Wisconsin Folklore

PREFACE

PREFACE In 1846, two years before Wisconsin became a state, the English scholar William J. Thoms coined the word "folklore." A partisan in the romantic and nationalist movements that swept Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, Thoms was fascinated by the sayings, stories, music, songs, beliefs, customs, and crafts practiced by English peasants. He felt, as did the Brothers Grimm in Germany, that intellectuals and artists need no longer look for inspiration beyond the medieval "dark ages" to the "classical" cultures of Greece and Rome; rather they could find more appropriate and immediate stimulation in the traditions of their own humble peasants. Thoms and others like him also recognized that folklore was far more than mere raw material awaiting transformation by an educated elite, it was valuable in its own right not only for its aesthetic qualities but also because it expressed the experiences, the attitudes, the "soul" of a given nation's ordinary people. More than 150 years later, on the occasion of Wisconsin's sesquicentennial, my own interests and motives as the compiler of an anthology of Wisconsin's folklore differ little from William J. Thoms and the Grimms. To be sure, like most contemporary folklorists, my notion of "folk" extends far beyond peasants, my sense of "tradition " embraces change as much as continuity, and my all-inclusive concept of just who constitutes a place's "people" counters perversely narrow interpretations that have justified potato famines, pogroms, holocausts, and ethnic cleansings. But I am very much a hardcore cheesehead. I was born and raised in Wisconsin and, for me, it is the center of the world. I don't mean this in a narrow chauvinistic sense. I believe that every place is, for its particular people, the center of the world, and that no place is inherently better than any other place. But Wisconsin is my center, my place, and, echoing America's southern regionalists, Wisconsin is where "I'll take my stand." I was born in 1950 and raised in Rice Lake, where my parents had built a home at the city's edge, between a woods, a swamp, and two lakes-a few hundred yards from the site of an old trading post where Frenchman August Carot swapped goods for pelts harvested by local Ojibwe. Our near neighbors were German, Bohemian, Norwegian, French Canadian, and Irish. Mostly Catholics and Lutherans, they were xv PT~face dairy farmers, loggers, woodworkers, gunsmiths, factory hands, and resort owners; some ran trap lines for beaver and muskrat, hunted ducks and deer, and fished year round; some picked mushrooms, gardened, and tapped sugar maples. As a kid I hunted and fished, skated and skied, worked on haying crews and peeled bark with a spud in the pulpwoods. I heard jokes about Ole and Lena performed in lilting dialect by wool-clad former lumberjacks whose cheeks bulged with "snoose." I sampled the Tschemachs' homemade sauerkraut and sniffed the lutefisk for sale in Gammelgard's Grocery. I ate aged Swiss from Hilfiker's cheese factory that was so sharp it made my mouth itch, and I sneaked into Broome's Club 48 for a draft of Breunig's Lager Beer. I played "Dirty Clubs" in Mike Gesicki's basement, danced the polka at Sokup's Tavern, and listened to WJMC radio when you could still hear the Erik Berg Band broadcast Scandinavian music "live" under the sponsorship of the Indianhead Rendering Plant. All this and more marked me with what scholars call a particular worldview, weltanschauung, or mentalitie. At sixteen I went off to Australia as an "exchange student, and then to school and work in Indiana, Ireland, North Carolina, Washington , D.C., and Kentucky. I came to think critically; to view my home territory from the inside and the outside; to evaluate, to compare, to contrast. But I had never really left home. In 1970, as a junior in college, I learned that one could study folklore as an academic discipline. Four years later-after earning a B.A. in English Literature from Notre Dame and an M.A. in Folklore from the University of North CarolinaI found myself pursuing a Ph.D. in Folklore and American Studies at Indiana University . There I listened and looked, mostly in vain, for comprehensive accounts of the rich folklore I had encountered while growing up in Wisconsin and the surrounding Upper Midwest. Disappointed but determined, I began combing libraries, archives, and bookstores; seeking out some of the writers whose works I found; carrying a tape...