Dave Wood

The great southern novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote a book called “You Can't Go Home Again.” I for one am glad I ignored his warning, although I must agree for a time I thought he was right. Those were the days when I'd drag the B.W. down to my hometown of Whitehall, Wis., only to find the restaurants were closed or had gone belly-up and the only friends I'd made over the years were buried in Lincoln Cemetery or had taken off for God knows where.

So when Covid struck, we locked ourselves into our old house on Walnut Street, River Falls, imposed our own quarantines and just decided not to go ANYWHERE, settling into our cozy haven to watch hundreds of movies, many more than once. Finally, in early February, the sap began to rise in our veins and arteries and one day, B.W. said “Let's get out, let's go to Whitehall!” I was reluctant because of past experiences already mentioned. But what did we have to lose to take in some unfamiliar scenery? Not much and, it turned out, we learned that a community can recover with a new vigor.

So off we went on Highway 10. Not having seen a hill or a dale in months, my heart leapt up as we turned onto Highway 53 and headed for the home I thought I couldn't go to. First stop: Whitehall High School, my alma mater to visit master teacher Gary Giese, who teaches a course in Wisconsin history and collaborates with me on finding artifacts for the school's library. I dropped off some marvelous 19^th century photographs sent to me by a distant relative, Sean Parsons of Walla Walla, Wash. with whom we share some Whitehall relatives of earlier centuries. Gary was glad to be able to use them to decorate store windows on Main Street during Whitehall’s sesquicentennial celebration starting in September.

 We drove down Dewey Street, marveled at the massive new county courthouse, turned left on Main, inspected the Chautauqua Society bandstand built by my great uncle Archie in 1915, and which B.W. and I helped finance during recent reconstruction. Farther down on Main Street B.W. shouted out, “The Outright Affair looks like it’s open!'' We slid up to the curb and sure enough, the newest restaurant in town was indeed open. So we slid again, this time into a booth. A youngish waitress actually said she thought I looked familiar. I told her when I was a little boy I lived in an apartment above this very restaurant when it was called Firpo's Cafe, which was run by my stepmother. “Firpo’s?” she said quizzically. “That was in 1945,” I explained.

After she said “Really!” she brought our order and B.W. called Celina, our widowed sister-in-law who lost my brother five years ago after 63 years of marriage. Be darned if she wasn’t home and told us she'd come right downtown. We hadn't seen Celina for months and, noshing on crispy onion rings and frosty libations, we caught up on recent and not so recent developments. WE WERE HOME!

Five p.m. came and who should burst in from the icy cold but one of my last friends in Whitehall, Bill Nemer, retired Assistant D.A. I don't know why we're such good friends because he's super smart and I'm well...not so...

Bill laid on some obscure quotes from a movie we had both seen as kids and then I remembered why.  We both love old movies. So we bored B.W. and Celina with tales of Charles Starrett and how he was a matinee idol before he became our very own Durango Kid, and Brian Donlevy, who starred in the excellent film “The Great McGinty” after leaving Beaver Dam, WISCONSIN to head for Hollywood.

Finally, we broke up to leave to catch a restaurant reservation in nearby Independence. Celina treated us to a wonderful fish fry, which doesn't exist in Whitehall. (But will soon, when Roman Catholics finally outnumber Lutherans and the new owner of the golf course opens his brew pub at the clubhouse.) And then it was back to the Outright Affair for a nightcap at the bar with Mr. and Mrs. Mike Halama, whom I had never met but who occupy a farm in nearby Elk Creek where my mother and aunts were born before World War I. Trempealeau County is a small world. WE WERE HOME!

We slept in at the Oak Park Inn on 20 acres of Italianate statuary, which when I was a kid was the home of a famous architect, Harley Hopkins, designer of many great buildings, including Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota. Come morn we sneaked over to Dani's Cafe, newly renamed the City Cafe, which is what my parents called it when they took it over back in the 1960s (Bravo, Dani, for leaving things alone. Why in the world did Lutheran Brotherhood, founded by Whitehall native Herman Ekern rename it Thrivent?). At breakfast, we chatted with my fellow high school band member Dagny Lund, who always tells it like it is, and my high school classmate Lyle Skoyen who spoke to me in English and Norwegian to Dagny, whose late father Berger was a prominent ski jumper from Norway, who came to the Olympic trials in Whitehall back in the thirties and liked it so much he stayed on and raised a family here.

Lyle told us his mother was concerned that he didn't speak until he was four years old. “Dr. Leasum told Ma not to worry, that 'he'll speak when he wants to.'” “Yes,” added Lyle's wife Patty, “and he's been speaking ever since!”

And then it was on to Celina's apartment at the edge of town where we brought Celina a facsimile of my stepmother's long-lost Sloppy Joe recipe, from “The Joy of Cooking.” Dining with us were Celina and two neighbors – Jo Hegge, my late sister Kip's erstwhile sister-in-law, and Rita Olson Hegge, a year older than me and one of my last friends in town, who in our childhood could give a Tarzan yell better than Johnnie Weissmuller. OOH--OOH YAY! 

I misjudged the Sloppy Joe recipe, because it was too spicy for our Norse guests. So we soothed our palates by scarfing down Celina’s strawberry Jello and plates full of her homemade sandbakkels and blonde brownies  We talked and talked and talked about who had left our midst, who probably had Alzheimer’s, teachers we loved, teachers we hated, about the recent death of Verdel Kolve, who grew up in nearby Blair and became a great Chaucer scholar and the only person from Trempealeau County who became a Rhodes Scholar, and before we knew it our brief luncheon had stretched to four hours. Then we headed for Highway 10 and the flat land that was our “new” home in River Falls until our next trip to guess where?

HOME AGAIN!

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.