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Clark County Press, Neillsville, Wisconsin September 15, 2010, Page 17 Contributed by "The Clark Co. Press" Transcribed by Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon. Index of "Oldies" Articles
Compiled by Dee Zimmerman
Clark County News |
September 1915
F. E. Brown has purchased a new ring-making machine for his jewelry store. It is an ingenious little device that will make a ring while you wait.
Farms in York Center were visited by killing frost on Sunday night, September 5th and all corn patches got ripe at the same time. Monday some of the farmers started to cut their corn.
A surprise was sprung on Mrs. Grace Turner of York last Saturday night in honor of her birthday. The guests came with cake and ice cream, so all spent good social evening.
Last Thursday afternoon at the Lutheran parsonage, Mr. Edward Dittman was united in marriage to Miss Jennie Lewandosky, with Rev. E. Kemena officiating. The young couple was attended by Mr. John Kitman and Miss Tillie Gloff.
The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Fred Lewandosky of the Town of Weston and is a highly accomplished young lady, well liked by all who know her. The groom is the son of Mrs. John Dittman, also of the Town of Weston and is a young man of good habits, well known and respected. The couple will reside on a farm near Christie.
The backward season and the killing frost that swept over the entire Northwest last week made the seed corn prospect for next spring look bad. In order to make sure this vicinity should not be shut off from a crop next year, the next day after the frost the Farmers Elevator in Neillsville ordered a carload of last years seed corn from the Dickinson Seed Co. This is northern grown seed and had a germination test of 90 or over and will be sold at the very low price of $1.75 per bushel. Make sure of seed corn now, by ordering at Farmers Elevator in Neillsville.
Norma Wren, Eugene Short, Elsie and May Huckstead and Marie Carter entered high school Monday, making 18 from the Pleasant Ridge in high school this year.
The automobile to be given by the Neillsville merchants and other businessmen of Neillsville will be drawn at 11 oclock Saturday, Sept. 18 at the corner of Hewett and Fifth Street. The Neillsville Band will play in the forenoon and afternoon to entertain the people who come in with their tickets or who come to see the drawing.
The interest in the drawing has been growing for several weeks and there is sure to be an intense interest in the result. Come to Neillsville Saturday, Sept. 18 anyway whether you expect the car or not.
The ticket drawing results were announced one week later:
It is very evident that an auto is a popular toy or tool as one may look at it, for there were certainly more people with wistful looks on their faces than have been seen in this town for some days. They came from north, south, east and west and all brought bunches of tickets with them. The band played and in addition to visiting with one another they all did a lot of trading in the stores. At 11:30 everyone gathered at the corner of Hewett and Fifth Streets.
On a dray wagon was placed one of Leasons watering stock tanks into which were poured ticket duplicates of numbers given out as trading stamps by Neillsville merchants and other businessmen the past few months.
Geo. Ure, Dr. Monk and W. C. Thoma acted as judges and with forks and paddles they stirred up the mass of tickets. Then they blindfolded two of the city teachers, Miss Henry and Miss Cronk, who are comparative strangers here.
The lucky number drawn as 208748, found to be in the possession of Wilber Boyd of the Town of Levis. Wilber Boyd was the lucky boy and may his good luck continue; may he never turn turtle with his auto or run off a road.
Granton and vicinity is contributing most liberally to the Neillsville High School this year. Among those from thereabouts attending are: Lawrence Davis, Leo Grassman, Bernard and Ruth Pietenpol, Anita Schoengarth, Birdine Kuhn, Daphne Beeckler, Myrtle Cole, Florence Davis, Curtis Cattanach, Esther Welsh, Amy Marsh, Jean and Sarah Davis, Pearl Lavey, Mamie Ure, Hazel Washburn, Hilda Petznick, Dulcie Smith and Grace Allbaugh.
A little dog belonging to Mrs. Charlotte Maines slipped the collar and chain off its neck in the baggage car Tuesday when Mrs. Maines and daughter, Delphine, were in the passenger coach enroute to River Falls. It jumped from the car while the train was in full motion west of Neillsville, making its way back to the house where they had lived. Miss Delphine Maines came back from Merrillan on the return train to get the dog.
Loyal is preparing for a two-day social and business revival to be known as Loyal Days, Oct. 7 and 8. All sorts of amusements are planned and a good time expected.
September 1945
Mr. and Mrs. Fred Newton, who live near Alma Center, received a message Monday from the War Department stating that their son, Kenneth, had been liberated from Toyama Camp No. 7 in the Nagoya District Camp No. 7 of Japan and would be home soon.
Kenneth was taken a prisoner of the Japanese at the fall of Corregidor and later transferred to the Japanese homeland.
The Newtons had received only one message from him during all this time and that was more than two years ago. His family and friends had feared that he was dead.
Kenneth is well known here, being a nephew of S. R. Newton of Humbird.
Nowhere in Neillsville are the pins of re-conversion more acutely felt than in the home of James A. Musil. The reason is that the Musil family went into war production in a big way, with a sled-length commitment.
Prior to the war the Musils raised no chickens. But with rationing on and meat likely to be short, they hunted up a meat breed of chickens and went for them in a big way. They chose White Giants, a breed, which produces females of seven or eight pounds and males up to 14 pounds. They had 100 of these White Giants chickens when the news came of Japans sudden surrender, leaving them with potentially close to 1,000 pounds of food.
After the surrender, the Musils were discussing the prospects at the dinner table. They had heard that meat rationing would soon be lifted.
Goody! said a small Musil, Then we can have T-bone steaks again!
But Mr. Musil, being a banker and bankers being what they are, pulled a long face and cooled the enthusiasm with this: What shall we do with all those chickens? We went into chickens, and we have a lot of them. Well have to eat them before we talk about steaks, 1,000 pounds of food.
So if you read in the papers that Ford and General Motors area having troubles with re-conversion, with labor demands and all the rest, you will understand that their difficulties are minor in comparison with this local problem. The Musils must attain re-conversion by eating 1,000 pounds of chicken.
Only two rural schools of Clark County are without teachers as of last Saturday, according to reports made to Eugene W. Laurent, county superintendent of schools. These were Butlerville and Pioneer School. It is possible that one or both of these will be supplied before schools are to open.
Thus the threatened shortage of teachers has been met, and the end of the war finds the rural schools fully under way, though not without plenty of tribulation.
Mr. and Mrs. Frank Miller of Neillsville, Rt. 1, received from their son, Clarence, the story of his war experiences. The uncensored letter comes from Germany and it gives his complete story of combat experience. The letter follows:
They recently released the censorship regulations so I thought I would drop you a few lines to let you know a little more about my escapades since I left the good old U. S. A.
We left for New York Harbor February 11. I doubt if I will ever forget that first day out at sea. It was snowing and cold and I was so blue I almost felt like crying and most all of the others did too. We had a fairly nice trip over, although we swept out a submarine once or twice but nothing ever came of it. They surely had us guessing though. We arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, February 22, and from there took a train ride to Bridgewater, England, where we made our home until the invasion of France.
On June 4 we left Portsmouth, England, for the coast of France. We were all expecting a rough ride across the Channel but as luck was with us, things were pretty quiet. We manned the ack-ack guns on the ship and were on the alert status most of the way across. When we neared the beach everything began to pop. I never saw so many planes and ships concentrated in one area in my life. There was enough noise from the massive navy guns on our warships alone to drive a man crazy. The whole beachhead area was just one big cloud of dust from shell fire and dive-bombing.
When I hit the beach I got my first taste of war and to say the least it was repulsive. I had read a lot in papers about the German artillery but I never realized it was so ruthless and merciless until we came face to face with it on the beach. The first night we got very little sleep and most of us didnt get any, but sleep was the least of our worries. There was a German plane that went over just after dark and it came every night thereafter about the same time. We called him Bed-check Charlie, anyway he started dropping his bombs and three dropped within a few yards from us but they were duds and didnt go off. If they had, a lot of us would have been buried alive or killed by shock.
From the beach we were sent inland to guard an air strip at Coigny, France and stayed for some time before and until Cherbourg fell.
Then came the break-through at St. Lo. We stayed there until we got to Versailles where we got another big landing field for our planes. From there we got passes to Paris and enjoyed the beautiful scenery and some pretty girls.
Then we went on to Liege, Belgium where I got my first glimpse of the highly publicized buzz bomb. They travel very fast and are hard to hit. I got to see Liege a little later, where lots of homes were nothing but piles of rubble. Then came the German break-through and Krenkelt, which was near the Siegfried Line. On Dec. 16 we were in the middle of the Germans big drive. We became surrounded with our escape routes cut off while more shells than I thought possible were thrown at us in the next three days. On the third night we were finally able to open up a road where we could retreat for several miles back, where we held a stand.
Finally, we drove the Germans back to the Cologne Plains. We crossed the Rhine River at Ludendorff Bridge. And there, we were the first ack-ack of our kind on the opposite shore. The Germans tried to knock out the bridge with their planes dive-bombing the area so as to keep our reinforcements from crossing, but we kept them from knocking out the bridge.
After the Rhine, we were around the Ruhr Valley and when the Krauts surrendered we were sent to the Third Army under General Patton, where we were until the war ended. Now you have an idea of what we have done in this war.
A letter has been received from Stanley Coffin of the Neillsville community. He says he has spent two years in the jungle and on the Ledo-Stilwell Road since its early days. He went to China in June with a convoy of 49 trucks and returned with admiration for the enlisted men who put the road through in the face of obstacles seemingly impossible.
Since his return Stanley has been processing men for their return to the United States. He says that if ever Americans wanted to get back home, those boys do. They are in the backwaters of civilization, with no cities, and plenty of unhealthy and unsanitary conditions and lots of work.
Stanley himself is getting more comfortable now. He is out of tent life and has a four-room bamboo hut, with two vehicles at his disposal, a jeep and command car. He has a riding horse and eight ducks in the back yard. Also he has a collection of 136 butterflies, netted by him in Burma.
Werner Jenni has bought the property at the northwest corner of West and Sixth Streets, occupied by the Christie Service Station and owned by John Moen. It is his purpose to make additions and improvements and to operate a service station there.
The milk trucks of Clark County will be released on November 1st from the route restrictions imposed by the war. They will revert to peacetime status and will be in position to resume their old competitive method of securing and serving patrons. This word comes from the county office of the AAA and will presently close a chapter in war regimentation.
The rerouting of milk trucks was the most important activity in Clark County of the office of defense transportation. The plan consisted in cutting out duplication of milk routes and in switching patronage to such an extent as to permit a substantial reduction in truck mileage.
Figures in the AAA office indicate that the rerouting plan saved 1,815 truck miles per day in Clark County. This meant a saving of two million tire miles per year and a saving of nearly 200 gallons of gasoline per day or about 72,000 gallons of gasoline per year. It also meant much in the saving of the wear and tear on trucks, the repair of which became a major trouble before the wars end, and remains major trouble, now that the end has come.
The Carnation Condensery at Owen will pass into the hands of Blue Moon, Inc., on or about January 1st.
The Owen Condensery is one of the larger dairy plants of the county employing a substantial number of persons and buying milk from a large patronage in the northern part of the county.
A common sight while driving along Hewett Street in the 1940s, on the west side of the street just before the ONeill Bridge, was that of milk trucks lined up along the south side of the Condensery building with their drivers waiting to unload the filled milk cans onto the intake apron of the milk plant. It was the days of much activity during the Condenserys operation at that site. (Photo courtesy of Bill Roberts)
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