Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood

How Now, Frau Blau?

131 l How Now, Frau Blau? Idon’t believe it!” Dad exclaimed. I followed him around the corner of the old farmhouse to see what was up. “Look at the privy back there,” Dad said. “Mrs. Blau is in it. Sousa doesn’t know it, but he’s got her trapped. He’s going to sell the damn thing right out from under her!” I was only thirteen, but I could see that the curtain was going up on some sort of farce featuring two classic Wisconsin characters of the middle 1950s—Colonel Sousa and his nemesis Frau Blau—in and around an outhouse near Menchalville in Manitowoc County. Sousa was the local nickname for an auctioneer who flourished in eastern Wisconsin in those days, selling off the old pioneer farms. He was a short, waddling man, ringed with rolls of fat like the coils of a tuba. But money stuck to him, and he had the other essential 132 HowNow,FrauBlau? tools of a successful country auctioneer: he knew the second-hand price of everything from a Wedgwood teacup to a silo filler, and he had a voice that could carry across two plowed fields and a woodlot. As did many auctioneers in those days, he called himself “Colonel,” affected a cane and cowboy boots, and wore a big white Stetson. I knew a little about Mrs. Blau already, from other auctions I’d gone to with Dad. She was a small-time antique dealer, about seventy and skinny as a rail. She was refreshingly honest and expected everyone she dealt with to be the same, including auctioneers. Dad was stocking our big old house with furniture that had been brought to Wisconsin by the first settlers, and what he couldn’t buy at auction, he bought from Mrs. Blau. As a sideline, he also bid on the old Ithaca, Fox, Lefever, L. C. Smith, and Parker side-by-side shotguns that occasionally turned up in basements and attics. He cleaned them up and resold them, squirreling the profits away for the day when one of the high-grade Lefevers called an “Uncle Dan” would show up on the auction block. As far as Dad was concerned, the Uncle Dan Lefever was the ultimate shotgun, and he wanted one so bad he could taste it. As we watched, Sousa and a crowd of farmers moved closer to the outhouse. It stood in a clump of overgrown lilacs in the backyard, surrounded by elderly farm machines parked there to be sold. At the moment, Sousa was only twenty feet away from the outhouse, trying to unload a rusty little Farmall Cub tractor. “Come on, boys,” Sousa said, impatiently. “I can’t let this machine go for three fifty. They don’t make ’em like this anymore!” “Good thing, too, enso?” said one of the farmers. Sousa ignored this sally. “Three fifty I got, who’ll give me four hundred?” “Three seventy-five,” offered the current high bidder, a rangy Norwegian with a cheek full of Copenhagen. Sousa shook his head. “Thank you, Nils, but we’re going fifty dollars a throw today, just 133 like the big city. And besides, you’re bidding against yourself. Who’ll go four hundred?” Sousa kicked the Farmall’s left front tire, spun around, and pointed his cane at a man of about eighty in a snap-brim straw hat. “OK, Romy!” he boomed. “Don’t go playing deaf on me now. I know you can hear me and I know you’re interested, so let’s get off the pot, here. It’s four hundred to you.” “But will it start?” Romy asked. “I’ll have to drive it home.” “Will it start? Of course it’ll start. It started the last time it ran!” shouted Sousa. A titter of laughter trickled through the crowd of onlookers, but Romy couldn’t hear it. “Well . . . ,” Romy said, tentatively. “Sold!” said Sousa. He slammed his cane down on the tractor’s worn leather seat, which split open at the blow and sent shreds of horsehair padding drifting away on the summer breeze. “Sold for four hundred dollars to Roman Pankratz, item number 176, the Farmall tractor,” Sousa said. He tore a sheet of paper off a clipboard and handed it to Romy. “There ya go, Romy,” he said. “Signed, sealed, and delivered. Just take that around to the cashier on the porch...