Time Capsule - W

Cold weather means doing a bit of cleaning and discarding.  I was moving a file cabinet and found this bit of history behind it.

I can date it precisely.  Late Summer of 2004.

We had a German student staying with us for a month or so.  It was not an official Foreign Exchange situation, just providing a bit of US experience for a kid as a favor to a friend.  It  worked out although I recall our own kids being lukewarm to the concept.  I think its important for foreign travelers to see something of the US beyond what they see on TV and what they encounter in the usual destinations:  New York, Florida, Washington DC and, God help us, Vegas.  Germans also are, in my experience, infatuated with Texas.

So we took the lad to a Demolition Derby.  Car obsessed Germans have a hard time getting their minds around the concept of purposeful destruction of automobiles just for fun.  We sat close enough to get sprayed with mud.  He was impressed.

Not long after that we asked if he'd be interested in seeing the President.  "Really?" he asked.  Sure.  There was an election coming up and George W. Bush was coming to town for a rally.  A phone call or two got us tickets.  

It was held at a local factory that made cardboard products.  I don't remember it being especially remarkable.  Big crowd.  Helicopters overhead.  A brief speech that was pretty much a recitation of the usual stuff.

But for a German this was a unique event.  Given their troubled 20th century history political parties don't hold big rallies.  Too "Nuremburg" I guess.  But there we were.  We each got a big cardboard W to wave around.  Maybe he liked President Bush a bit more because of his Texas origins.

A few years later we did visit the student back in his home country.  Later still I understand he moved to the US and started a successful restaurant chain.

It was in Texas of course.

Can Money Buy Happiness?

Christmas is over and we are in that odd in between week that divides Yule and New Years Eve.  So....what did I get for presents?  Nothing much, unless you count the presence of friends and family.  And I do.  Very much so.  It's the simple things you cherish.  And besides as the old saying goes, you can't buy happiness.

Nonsense.

Despite being, and proudly so, an ol' softy I  believe that certain varieties of happiness can indeed be purchased.  Confining ourselves to those that are both legal and acceptable for the general internet reader here's a list.  And because the State of Being Happy should not be exclusive of those with less cash I have suggestions at various price points.

Price range zero to $5

A nice pint of ale.   Perhaps the ultimate value with respect to the cost/happiness ratio.  You can close your eyes, let the cares of the day fade, take a deep sip and remember times, pints and friends past.....

Price range under $20  

We like our house.  We've been here for about 35 years.  And for all that time we've been complaining about a few small flaws.  It has a laundry chute that drops from the top floor to the basement.  That's cool.  But the grungy duds end up in a small enclosed space that has always been difficult.  You bend over and lean in.  There are dark corners were mismatched socks hide.  As the decades roll by our backs start to complain more.  It was time to do something.

As usual the best answer was a collaborative effort.  Initial Guy Solution.  Cut a bigger hole so that we can slide the laundry baskets in, perhaps sitting on a platform so they are at a nice lifting height.

The Gal Modification of Guy Solution.  Get a cheap laundry basket of the proper dimensions!

Around $100

Sometimes modern technology is just different ways to waste time.  But a few things come along that are outstanding.  When sitting out in the cold tree stand deer hunting there is nothing as nice as a garment or two heated with Lithium ion batteries.  Ah....warmth.  Why it even helps a bit with the chilly toes and fingers.  I got a shirt like this and it's great.

This is, I must point out, a male model not your humble correspondent.  He looks a bit dweeby to be out in the woods but at least he's allowed the usual foolish unshaved  look grow out into the beginnings of a proper Hunting Season Beard.  

Several hundred, but worth it.

I live in Wisconsin.  It snows a lot.  I don't want frostbite and/or a heart attack.  Gotta have a snow blower.

OK, not cheap but so appreciated.....

A garage.  Leaving a car outside to get frozen is bad enough.  If you have to park it on street and move it on plowing days....ugh.

Christmas goes to the dogs

Most of the time our house is a pretty quiet place.  Not so at Christmas when kids, grandkids, friends of same....and dogs descend upon us.  I don't show a lot of people pics, but them dogs....

Old Dog snoozes on the sofa.

The young dogs tussle and growl at each other.

The first dog drama of the holiday actually came a couple of days earlier when one of the hounds, noting the tree in the house and recalling what trees are especially good for....well, use your imagination.  The incident was later memorialized in block construction with the grandkids.

Oh there was also the usual stuff.  Good food and plenty of it.  Presents for those of an age to be interested in same.  One of our boys got this interesting gift, a Willie Nelson Chia Pet.  I'm not sure just what kind of seeds this comes with.  As Mr. Nelson says on the box:  FUN TO GROW!

Editing Yeats - Christmas 2022

I've always had mixed feelings about the Yeats poem "The Second Coming".  It is powerful stuff, but speaks to us from such a cynical and broken time, the aftermath of The Great War.

That's not a fair representation of the human existence.  There will always be good and bad in the world; always be things happy and sad either in your current life or just over the horizon.  The difference between a basic optimist such as myself and a pessimist like Yeats is what you choose to see when peering into the coming dawn.  Yeats had an unhappy family life.  If you can't find happiness and inspiration in your children and grandchildren then you are not reporting, but contributing to the cynical and broken aspects of the human condition.

Here's my re-write for Christmas 2022.

Slowly widens the Family band

Yet still they hear the Call of Home

Things hold together.  The Centre is secure.

The Anarchy of grandchildren and dogs is loosed upon us again.

Innocence persists in a benighted world.

The Best love each other with passionate intensity.

And the Worst we can forget for one blessed day.

Herman Dettloff

Today we have a look at another early druggist of Chippewa Falls, and at his surviving building.

Herman Dettloff was born in New York state in 1854.  He moved with his parents to Wisconsin in 1858 settling in Bloomer for a year.  The family then moved to Chippewa Falls where the father was an early blacksmith.

The first mention I could find of Herman Dettloff was in a school report from 1868.  He got good marks for deportment.  He supposedly started working as a drug store clerk the same year, making him only 14 at the time.  At a still very young age he was in partnership with a man named Beauchene but that business dissolved in 1872 leaving Dettloff - now all of 18 - as the sole proprietor.

He was the usual civic minded sort.  Quite early on he was treasurer for the City Fire Department, even being briefly appointed chief in 1893.  He was also City Treasurer in the late 1870's and a director of the 1st National Bank in the 80's, so he must have been a fairly sharp businessman.

In fact he is at various points in the 1880's said to be doing business in St. Paul as a wholesale paint and oil dealer, only dropping in occasionally to look in on his drug store interests.

In 1880 he purchased a 2 story brick building on Bridge Street for $5,500.  This was somewhat damaged in a very destructive down town fire in December of 1884.

Five years later Dettloff built a brand new brick store at 120 Bridge Street.  It still stands today.

By the mid 1890's the firm was doing business as Riester and Dettloff.  This name was still in use in the 1920's although Herman Dettloff had died in 1918.  The later history of the building includes a stretch as Nelson Drug and later the Q Bake Shop.  It is now some sort of boutique.

120 North Bridge, December 2022.

Many pharmacists made up a few of their own preparations.  Here's one from Riester and Dettloff circa 1910.   Courtesy of Ryan Metzenbauer.

Variable Luck at the Good Luck Drug Store

L.W. Stapleton needed some good luck to compete in the drug store trade in Chippewa Falls.  After all he was literally next door to one of his main competitors.  But maybe he was the kind of guy who relied on luck here and there.  Some of his non business interests suggest that.

In 1912 he announced that he was leaving the trade after 30 years in business.  So lets put his arrival on the scene at 1882.  I start seeing ads for his store in 1884 so that seems about right.

In the 1880's he was manager of the Chippewa Base Ball club, an undertaking where Luck is not unhelpful.

And he was a serious fisherman.  He was a member of the Home Fishing Club which later changed its name to the Chippewa Fishing Club.  They had a club house at Chetek and at one point were said to be buying a 14 person boat!  He also had his own place at Chetek, called The White Lodge.

Luck, in business or in angling, can be good or bad.  In 1896 there was a big spring ice pile up on the Chippewa River and downtown businesses had extensive water damage.  The Good Luck store was no exception but as a partial compensation in the process of moving stock out of harms way Stapleton supposedly found a pocketbook full of cash!  In another bit of bad luck The White Lodge burned to the ground in the middle of the night in July of 1908.  A party of young people from Chippewa were staying there and accounts of the ladies scrambling out in various states of undress and the young gentlemen enjoying the whole situation are a bit saucy.

Stapleton's farewell message is worth presenting as is:

Stapleton's Luck ran hot and cold.  But he did have very nice bottles.  Several versions are known all of which feature a horseshoe.

His house also remains at 707 West Grand.

The Collette Pharmacy through the years.

Digging through the history of Pharmacies in Chippewa Falls prior to 1910 you have a lot of names to deal with.  Something on the order of 29 or 30 individuals operating in various partnerships.  But in general there would be four or at most five drug stores in town at any one time.  These long running enterprises - such as the Eagle Drug Store we recently visited - continued on for decades with different men behind the counter.  Here's an example of a store, or at least a building, that has survived into the modern era.

Now a very nice Thai restaurant it was once.....

Urgel Collette was born in Quebec in 1857.  He came with his family to Chippewa Falls at age 13 and began clerking at one of the established pharmacies circa 1874.  Six years later he started his own store.  I suspect he actually took over the store he worked at but as drug stores came and went pretty quickly in the 1870's I can't say which one.  If I had to guess I'd say Leahy and Jesson as they went out of business at about the right time.

In 1888 he built the handsome brick structure that still stands on Bridge street.  Business was good and in addition he took on the clientele of a druggist named Wilcox who died in 1891.

That same year a notice in the paper says that:  "Joseph Nolte after taking a course at the School of Pharmacy passed a successful examination and is now a registered druggist.  He has resumed his place at Urgel Collette's."  As the 19th century inched closer to the 20th pharmacy was becoming a more professional business.  Just being a hospital steward or a long term clerk was by that point not considered sufficient qualification.

Collette had the usual small town life.  He turns up in various minor civic jobs.  When he and or his wife go out of town their doings get reported.  At one point Mrs. Collette was said to be "..quite sick with brain fever" but she recovered uneventfully.

In 1898 Urgel Collette dies and the business is taken over by long term employee Joseph Nolte in partnership with a man named Ihle.  Nolte is said to have worked at the store for 13 years and to be fluent in French and German.  Ihle came over from a pharmacy in Menomonie.

Nolte and Ihle kept the Collette name.  Partly to preserve the tradition but I suspect also out of respect for the founder.  

In 1919 Nolte died unexpectedly.  The next year the building was purchased by other parties and converted into a meat market.  It has been other things over the subsequent century.  At one point it seems to have been a drug store again, run by a man named Oleson.  I see mention of a business called Kookers North, whatever that was.  I vaguely recall it being a barbershop called Gentleman's Quarters when I moved to town in the mid 1980's but I could be confusing it with the many similarly named establishments.  For a while it was an interesting hamburger joint with a railroad theme.  That proprietor was a guy whose main interest was renovating old buildings and he did a good job at that.  At running the restaurant maybe not as well.  Its been Mahli Thai for about a decade now.  I recommend their food highly.

When the original building was sold in 1920 the drug store, I assume run now by Ihle, moved down the street to 224 North Bridge Street.  This was in the "Ihle Block" no longer extant.  But next door there was still a pharmacy when I came to town.  Was Konsella Drug in the direct lineage of Urgel Collette? Konsella's has been closed for about a decade.

Urgel Collette bottles are relatively uncommon given the length of time he was in business.  This one still has some residue of the circa 1895 prescription gumming up the insides.

Nolte and Ihle bottles on the other hand are very common.  It was still the Collette Drug Store a decade or so after its founder had passed.

Still Lifes with Snowblower, Berries and Little Free Library

 

Robotics - Farewell to 2022

Last robotics work session of 2022.  We'll have one pre-season session left before the Build Season officially begins on January 7th.

Last week the team was a bit off, holiday distractions and all.  It's also a really big team, now at 35 students.  So we've divided up into five sub teams with an adult coach or two on each.  Six kids get way more done that 35 do.

And we had a less intense session.

One student has acquired a Mascot Suit!  This is not the full outfit on display.

We have the four swerve drive modules actually mounted onto a temporary wooden frame.  Enough for software to start working the complicated programming.  Or it would be if two of the four units were not missing a teeny, tiny little spacer that I pointed out to the kids two weeks ago.  Ah well, a quick fix and much better than powering them up and seeing things break.

Team photo time!

And after that....Venisonfest.  Four of our hunting families brought stew or chili.  Excellent fare and a good end of the year send off.

Wisconsin Man

The epitome of Wisconsin Manliness.  Posing, rifle over shoulder, with a deer in the bed of a pickup truck.  It is my rifle.  And my deer.  The truck belongs to the guy whose land we were hunting on that morning, an old friend.  But since he's a car dealer maybe I'll end up with that too.....

"Never Act with Children or Animals"

This quote is often attributed to the famous misanthrope W.C. Fields but the sentiments are so timeless that I have no doubt it goes back to the very beginnings of what we understand as public entertainment, the Greek Theater.  I'm sure they took a particularly dim view of fauns and satyrs, those goat/human hybrids who combine the baser qualities of each.

Everything old is new again.  And so on a recent winter afternoon I found myself helping on a video shoot for the robotics team.  We'll see how it emerges from editing but the premise is that maybe you can teach goats to write code.  

Goats of course being Chaos Engines it escalated quickly....

Ah, What's in a Name?

Let me say from the start that I generally disapprove of vulgarity.  It shows a lack of imagination and rarely does it express an idea better than words your grandmother would approve of.  But rarely is not the same as never, and I have an even greater dislike of not calling things by their True Names.

Recently we had the robotics team over to visit one of our sponsors.  They have a new facility and it is awe inspiring.  But I couldn't take my eyes off something up in the ceiling.  It was a fan, slowly turning and something like 25 to 30 feet in diameter.  It looked like this:

When I stood directly beneath it I could read something on the hub.  I'm playing around with a video camera so figured I might get a decent shot here:

Big Ass Fan.  Yep, that certainly describes it perfectly.  

The company that makes these started out being called something else.  But their customers just started referring to their products as, well exactly what they are.  So they changed the company name!  In case you are in need of a ridiculously large ventilation fan here's where to go.

Big Ass Fans.  If that's what you need why look anywhere else?

The Eagle Drug Store of Chippewa Falls

Although this is my third article on early drug stores of Chippewa Falls this one, the Eagle Drug Store, has the most to look at.  Due to a combination of easy to photograph location and some very attractive artifacts there is a lot to like visually.

The beginnings of the Eagle Drug store are a bit confusing.  1875 was a year that saw a great deal of change in the local pharmacy community.  As best I can piece it together, here is what happened.

1. Thomas McBean, the first druggist in Chippewa Falls, opens a new store at the corner of Bridge and Spring Streets.

2. McBean sells a half interest in the store to Hiram S. Allen - who was pretty much the founder of Chippewa Falls - with the intent that Allen would set one of his sons up in the business.

3. Ads for H.S. Allen and Son's Eagle Drug store begin to run in August of 1875.  I'm assuming no formal training for Allen Jr., as a Dr. H.B. Losey and Mr. J.F. Bieg are listed as being in charge of the prescription department.

4. By November of 1875 the store has been renamed Goddard and Company, Eagle Drug Store.  Goddard owned another store in town and must have bought out Allen.

There is in this sequence of events something of a lesson about small town business communities.  McBean and H.S. Allen had known each other since 1856, when Chippewa Falls was a frontier hamlet full of lumberjacks, river rats and sawyers.  It looks like McBean wanted to get out of the drug store business and Allen wanted to set up one of his sons in a stable profession.  It is telling that at least in my first pass research I can't even find out which Allen son this was.  It seems to have not worked out, with ownership passing to Henry Goddard after just a few months.  Goddard on the other hand, kept running the store for 25 years.

Henry Goddard was born in New York state in 1844, moving with his family to Beloit Wisconsin two years later.  Like McBean he served as a Hospital Steward during the Civil War.  He came to Chippewa Falls in 1875 purchasing a drug store owned by a man named Hinckley.  He must have barely had time to unpack before switching over to the new Eagle Drug store.  His ads prior to the switch were pretty good too, although I don't believe he made the Elephant part of the store name!

At various times he had partners.  A man named Chisholm joined him in 1875 or 76, having previously clerked for the enterprise run by Leroy Martin.   After Chisholm left circa 1882 Goddard sold the store to a man named Spence around 1888.  In 1892 Spence retired due to ill health and the Eagle store along with another store on the south side called The Model Drug Store were purchased by a partnership of Goddard and a father son team named Watson.

This photo shows the Eagle Drug store probably in the 1890's.  Its on the corner of Bridge and Spring.  And right next door to the Good Luck Drug store.  An interesting situation and one that speaks to the demand for and competition between pharmacies.  We will consider this in a future post.

When Goddard retired from the store a second time in 1899 Frank Watson ran it solo.  Despite being a Pharmacy school graduate his ads seem to run towards patent nostrums with his name associated with them.  By this point the drug store trade had become very competitive and it perhaps Frank Watson's health was in decline.

In 1910 Watson died in his rooms above the store.  He had been making final arrangements to sell the store.  In fact a gentleman named Muggah from Ellsworth was in town to sign the papers transferring ownership.

The business was still occasionally referred to as Eagle Drug after the sale but after a while it just became Muggah Drug.  And with that closing out of a 35 year run perhaps we can finish the story of The Eagle Drug Store.  Founded by the man who was the first permanent resident of Chippewa Falls in the 1840s it lasted long enough to see automobiles go past on Bridge street.

The bottles of Eagle Drug Store

From about 1880 to 1910 it was common for druggists to order bottles with their name embossed on them.  Usually these were clear glass, but for light sensitive prescriptions, or perhaps just to be fancy, you sometimes find colored ones.  This is a real beauty from the Goddard and Chisholm era, very early 1880s.

Here's one from circa 1890 when Spence ran the Eagle and Model stores.

Then the late 1890's when Goddard came back into the business and ran it with Watson.

The Look of Robotics 2022/23

Here's the logo for the 2022/23 iteration of the FIRST robotics team.  It will look good on shirts, pit artwork and a new team flag.  

I have heard idle chatter from the Media/PR subteam that I'll have to wear a bright pink wig if the team achieves certain benchmarks (which are very much under discussion!).  I think this will look as good with that ridiculous get up as anything would.