it is taken care of immediately. And I think it is because most of the boys here, I'd say around eight out of ten, are high school graduates.

STANLEY: Coyer was overseas during the war, in England and France, repairing airplane damage. Caldwell is a veteran, too. Jack Caldwell: works on the heavy service tires of the plant. Ask Jack Caldwell about an industrial town. Is this a good place to raise a family? Is it a healthy place for kids?

CALDWELL: Oh, the healthiest there is. We don't have much smoke or anything like 00:24:00that to contend with.

STANLEY: Are you listening out there in Pittsburgh or Wilkes-Barre or other industrial towns? A man doesn't like to brag, but ask Jack Caldwell what it's like to go home after the swing shift at the factory. Jack drives home, just three miles from the plant and--

CALDWELL: I live out on Altoona Lake. It's just east of Eau Claire here, about three miles. We have our own home out there, we live right on the lake, good fishing, and we have hunting close by. We have a six-room home built right on the lake bank, and any day we want to go fishing when the season is open, we can go. We are only about twenty feet from the lake, the back porch. We have our boat and motor. I think it is a very nice place out there.

STANLEY: A very nice place, you can tell the world. Here is a neighbor of Caldwell's, lives in the little town of Altoona, rides the bus three miles to work. A pocket builder for U. S. Tires.

ENGEBRETSON: It was during the war that I went to work. My husband was drafted, and I thought that I would work during the war. Then my husband lost his life so I kept on working.

STANLEY: Do you have any children?

ENGEBRETSON: Yes, I have a little girl.

STANLEY: How old is she?

ENGEBRETSON: My little girl is eight years old.

STANLEY: You went right on and made a home.

ENGEBRETSON: Well, I have tried awfully hard.

STANLEY: Where is that?

ENGEBRETSON: I live in Altoona right now. But I like living there because my little girl has a better place to play, and I feel more at home away from the big town--just feel more like home. I own my own home, and I really enjoy living in a smaller place. 

STANLEY: She's an attractive young woman--Mary Engebretson. She talks to you there on the swing shift, the machinery of the plant rumbling in the background, she wears a soft white blouse, and a pair of slacks. She's doing a factory job for a reason and she's happy to talk about her little girl.

ENGEBRETSON: Oh, she's a sweet little child. She's got blond hair, cute little 00:26:00personality. She goes to Sunday School every Sunday, goes to the school, hasn't missed a day since she started kindergarten. She's in second grade now.

STANLEY: We can't forget the war. The war cut deep into the life of the valley. Men who travelled far, slept under strange skies, some who vanished like the puffs of smoke from the anti-aircraft guns. Francis Jacobson was a heavy artillery man, crossed the channels to the beaches of Normandy, stayed to see the job done. Jacobson was one who came back, wouldn't live in any other town. A man couldn't ask for a better place, better working conditions.

JACOBSON: I guess everybody always comes home to their hometown. Working conditions are fine.

STANLEY: And after he's through on the swing shift, what's home for Francis Jacobson?

JACOBSON: I'm in my own home--a home I have been building since 1947. 

STANLEY: Tell us a little bit about it. What's it like?

JACOBSON: Well, it's quite a large home, but I didn't care to have anything too 00:27:00small. The home is forty-five foot long and twenty-six foot wide.

STANLEY: Do you have a family?

JACOBSON: I have a family--three children. Oh, it's beautiful this time of year.

STANLEY: Building his own home, doing the job himself, with lots of elbow room for those three kids of his. Jacobson's not different from a lot of folks in your town. There are no slums in the valley, about eighty percent of the people own their own homes. And day in day out, in blue jeans on the assembly line or wearing a white shirt and sitting up in the front office, a man can live close to the lakes and rivers, find easy recreation around the corner from his job. Go back to Howard Hutchens, top U. S. Rubber man and factory manager.

HUTCHENS: A couple years ago, we were fortunate in being able to find a very desirable place on Lake Altoona, and there we moved, to this cottage for the summer, and find it very convenient. We have bought an acre and a half of land with one hundred twenty-five feet lake frontage, and it takes me just a little 00:28:00bit less time to get to this summer cottage from the factory, than it does to my home in town.

[Eau Claire Male Chorus singing "That Lucky Old Sun"]

STANLEY: "That Lucky Old Sun." You are hearing the Eau Claire Male Chorus again.

[Eau Claire Male Chorus singing "That Lucky Old Sun"]

[Eau Claire Male Chorus singing "That Lucky Old Sun"]

STANLEY: Great thing, the Eau Claire Male Chorus. Sing concerts for the townsfolks; travel, too. Last Christmas, the whole country heard them singing on a nationwide broadcast carried by four hundred fifty radio stations. Caldwell Johnson is their director; busy man around town. He also directs the Eau Claire Oratorial Society, two hundred thirty voices, famous for their annual Easter concerts singing the Messiah in the City Auditorium. Mr. Johnson's full-time job is at the State Teachers College. You'll find the campus near Putnam Park, where the Chippewa River rolls westward beyond the town. A college campus, tree-lined, grass-carpeted, teacher's college and dormitories with a playground for the town's youngsters who attend the model grade school there. Top-notch institution of learning. Its job: to turn out teachers for the rural, elementary, and high 00:31:00schools of Wisconsin.

[student and teacher speaking French]

STANLEY: That's John Schneider, an Eau Claire boy, talking in French with his French instructor, Eldon McMullen. Someday, John is going to teach French to other kids in Wisconsin schools, and he's learning it the right way: learning to speak it and feel at home with it as if it were his mother tongue. You remember how it used to be when you went to school years ago. You learned French the hard way and all you can remember now is, "Merci, oui, oui." Here at the college it is different. Ask the instructor Eldon McMullen.

McMULLEN: We are very interested in our experimental course in French, where all of the instruction is oral; conversational. Mr. Schneider is one of the students in that class. We have no written assignments; in fact, we meet for double the length of an ordinary class, so that we try to get all the work done in class. We feel that they retain longer what they learn orally and by doing exercises.

STANLEY: But the big news this month is the debating team away from home. A very great honor--first of its kind. An invitation to the State Teachers College to send its debaters to the National Tourney at West Point, New York. Here is Cleat Howard and Dick Donaldson, both debating students from the Eau Claire region.

STUDENT #1: On the basis of the records attained at these tournaments, Eau Claire State has been invited to attend the National Debate Tournament at West Point in New York.

STUDENT #2: There will be thirty-two teams out there at West Point including the University of Alabama, last year's defending--the defending champion from last year, and the West Point Military Academy team, so we will really have a tournament there. It will last three days, and the champions, of course, will be given a big trophy, and will be invited to the tournament next year.

[band playing]

STANLEY: You will want to hear the State Teachers College band, the concert band, fifty-two members strong under the baton of Robert A. Gantner, the college 00:33:00director of instrumental music. The band's members wear blue and gold uniforms, and their season includes concerts within a sixty to seventy mile area. Here they are in the March of the Steelmen. 

[band playing]

HAAS: It's under the direction of our president, W. R. Davies. The Chippewa Valley Forum was inaugurated in 1942. It has had a continuous program since that time, and all of its sessions are held here in the College Auditorium, where outstanding thinkers and speakers from all over the world have appeared.

STANLEY: You are listening now to Dr. Leonard Haas, Dean of Instruction at the college, and distinguished leader in civic affairs.

HAAS: The matter of community service--we have borrowed the traditional Wisconsin Idea. We aim to make this college a service center for the area which 00:34:00it serves.

STANLEY: One year ago, the town of Eau Claire voted to adopt the city manager plan of government, and elected a seven-man council to serve for a nominal $200 a year. Dean Haas is a member of that council, a symbol of the great contribution the State Teachers College makes to the town.

HAAS: I believe that the city manager form of government in its first year has gained the confidence of the electorate of this community, as was given evidence by the fact that the three men who were up for re-election were re-elected here early in April. More efficient business management of the affairs of the city, and the inauguration of a long-range program of community planning, have been uppermost in the minds of the present city council. It has given us an opportunity to get a true cross-section of community leadership actively interested in community--in the city affairs by the membership on the council.

STANLEY: Who are some of the members of the council?

HAAS: Herman White, who is president of the council, is president of the White 00:35:00Machine Works here in Eau Claire; Mr. Van Gordon, who is a local manufacturer of boats and miscellaneous products, is also a member; Mr. W. D. McIntyre, who is the local State Teacher's College Board of Regent member, and who is a local manufacturer of bread and bakery products, is serving--beginning his second term; James Voll represents the American Federation of Labor, since he is their business representative here in Eau Claire; Fred Stuessy, a long-time figure in local politics and a former mayor of the city of Eau Claire, has been making a real contribution; Dennis Danielson, a local attorney, is also on the council.

[splash]

STANLEY: That's the sound of divers splashing in the YMCA pool. One of the swimmers is Jack Quickland, a pre-commerce student at the college, now attending a night class in life-saving with Houghton Lewis as the instructor.

LEWIS: These boys are qualified for senior life-saving and life-saving duty on the beaches here in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest, in fact, any place in the country after they finish this course. 

GUTHRIE: One of the real services that we feel the "Y" offers to the entire community, not only to the citizens of Eau Claire, but to surrounding communities, any place where a public bathing beaches, pools are located--in that adequate life guards are necessary to safeguard the lives of these youngsters who swim throughout the summer months. My guess is that fully ninety-five per cent of all of the life guards serving in public bathing places within a radius of seventy-five miles of Eau Claire have been trained in the 00:37:00YMCA program.

STANLEY: Now you are in the office of the "Y" listening to C. E. Guthrie, the YMCA general secretary. The YMCA is growing, too.

GUTHRIE: One of the significant things is that we provide a meeting place for many groups in the community. Last year, we had a record of more than seven hundred different groups having regularly scheduled meetings in our building.

STANLEY: What kind of groups are represented there?

GUTHRIE: Well, today is just a typical day. Of course, they are not all this big, but it happened that this was a fairly large day. When I came down to the "Y" at 9:00 this morning, I heard a large group of women singing upstairs, and it was the Women's Chorus of the Eau Claire Women's Club, who have been meeting here regularly all through the winter months every week, at least, and sometimes oftener when they are preparing for a special concert. In addition to that, during the late morning hours and early afternoon hours, a large group of men 00:38:00and women in a garden club will have their meeting here. Tonight, every room that we have available for meetings are being taken. The CIO Council is having a meeting, the Eau Claire Stamp Club, there is a large group of people interested in improving the literature that is available to our young people in the newsstands of the community. They call themselves the Citizens' Committee on Good Literature. They are meeting here in our building. In addition to that, the Junior Chamber of Commerce have committee meetings, their board meetings, and all that sort of thing. Many civic, religious, and patriotic groups, when they do not have any facilities of their own or meeting places, they look to the "Y" to provide that type of service.

STANLEY: And you move over to the office of the YMCA Athletic Director, Clayton Anderson. It's quite a place. Pictures line the walls, pictures of boys.

CLAYTON: There must be close to five thousand pictures in here of different 00:39:00individuals, several of them duplicated, of course, in different sports, but they are all present members or past members of the YMCA.

STANLEY: You remember how it is for a boy--you remember being a kid in short pants, hanging around the baseball park, watching the Eau Claire Bears play. You suck on a pink ice cream cone from Uecke's Dairy. And you wanted more than anything on earth to be a ball player--play on a real team and be friends with the other fellows. You wanted it so hard that the bottoms of your feet ached. That's what it's like for a boy. Athletics are important. And you remember other things, half-forgotten long ago. You remember your first day at school, the big kid that grabbed your cap and wouldn't give it back and threw it in the puddle in the street. But you can't remember back far enough. Memories of childhood are lost in the blur of sunshine and rain, mother and father, candles on a birthday cake, and a rag toy. And there is something more, something beyond the limits of 00:40:00home and family life, bigger even than yourself and the playthings of your world. It grows with a child, flowing throughout his life like the flow of the great river from the spring which gives it life, flowing on to the infinite ocean at the river's end.

[children singing "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know"]

STANLEY: We are standing in the Children's Chapel of the Grace Lutheran Church, a chapel for children four and five years old. It's a miniature house of worship. Rows of tiny pews and kneeling benches, a small altar with a medallion of the mother and child above. On the altar a miniature figure of the Christ, his arms reaching down toward the inscription. The inscription reads, "Suffer the little children to come unto me."

[children reciting the "Our Father"]

STANLEY: In the Children's Chapel Reverend Quello explains the significance of this service in the Grace Lutheran Church.

QUELLO: There have been those who have questioned the value of a Children's Chapel, thinking that the adults probably should be favored ahead of the four and five year olds, but we have found it most advantageous to have the little children, the four and five years olds, become adjusted to the environment of the church through a chapel that is their size. They have become so reverent. The superintendents of the kindergarten department, Miss Viola Tilleson and Mrs. Marvin Olson, have been very successful in instructing the children to be reverent in the house of God. "This is God's house" is one of the first words that they learn.

STANLEY: And you wonder how it is when the child grows up. Do the grown-up folks of Eau Claire go to church?

QUELLO: I have never been in a city where the church has been as strong as it is in Eau Claire. I don't believe there is a single time during the week when traffic is as great a problem as on Sunday morning.

[church organ music]

STANLEY: The church and the school--that's the child's world. And everybody cares about children. The folks of the River Valley care. You can see it in Sam Davey's school, the newest elementary grade school in Eau Claire, named for the late beloved superintendent of the city school system. On the outskirts of town, high on the hill near the highway to Chippewa Falls, this school serves over four hundred youngsters, who used to have to travel miles by bus before this neighborhood school was built. You visit the school library, see the beautifully designed huge curved windows of glass brick, walls in gay pastel colors, 00:44:00florescent lighting and streamlined blond furniture. The school principal, John Walters, tells how the parents take part in school affairs.

WALTERS: I find that the parents in our PTA are very responsive and very active, as has been shown in the projects they have attempted this year, and the success of those projects.

STANLEY: What are some of those projects?

WALTERS: Well, this past Tuesday, we had an auction sale, and although our group wasn't so large, the financial end was good. We took in approximately $195 and cleared about $160.

STANLEY: What is that $160 going to be used for?

WALTERS: That $160 will be used for buying equipment for the school.

STANLEY: And you get a word with Homer DeLong, the new superintendent of the school system. A newcomer, and happy to be in Eau Claire.

DELONG: Well, I have been particularly impressed with the Eau Claire School System in the informality of the faculty itself, the friendliness that exists, 00:45:00and splendid cooperation that I have had since I have been in the city. It seems to me that over the past years, that there has been some very fine feeling between faculty and administration, to have developed the spirit that seems to exist in the school system.

STANLEY: It's a fine school system, kindergarten through high school, and all over Wisconsin, the high school is famous for its basketball team and its band.

[Eau Claire High School band playing]

STANLEY: The town's mighty proud of the high school band; everybody, teachers, and mothers and fathers, they have helped the band to grow. Ask Bob Guthrie.

MR. GUTHRIE: We have a band director, Donald I. Boyd, who has done a very outstanding job with these students for twenty-three years. Each year, he produces a band out of green material that is really outstanding. The students' parents felt so loyal and so thrilled at his ability to do a good job with the children, that they felt obligated to do something for him, and they formed the Band Parents' Organization. They sell hot dogs at football games and pop, and do 00:47:00a lot of--anyway, to make money, in other words. I was president of the organization for two years, and in the two years that I was president we made $7, 000 for the band.

STANLEY: What do you do with that money?

MR. GUTHRIE: Oh, we bought new uniforms for one thing, and it cost us $3,400, and took the students on a couple of trips--chartered three buses, and took them to Minneapolis. And we took them to Duluth, played a couple of concerts, stayed at a good hotel with them, and we do that as a courtesy, or to reward them for the extra effort that they had put forth in this band work. 

STANLEY: How do you feel about it as a parent with a daughter who has played in the band? Is it worth all the effort?

MR. GUTHRIE: My daughter played in the band for four years, and it is worth all the effort that I have ever put into it. In fact, I regret that I don't have more children with whom Mr. Boyd's hands in that band, and I would still be in there working, I'll tell you.

STANLEY: How do you feel when you see that band now, all dressed up in its 00:48:00uniforms marching out on the football field?

MR. GUTHRIE: That band is very dear to my heart, and I really get a thrill out of it. When that high school band comes down the street, it is really something to see.

[cow mooing, dog barking]

STANLEY: Everybody in town knows about Guthrie; lives on a farm nearby, and that girl of his that played in the high school band. Why, Mary is somebody you'd be proud to know too. She is a lovely girl of nineteen now, a sophomore in the Teachers College and a champion 4-H Club member. You'll find Mary in the barn by the calf pen.

MARY: Ever since I can remember, I have been around stock, and I didn't care much about dolls or anything. I would rather go out and play with the calves in the barn. I had my first calf when I was ten years old, and I groomed it all summer, and then took it to the 4-H Fair, which is held at Eau Claire every year. I took first prize. 

MRS. GUTHRIE: We were very thrilled when Mary took her first calf to the show, because we had watched her work with it all summer, and naturally we were hoping 00:49:00she would derive some benefit from it, which she did. We have always been interested in any activity that Mary belonged to. For instance, when she was a member of the Eau Claire High School band, we were always very active in the Band Parents. When she joined 4-H, we backed her up in that a hundred per cent. Any activity that she was interested in, we were interested in. And we always felt that that gave her more enthusiasm, when she knew we were behind her a hundred per cent.

STANLEY: That's Mary's mother. Look in her eyes, and you see all the warm affectionate pride and loyalty that stood behind Mary in her plan for an education and in her work with livestock. Mary kept on raising calves, four each year, and when she was twelve Mary began exhibiting beef at the Northwest Junior Livestock Show. Ask her dad how he felt, sitting on the sidelines, watching Mary win the championship ribbon at the show last year.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, I think without a doubt it was the happiest day of my life. I was very excited and thrilled. I just don't know how to express myself when it 00:50:00comes to that. You help these boys and girls work all these years, and when finally your own daughter gets to the top, why, of course, it makes you very happy.

STANLEY: And besides winning the championship award, Mary earned a tidy sum of cash. The calf was sold at auction there at the livestock show.

MR. GUTHRIE: Mary's calf was bought by Mr. Cashman, president of Doughboy Mills in New Richmond. Sold for $1.15 a pound, the highest price of any grand champion calf that was sold at our Eau Claire show. Mary uses it to educate herself. I want her to have a college education, and when she was in high school in Eau Claire, why, Mary decided it would be a good way for her to make some money, and also get some knowledge of livestock. So she started right in and done a good job.

STANLEY: The Guthrie family and their neighbors are a big part of life in the River Valley. Luellen Lee, Mary's cousin, fifteen years old, had the grand 00:51:00champion sow at last year's 4-H Fair. The Ray family, down the road, has some of the best purebred Holsteins in the state. The neighbors get together from house to house in a continual round of dinners. Sitting in the comfortable living room at the Guthrie farmhouse, you ask Mrs. Guthrie if the farm folks joined in at affairs in the city.

MRS. GUTHRIE: Yes, we do have quite a few interests in the city, and both enjoy our city friends as well as our country friends. We feel there should be a bond of friendship between these two. We belong to a church in town, and we also help with the church out in our community.

STANLEY: Bob Guthrie is active in the Farm Bureau, and he is often out of town buying cattle in the West. But he's not too busy either to enjoy friends in town. He's a member of the Kiwanis Club in Eau Claire.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, each year, my wife and I invite the Kiwanis Club out here, the Ladies Aid from the Truax Church here, which is just two miles from here, serve the food, and we sometimes make it what's known as Ladies Night for 00:52:00Kiwanis, the Kiwanis Club pays the Ladies Aid for the the food. It gives them an opportunity to make a little money for the church, and it gets the Kiwanians away from the routine of going to the hotel for dinner each Thursday.

STANLEY: Yes, the farm folks are the big part of life in the River Valley. You remember a story you heard in town, happened long ago; about a little boy, seven years old, a farm boy, came to town to visit his uncle. Those were the sawdust days, the days of traffic on the river. And the little farm boy could never forget three things about his visit: a Mississippi steamboat docking at the river front, the streetcars downtown, and a big Eau Claire policemen. Well, the sawdust days have gone. There's a schedule of airplanes landing instead of a steamboat, city buses instead of streetcars, and the little boy grew up to outrank the biggest policeman on the force. He's Herman White, president of the Eau Claire City Council and bulwark of town affairs. He took over the little 00:53:00shop his uncle started in the basement of his home. A shop which grew from manufacturing sawmill tools, to become the White Machine Works, giant maker of piston rings and cylinder liners. Herman White knows this town, he helped to build it. Ask him about its growth.

WHITE: Well, I think it's rather marvelous that a city like this could change from a lumbering town to the highly industrial community that it is. And then, I believe the thing that makes this community successful industrially is that modern diversification. Outside of the rubber company, we have the National Pressure Cooker Company, large processors of aluminum and manufacturers of kitchenware; and Northwestern Motor Company makes railway motor cars. Then in another line that often follows lumbering, the paper mill, which is not the largest in the state, but has a reputation for making some high quality paper, such as fruit wrappers and so on, because of the pure water to be found here. We 00:54:00have several food processors: the Drummond Packing Company, the Schwahn Sausage Company among them. We also have a smaller one that has almost a countrywide reputation, the Silver Springs Farm, which produces I don't know how many tons of horseradish a year. You can travel across the country from New York to San Francisco, and ask for horseradish in a hotel or restaurant, and the chances are the bottle'll say Silver Springs Farm, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

STANLEY: Well, good zippy horseradish hits the spot. And so does baseball in any man's town. Besides heading up the Eau Claire City Council, Herman White is president of the Northern Baseball League; also an advisor on minor league affairs to Happy Chandler. Eau Claire's got a first rate ball park, rigged with new light towers this spring. And the Eau Claire Bears won the pennant last year. They hope to repeat this season. Yes, everybody in town's a baseball fan; that is, when they're not out fishing. Remember that string of names, the diversified industries Mr. White just listed? Take the National Pressure Cooker 00:55:00Company. Food's not all that's cooking there. The plant's turning out a new kind of outboard motor, one with a special poppet valve. Get Phil Brightman of the company to tell you about it.

BRIGHTMAN: The poppet valve development has permitted very attractively low trolling speed, which any fisherman loves. It also permits rapid smooth acceleration and high speeds. And it's a rare fisherman who doesn't love to both troll at a very slow crawl, and at the same time have the possibility of zooming up to pretty thrilling speeds.

STANLEY: Yes, the time has come in Eau Claire town to talk of many things, of muskies, trouts and northern pike the fishing season brings. Last week the fourteen year old boy at Art Peterson's house was busy tying flies. And his dad knows that pretty soon, the only time you'll see your neighbors is when they wave from the boat going by your summer cottage.

PETERSON: Practically everyone, or somebody's brother or sister or uncle owns a 00:56:00cottage on one of the surrounding rivers or lakes. And just about now if I were to go down the street and look for a certain fellow or, call his home, his wife would probably say, if she was still home, that he's out to the river, he's out to the lake, or he's out to the cottage, getting it all cleaned up so we can move out next month. And it doesn't matter whether he's working at Pressure Cooker, U. S. Rubber, or a clerk in a small downtown store, or if he's just a butcher at a local meat market. They all seem to have their cottages, or they have part ownership in one, so that a good share of the summer when they're not on the job, they're out at the cottage.

MUSICIAN: (singing) One evening last June as I wandered--

STANLEY: You ought to know Art Peterson is president of the Chamber of Commerce; a small business man, runs the furniture store down on Barstow Street. Yes, it's the main drag, Barstow Street. If you stand on the river bridge of Barstow Street you can look right into the heart of town. You've come a long way, 00:57:00traveler. You've looked past the street signs and billboards, looked into the factories and shops of this town, looked into the homes and the hearts of its people. You remember Ole, the man who came back from the woods. You remember the boys, the G.I.'s back from the war. Remember the children, singing, and the athletes at the "Y".

[bell ringing]

STANLEY: There's a train leaving now from the station down the way. But you're not leaving. You know the funny thing? The best part of going away is coming back home. Well, this is your home, you'll feel like the Guthries, Bob and Mrs. Guthrie across the river on the farm.

MRS. GUTHRIE: We like to go to see the bright lights and visit the big city, but we're always glad to get back to the farm.

MR. GUTHRIE: I like to go and visit there, but I don't, I wouldn't like to stay. I was very happy to get home after I was gone for a couple of weeks.

STANLEY: What's to say, yeah, uh huh.

MR. GUTHRIE: Yes, I like it in Eau Claire. In fact, I wouldn't trade places with Truman.

[organ music]

NARRATOR: The story of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This has been the fifth in a series of documentary programs about the people and places of Wisconsin, presented by the State Radio Council. Your narrator-producer was Ray Stanley. Technical assistance by Ben Rosse and Myron Curry. Music by Patricia Hazard. Script by Jay Helen Stanley, with magnetic recordings made on the spot in the city of Eau Claire. Join us in two weeks for a profile of Vilas County, Wisconsin's playgrounds.