[Magdalen] 777 mails

[Scott Knitter]

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 5:20 PM, ROGER STOKES
<roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Roger, currently in Milwaukee.

Welcome to my native city and one of America's few places that for
years was run by socialists: not just people suspected of being closet
socialists, but actual out-and-proud socialists. For 50 years,
1910-1960, Milwaukee elected Socialist mayors. This was influenced by
a combination of some idealistic German intellectuals (Milwaukee was
"the most German city in America") and the rise of factories and labor
unions. Fertile ground for a socialist experiment, unique in the USA.

Artifacts of this period include the city council being officially
known as the Common Council, emphasizing the "cooperative
commonwealth" ideal; a fantastic system of parks (Whitnall and
Mitchell parks are among the best). My mother attributes many of
Milwaukee's historically excellent public services (perhaps not so
excellent today) to the Socialists: reliable streets and sanitation
services; responsive police, emergency services, and city agencies.
I'm not sure whose idea it was, but it seems a good one, to provide
every home with a high-quality lighted set of tile house numbers,
uniform in style and legibility, a black number on each white ceramic
tile, in a fairly attractive frame with a little light bulb in the
housing, so emergency services could read numbers at night. Half a
million

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/89804422.html

I don't know if it's on yet, but Milwaukee hosts one of the largest
festivals in the country, called Summerfest. I'll look it up...just a
sec...oops, doesn't start until 24 June.

In my parents' younger days growing up in Milwaukee, the South Side
(south of Wisconsin Avenue, mainly) was mainly Polish Roman Catholics,
and apparently most Protestants, African-Americans, and especially
Lutherans lived on the North Side. My mother spoke of priests warning
of dire consequences for young Catholic girls who met Lutheran boys
from the North Side and dared to darken the doors of their Protestant
conventicles. (Mom dated such a boy for a time and went to a dance at
his Lutheran high school).

Milwaukee is of course the home of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran
Synod (WELS), one of the quite conservative, but not the most
conservative, of the several Lutheran denominations. But the ELCA and
LCMS are also well represented in Milwaukee, and not only on the North
Side.

I was baptized at Our Lady of Good Hope RC Church (on the North Side!
Gasp! but my parents lived in a suburb (Shorewood) near there at the
time).
http://www.olghparish.org/

My mother's parents attended Our Lady, Queen of Peace (on the South Side):
http://www.olqpmke.org/domain/13

As far as local speech/jargon goes, I was skeptical of this site, but
a lot of these were common among my relatives:
http://www.folklib.net/history/scansin.shtml

"Ainna?" was constantly on my grandparents' lips: "Getting chilly now,
ainna?" And "Let's go by Auntie's," meaning "Let's visit Aunt N."
"Say, Emil, go by Walgreens and pick up some bat-trees, ainna?"

Enjoy Milwaukee now. :)


-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA