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    Athens, WI: The Place Where Time Stood Still
    Athens, WI: The Place Where Time Stood Still
    Athens, WI: The Place Where Time Stood Still
    Ebook146 pages2 hours

    Athens, WI: The Place Where Time Stood Still

    By Ed Semon

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    About this ebook

    The real power of memory lies in the richness of experience a town such as Athens offered. I donʼt fully understand the strength of that bond, yet I feel the power of attachment. Some may despise those provincial places; we gloried in ours. Daily we played, fished, swam and hung out together. We were inseparable from our friends.

    How often in any personʼs life does someone buried deep in your memory, someone you have not spoken to in five decades call to say, “Eddie! Remember me!”

    The town and the times Buck and I talked about had little to do with numbers or buildings. We spoke of magic places that no longer exist: Second Dam, Erbachʼs Woods, the clean river, Helendale Farm. We spoke in reverent voices about our friends now sadly mostly gone. George, Harold, Andy, Ralph, Lloyd, Bob. We spoke of that better time before World War II, television, jet planes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Semon
    Release dateJun 24, 2013
    ISBN9781301481019
    Athens, WI: The Place Where Time Stood Still
    Author

    Ed Semon

    Ed Semon, retired from teaching reading and study skills at Waukesha County Technical College, is now living the Wisconsin dream with his artist wife Jeanine, on beautiful Bolton Lake near Lac du Flambeau. Between swimming and boating, he writes for the theater, short stories and his novel Capture a Comely Woman, soon to be published.

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      Book preview

      Athens, WI - Ed Semon

      PREFACE

      On a late May afternoon in 1990, I walked out of my Waukesha County Technical College office for the last time. After twenty-six years of teaching, I retired, not to rest from my labors, but rather to begin a new career, writing. I wrote Gates to Understanding, a reading and vocabulary textbook, plus a number of instructional books teaching the meaning and usage of American idioms. After a theater production of my play Family Tea, I started writing about Semon family history.

      Short essays about my early life in Athens, Wisconsin, delighted our children. Common reactions to the stories were, Was life in your town actually like that? Did you really do the things you talk about? I don’t believe it. Yes, it really was the way I recall my twelve years in that tiny village.

      In Irving Howe’s epic study (World of Our Fathers) of the vast emigration of eastern European (Russia, Poland, Romania) Jewry, he describes the struggle Jewish immigrants had in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, adapting to their new lives in America. The work is mammoth, yet it neglects to tell the story of Jews who didn’t come through Ellis Island, who didn’t settle in New York, who didn’t work in rag trade sweat shops—people like my parents who made a Jewish life in a small town in northern Wisconsin.

      My story is a tribute to my father and mother, who, at age nineteen, crossed more than an ocean; they threw off the chains of the old world without surrendering their heritage—not easy when you are the only Jewish family in Athens, Wisconsin, an otherwise Christian town.

      THE PLACE WHERE TIME STOOD STILL is three stories: Athens—small town Wisconsin in the 1930‘s; my father, mother, brothers and sister—the only Jewish family in town; and a boy—growing up in that magical time and place. Mostly, we were the same as our friends, but there were some who never let us forget that we were different.

      PROLOGUE

      DESPERATION–RUSSIAN STYLE

      In 1904, a Japanese naval armada shelled a far eastern Russian port on the Pacific ocean, setting off a chain of events which in 1913 brought my father, Benjamin Sumanowski (his Russian name), to his new home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. A portion of the story of those events is pure legend, an untold piece of history.

      In 1904, it was believed that Russia was the foremost military force in the world. In the Russian army, however, a large number of its soldiers were either unfit to fight or disinclined to do battle for the hated Czar. Both Russian and Jewish boys were known to mutilate parts of their bodies (fingers or toes) to avoid service. New recruits sought ways to desert. Such was Jacob Ugoretz.

      War on Russia’s Pacific coast meant transporting an army by railroad train thousands of miles to the east. New recruit Jacob Ugoretz rode on one of those trains. Throughout the long journey, he and a friend devised a scheme for escape.

      Somewhere at a water and refueling stop close to the far east coast of Russia, the two would-be deserters crawled unseen out of their rail car, climbed to the roof of the transport, tied themselves to the wooden walkway, gripped iron fasteners, and held tight until the train came to a station and stopped. Only men brave enough to put their lives at risk—knowing that if discovered they would be shot without hesitation—would be so desperate that they would face cold winds, rain and snow, or a quick end due to a sudden fall. Who would go to such a rash measure to escape service in the Russian army? Only a pair of young Jews searching for freedom in an anti-Semitic world.

      In the dark, they scrambled down to the ground with as little noise as possible and brashly asked the railway guard for a cigarette. The guard, under strict orders to shoot any potential deserters on sight, put down his rifle only to discover the boys had disappeared into the night.

      Somehow from war-torn far eastern Russia, Jacob Ugoretz managed to cross an ocean and a continent, enter the United States illegally, and find work in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. How he was able to accomplish this unbelievable journey, even his grandchildren don’t know.

      Jacob found a wife in Sheboygan—Batya, an immigrant Russian Jewish woman. Batya was my father’s mother’s sister, making Jake Ugoretz my father’s uncle. How Aunt Batya got to Wisconsin remains a mystery.

      In 1913 my father left home and family in Vitebsk, a small rural village in north central Russia. He was nineteen years old, had no money, and spoke no English, yet somehow he found his way to his aunt’s home in Sheboygan. There, my dad changed his name and found a low-paying job in a chair factory. He left Sheboygan a year later and began painting houses in Milwaukee before enlisting in the World War I United States army. Seven years after the time he first arrived in the States, he set up a general merchandise store in northern Wisconsin, in a logging town called Athens. I don’t know how he decided there was opportunity in that small rural community, but his choice proved to be a good one.

      What I do know is that in 1920, after returning from army service at the end of World War I to Milwaukee, he met and—after a three-month whirlwind courtship—married my mother, Hattie Neumann. She was twenty years old, only recently emigrated from a remote settlement in Czechoslovakia. There was no honeymoon. He put his new bride and her meager belongings into a truck, and drove two hundred hard miles north to the town where he had opened his first general merchandise business.

      The store wasn’t a specialty type business with a single product line like a bakery or a butcher shop; rather, he offered groceries—sugar, flour, bread, sausage, shoes, boots, overalls, hats, gloves, hardware, and ladies dresses, plus a multitude of other necessities, all of which made up the general merchandise inventory.

      I don’t think my father started out knowing a lot about the goods he sold, but he was a fast learner, and from stories I heard, he was wasn’t liked by the other merchants in town. Hate in Athens was in good supply over the twenty years our family lived there. There was also love.

      My mother was loved by the many women friends she made in Athens. However, she hated the hard winters and the two-hundred-mile distance from Milwaukee’s Jewish community.

      It is important to note that in the first half of the twentieth century a Jewish family could be found in most every small town in Wisconsin. They did business in general merchandise, scrap metal, or buying and selling produce such as potatoes, cabbage, sweet corn, wool and animal hides. Once tailors in the old country, they often owned and operated clothing stores which later became department stores—for example, Winkleman’s, named for a Jewish family in Wausau, which grew to what became a well-known department store in the richer and more populous Marathon County seat of government.

      These hard-working immigrant Eastern European Jews fled from harsh living conditions and persecution. They were observant, pious people, and intensely patriotic. Their children attended universities and became lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and social workers. Many studied economics and business, and came home from school to carry on the family business.

      Those same pious, immigrant, Eastern-European Jews had to tailor their piety out of necessity to American norms—such as working on Saturday, the Sabbath. Saturday was and is a traditional American shopping day, which is exactly what my father and mother did in Athens. That is, they opened the store on Saturday, in the place where time stood still.

      CHAPTER ONE

      WHO DID YOU SAY CALLED?

      Whatever was in the air before is probably still there.

      Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone

      The telling of my story really started on a Labor Day morning. My wife and I were living in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. We were an empty nest, our children either married or at school. I was employed at Waukesha County Technical College in the Communication Skills Department.

      Jeanine took the call on a Monday morning, Labor Day. I was at Le Club playing tennis. A gentle male voice asked if this was the Ed Semon residence. She was careful and asked the voice to explain who was calling. He continued, Is this the Eddie Semon who once lived in Athens, Wisconsin?

      Yes.

      He went on to identify himself as Willy Wiens, known to Eddie and Eddie’s brothers as Buck. As he spoke, Jeanine sensed immediately that this call was special and stayed on the line.

      Willy, nicknamed Buck in Athens, and now known as Tiny, was six foot seven inches tall, weighed over three hundred and fifty pounds, and wanted to know everything she could tell him about little Eddie and his two older brothers—people he had not seen nor spoken to for fifty-four years. No one my wife knew referred to me as little Eddie, however, this person last saw me when I was twelve, the year we moved from Athens to Milwaukee. He was really -my brother’s friend, but in that town, we all sort of chummed together. They often needed the likes of me to make up a team.

      Buck and my wife talked a long time. MCI telephone company had awarded him a month’s free long distance calling privilege and he was using it from his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, to renew the bonds of shared experience of growing up in Athens. He was obsessed with talking to anyone he could find who knew him then. He didn’t explain how he found us; my brothers were even harder to locate. In the conversation he revealed a good deal about himself and some things about me that my wife had never heard. In particular, he related in vivid detail how I had been rescued from drowning by a young girl scarcely older than myself. I was eight or nine at the time.

      We, the Semon family, moved out of Athens in 1940. Buck left two years later to join the army. Neither of us returned after 1942 except for very brief visits, yet the recall of our lives during that time, and in that place, was nearly total and complete.

      When I returned from tennis that morning and was told that a fellow

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