BRIDGES & BUSES - 1975

Lately I have been working on volume II of my La Farge history.  I have been reviewing my research of the events that happened during the mid-1970s in this little Kickapoo River town.  It was a crazy time, as the controversy over the La Farge dam project seemed to control everything happening in the village.  One of those strange occurrences in the fall of 1975 put La Farge back in the media bulls-eye once again.  The local protest played out over a couple of weeks and was initiated by the appearance of Senator William Proxmire in the village.

Senator Proxmire spoke to a standing room only crowd at the new La Farge firehouse that Saturday morning, September 5, 1975.  Proxmire announced that he was withdrawing his support of the dam project after being a staunch proponent of the project for years.  The announcement stunned nearly everyone in attendance (including my wife, Carolyn and me) and the discussion after the senator left, was what do we do now?  The pro-dam contingent, a vast majority in the village, wondered what was the next step to take?

That next step occurred on the following Monday evening at a special school board meeting held in the La Farge gym.  One hundred and thirty people were in attendance at the meeting and a petition was read bearing 140 names asking that the school board take appropriate action if the board members felt that area bridges were unsafe for travel by school buses.  A discussion at the meeting brought up that most area bridges recently had weight limits posted on them, some with limits as low as ten tons.  All of the bridges on Highway 131 north of La Farge located in the dam project land had 10-ton limits except for one.  School board president Roger Gabrielson estimated that a full school bus would weigh close to or exceed the 10-ton weight limit.  Gabrielson contended that nine state highway bridges located in the La Farge School District were unsafe for the district’s seven buses.

In a 3-2 vote, the school board decided to close La Farge Schools beginning on the following Thursday due to the weight restricted bridges.  Board members Mac Marshall Jr., David Clift and Marvin Munson voted for the measure, while Gabrielson and Richard Allen voted against it.  Both Gabrielson and Allen voted against the measure because they wanted the school to close the very next day, on Tuesday.

Discussion at the special school board meeting also focused on the fact that there was no money budgeted for repairs or replacements for any of the bridges on Highway 131 north of La Farge.  Those bridges were supposed to be removed when the lake from the dam project was created, but with Senator Proxmire’s withdrawal of support for completion of the dam project, it seemed the bridges would have to remain in use.  Since Governor Patrick Lucey earlier had said that no state funds would be used on the bridge and highway relocations for the La Farge dam project, it could be years before the bridges would be upgraded or replaced.

School board president Gabrielson told the board and attendees that the school would be in contact with the state DOT the next morning about the bridge concerns and the school closing.

Further local protest was in place the next morning as the La Farge school buses crossed the crumbling Highway 82 bridge over the Kickapoo River in La Farge.  On that Tuesday, a dozen protestors, many carrying signs denouncing the conditions of the bridge as well as state and federal politicians, paced warily along the sides of the bridge.  The number of protestors grew during the week and nearly three dozen people picketed on the bridge west of Nuzum’s by week’s end.  A reporter for the LaCrosse Tribune covering the demonstrations took a photograph of Orval Howard standing in one of the holes in the side of the road on the state highway bridge.  In the photo that appeared in the next days’ newspaper, Howard sank over three feet into the hole before his feet found some hanging angle iron beneath the road.  Soon after, the county highway crews placed orange construction barrels over the holes and stretched snow fence along each side of the bridge to keep demonstrators and others away from the holes.

By the end of the week, others who were walking across the bridge over the Kickapoo River in La Farge included school children riding on the buses to and from school.

After the leaders of the La Farge Schools contacted the state DOT about the bridges and scheduled school closing, intense negotiations resulted in a compromise to avoid closing La Farge’s schools.  Representatives from the DOT met with school officials on the afternoon following the special school board meeting.  An inspection was done of the bridge at Nuzum’s (where picketing had begun that morning) and options were discussed.  The next day, the DOT sent a letter to the school with assurances that all the state bridges were safe for school buses to cross.  School bus routes were then altered to avoid crossing the bridges north of La Farge as much as possible, although the new routes took more buses across the Highway 82 Bridge in La Farge.  It was decided by the school leaders that the buses would stop at the bridge approaches and the children would be unloaded.  Then the empty bus with red warning lights flashing would lead the walking students across the bridge.  Once across, the students would return to the bus and the route would continue.  This drastic move of having students walk across the bridges in and around La Farge was continued for several school days reaching into the next week.

During that time, more state bridge inspectors came to La Farge and inspected all nine bridges cited by the school in their report to the Wisconsin DOT.  With new weight restrictions and speed limits placed on the bridges, the La Farge school buses once again began hauling students across the spans instead of having them walk.  The press coverage of the La Farge bridge protest and the students walking across the bridges was massive.  Besides the La Farge area newspapers and radio as well as the LaCrosse newspaper, radio and TV stations, the bridges story merited coverage in the Madison and Milwaukee newspapers, radio and TV stations.  Several Chicago newspapers and one of the Windy City’s TV stations also covered the story of the La Farge bridges and walking students.

La Farge Epitaph editor Lonnie Muller concluded his “WHAT NOW ???” editorial in the September 10^th issue by writing, “I support the board 100% even though I figured a Tuesday closing was even better.  The day has come when La Farge can quit taking a back seat to everything in the state.  It’s damn time our side of the story got out to Lucey and his conniving bunch of pigheads in Madison.  We are sick and tired of being the pawns in the chess game of life.  We just checkmated you Lucey and from now on you are playing a losing game with the people of the Kickapoo Valley, if not the entire state.  You figured that you could put us down forever, but it just didn’t work out that way did it?  I think that now, more than ever, the La Farge people are starting to really work together.  I was damn disgusted Saturday when Proxmire made his speech pulling his support from the project, but by Tuesday evening when I write this, I can say that I’m damn proud of these people in this community who are going to fight this together to the finish.  I think a new chapter just started for La Farge, and probably a pretty good one at that.”

In the following week’s Epitaph (9-17-1975), reporter Pete Beckstrand wrote an interesting article on the DOT bridge inspections.  The recent state inspections had found that all of the bridges in the Kickapoo Valley were structurally safe.  However, much of the article provided contrary evidence of the sorry state of most of the bridges around La Farge.  Beckstrand noted that many of the state highway bridges in the La Farge area were “used” bridges – having been originally built at other sites.  He wrote that Bridge 18 (the Bacon Bridge just north of Seelyburg and the dam project site) was originally a span over the Wisconsin River at Spring Green.  After the bad Kickapoo River flood of 1951 damaged the Bacon Bridge, the state highway department hauled an old Spring Green span out of storage and put it across the Kickapoo River as a replacement.  Beckstrand also detailed that there were a total of 92 bridges in Wisconsin that had weight restrictions and 15 of them were located in the northern Kickapoo Valley.  In the article, he quoted Lee Schneider, chief engineer of the DOT’s LaCrosse office, as saying in a phone interview that the La Farge area bridges were in need of “massive maintenance and repair”, and there was no state money budgeted to pay for it.

Within a week after the state bridge inspections, Bridges 16, 17, and 18 on Highway 131 north of La Farge were posted with speed limits and 10-ton weight limits.  The Highway 82 Bridge across Otter Creek west of La Farge was made one-way for traffic.  The Highway 82 Bridge over the Kickapoo River at Nuzum’s was already one-way due to the placement of barrels and snow fence along both sides.

Beckstrand also reported in the article that a La Farge school bus loaded with mostly small children was weighed on the scale at Nuzum’s.  The bus weighed 16,900 pounds and the Episcope reporter wondered if a bus loaded with high school age students might exceed the 10-ton limit placed on most area bridges.