Dave Wood

What in the hell is a “Ramadan?” And what was happening “after?”

Those were the questions we kids asked ourselves back in the 1950s as we sat at our desks in the old Assembly Hall and stared at the gigantic painting of elephants and slaves and big shots riding astride massive pachyderms in a very exotic setting. Our proctors didn’t pay much attention to the only colorful thing in the room, hanging above the high school’s modest library. Whose only attraction were the bare-breasted African ladies pictured on the pages of every male student’s favorite magazine in the library, National Geographic, of course. 

We finally heard from Latin teacher Sylvia Rice, who knew EVERYTHING, that the giant portrait looking down on us was painted by a WHS alum, and we figured it was different than most because of the stylistic method used by whoever must have worked a long time with the massive work of art. “Ramadan” is an Islamic rite and bas-relief,” she explained. “It iss a painterly device in which the figures in the foreground project higher than the colors of the background, giving the appearance of a third dimension.” 

So there hung “After the Ramadan” for generations of students who puzzled its origins, but were further puzzled when After the Ramadan disappeared years later when I visited the old assembly hall to make a presentation. I asked a teacher what had happened to it and she said she didn’t know what I was talking about.

Later when I visited the magnificent new high school, “After the Ramadan” made a miraculous return to a wall in the new auditorium. It was like seeing an old friend after his long absence. I asked WHS history prof Gary Giese, who thankfully is as crazy about history as I am. His reply: “I was up in the attic in the old school and saw it lying in a dusty heap. I dragged it out, had it cleaned and persuaded the authorities to hang it in the new school.”

Well, thank goodness for folks like Gary Giese who don’t throw things away just because they’re OLD.

More recently, I once again must thank another young man who hasn’t the heart to throw things away.  Andrew Dannehy is the editor of the newspaper I grew up with, the award-winning Trempealeau County Times, formerly known as the Whitehall Times. Fans of the old version worried that when the Times merged with several other Trempealeau County weeklies, the new management might change the offerings and we oldsters would no longer be able to read every week the feature called Memories of 25, 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago, which had  been for years gleaned from the Times’ magnificently complete collection of past issues.   

Long story short, as they say on “The Sopranos,” Dannehy and his staff did no such thing. Au Contraire! If anything, they’ve expanded the feature, which I wait for every week. Two weeks ago, I headed straight for Memories and when I got to 1923, I found an item that answered lots of my questions: “Florison Hopkins dropped by and shared with Ye Old Editor, news from his son who is studying at the Chicago Arts Institute and writes me that he has just won an award for his huge painting that depicts an Islamic rite. His prize was $600.00.”

Aha! Florison was the son of James Hopkins, a Scot who was one of the first arrivals to our neighborhood in 1855. He bore a son, Harley J., who I well remember as the first man I ever saw who wore a beret. Yep, a guy from Whitehall, who never forgot Whitehall, who restored his grandfather’s mansion and formal gardens with the help of his architectural students at the University of Minnesota, where he was also a designer of the beautiful art deco Coffman Memorial Union, an interior design that a recent administration dismantled for something more MODERN. Harley John Hopkins also drew the battle maps for San Mihiel in World War I and designed the interiors of Milwaukee’s Pfister and Schoeder Hotels. He was a dashing character, whose friends called him Hoppy and whose nephew told me Harley introduced his small-town relatives to the evils of the dry martini. And wore his military sabre down Main Street when he returned from The Great War.

And what of his baronial estate? Twenty acres of formal gardens full of genuine Italianate statuary and rooms decorated with wallpaper Harley had steamed off the walls in France’s Loire Valley! When Harley died, his adopted son Mike sold it and recently it has been restored again as The Oak Park Inn, popular bed and breakfast for people from all over the Midwest to bicycle the largest network of bike trails in Wisconsin and walk in the spacious gardens where the Hopkins’ negro servant is buried because the authorities would not allow her burial in LINCOLN (irony of ironies) Cemetery. When we take friends to admire the spectacle, they probably wonder how it ended up in the little town. Now they’ll know, thanks to the little weekly that keeps publishing memories of many years ago.