Dave Wood

QUESTION: WHAT DO THE FOLLOWING PERSONALITIES HAVE IN COMMON?

Otis Redding, Little Richard, Eudora Welty, Georgia O’Keefe. Joyce Carol Oates, Hattie McDaniel, Rodney Dangerfield, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, The Racine Belles, the Kenosha Comets, Jim Lovell, Abraham Lincoln, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles.

ANSWER: THEY DON’T BELONG IN A BOOK ENTITLED “WISCONSIN IDOLS: 100 HEROES WHO CHANGED THE STATE, THE WORLD AND ME,” BY DEAN ROBBINS (WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS).

Whenever Ruth hopes to please me, she brings home from our fine public library a book about my natal place, Wisconsin. Some of these books are simply trash cooked up by freelance writers to bamboozle suckers like me. For example, when we first arrived in River Falls, she brought home a tome that purported to be a guide to family bars and supper clubs, which lauded the wonders of Prescott’s Steamboat Inn which had been closed for several decades. Also recommended was a family tavern in Mondovi’s downtown called The White Pig. Ruth and I dropped in and found the customers’ language so blue it would have outdone the language used by my Uncle Chet. Family tavern indeed. This book was obviously written out of the yellow pages of an elderly telephone book. 

The book under consideration today was also published down Madison way and bore an historical society imprint that suggests reliability. But take a gander at the “Idols” it includes, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice at least 20 of these so-called Badgers spent very little time in our state. Abe Lincoln gave one address during his Presidential campaign; Bob Dylan left the University of Minnesota for Madison where he Lasted only a week. Author Eudora Welty liked the beer in Madison but headed back to Mississippi when the temperature inevitably dropped. Joyce Carol Oates left Madison’s English department because it was made up of out-of-date literary snobs. So why in the world did the author include hillbilly singers like Otis Redding? He died in a plane crash near Madison! Certainly not because he ran out of REAL badger personalities.

Here are a bunch of notable omissions for you to chew on:

Kenoshan Alan “the Horse” Ameche, Baltimore Colt and entrepreneur; Milwaukeean’s Pat O’Brien; The Queen of Off-Broadway, Don Ameche, Alan’s cousin and movie actor Richard Lane, born in Rice Lake and starred in a score of movies as Boston’s Blackie’s  detective rival and opposite Raquel Welch  in “Kansas City Bomber;” and my grandmother’s cousin, George Wilbur Peck, two-time Wisconsin governor and creator of Peck’s “Bad Boy” of Whitewater and childhood neighbor of my great grandma; Thornton Wilder of Madison and author of “Our Town;” actor Brian Donlevey of Beaver Dam and star of “The Great McGinty;” Polish--American novelist Anthony Bukoski and actor John Hodiak (“Lifeboat” and “A Bell for Adano”) from Superior; “Curly” Lambeau of Green Bay and Packer great from New Richmond “Johnnie Blood;” 30-game winner Burleigh Grimes and Earth Day founder Sen. Gaylord Nelson both,  from Clear Lake; author Ben Logan of the Kickapoo Valley and author of “The Land Remembers;” science fiction great Clifford Simac born near Prairie du Chien; Lorine Niedecker, Fort Atkinson poet and macabre humorist. Novelist and publisher August Derleth and biographer, both of Sauk City, and novelist Jane Hamilton of Rochester, Wis. 

But wait! There’s more! There’s one more to fill the holes left by the not so idyllic holes left in the “Idols” book. Let’s add Glenway Wescott, literary, and then come to the inevitable stop with this avant garde literary critic and novelist from tiny Kewaskum.

I hope I’ve made my point that freelance authors and biographers owe readers the resolve to dig deeper than the aforementioned “elderly” yellow pages. Oh, one more:

THE INIMITABLE New Auburn nurse and ambulance driver Michael Perry who named his first book after his hometown’s number of citizens: “Population 485.”