It only took five years or so, but Volume II of my little
history of La Farge is finally finished.
The book is printed and is available to the
public.
After completing the book at the beginning of October, I gave the text
to my publishing guru, Chuck Hatfield, who formatted the book, made a really
spiffy cover and added all the photos, maps and other inserts. Chuck also contacted printing companies that
he has used in the past and took bids to print my book. We settled on TPS Printing for the job and
Chuck e-mailed them a copy of my book.
TPS ran a quick proof copy of the book and sent it back to me for a look
over.
At this
point in the process, I was a little ambivalent about the process as I kept
remembering things I should have included in the history. I realized that everything cannot be included
in such a history, but leaving parts of the story out of the telling is
difficult. As I looked over the proof
copy, I also felt there were lots of places that the story could have been
better written. Regardless of my
ambivalence, the proof was approved and the printing process initiated.
Volume II
is over 420-pages in length. It covers
the goings-on in La Farge from the 1960’s until the present. The longest chapter in the book focuses on
the 1970’s - a period that I title “Dynamic Times”. The 1980’s and ‘90’s also are covered in some
depth as I tried to focus on a couple of developments that make La Farge rather
different than most small towns in western Wisconsin. Those, of course, were CROPP coming to town
in 1989 and the creation of the Kickapoo Valley Reserve about a decade later.
I tried a
different format with my “Chapter Notes” in Volume II. In the earlier book on La Farge’s history
that I wrote, I put the “Chapter Notes” in a separate section at the end of the book. I had “borrowed” this technique from author
Lynne Heasley, when I read her book about the Kickapoo Valley, A Thousand
Pieces of Paradise. Lynne had used
the chapter notes in her book to flesh out the story even more and to add some
personal comments as well outside of the main text.
As the
length of Volume II became greater and the number of “Chapter Notes” stretched
into the dozens for some chapters, I thought I should put the notes at the end
of each chapter instead of all being placed at the end of the text. I felt the notes and the personal asides
contained within them would be easier to access if they were at the end of each
chapter. As a reader of Volume II,
you’ll have to let me know how you like the change. I’m sure Lynne Heasley will be OK with it and
even might copy my style in return.
In another
similarity with my first La Farge history book, I have also included a number
of “Local History Notebook” columns in Volume II. Since I write about a lot of divisiveness in
the community in Volume II, I tried to pick out some of my columns that show
how the people of La Farge came together during that time as well. Successful athletic teams at LHS were often a
source of that coming together, so I copied a few of my columns about some of
those teams and included them as part of the story. In addition, I included “Notebooks” on the
building of the first medical clinic in La Farge, the history of Calhoon Park,
“The People Remember” oral history project on the dam project, gas station
memories, pool hall memories, and several more.
By the time that we added those twenty-five “Notebooks” with photos, the
book had stretched out to over 420 pages.
The editing
of Volume II was a bittersweet process for me.
My good friend, Paula Muller Howard had edited the first volume of the
La Farge history for me. As I completed
each chapter of that book, I would send Paula the finished product. She would read through it, making edits and
providing comments for me to look at along the way. That process worked really well as Paula had
a real talent for editing. We had
started the process again for Volume II and Paula had edited the first three
chapters for me. Several other chapters
were written, but I had been tardy in passing them onto her to look at. With Paula’s passing, the editing process at
which she excelled was lost. I’m sure
her absence shows in the latter part of Volume II.
I conclude
Volume II of my La Farge history with another of my little “Walks Down Main
Street” that I often use to close out the year when writing my newspaper
column. There are actually several Main
Street walks in Volume II as I like using the devise to show what was happening
in the village at a particular time in history.
The last
walk was actually first written in 2013-2014 as that was when I had hoped to
finish up Volume II. But for a variety
of reasons (that I chronicle in the beginning of the new book), that last
little walk kept getting extended, first into 2015, then 2016, and finally
2017. Even though the walk ends up
chronicling about a half of a decade in La Farge’s most recent history, it also
shows some of the dynamics that show how the changes occurred. This is how I introduce that last walk down
Main Street at the end of Volume II.
So as we arrive at the end of our story
about this little Kickapoo River town, we might ask the question – what
position is La Farge in? If we climbed
up to the top of Fort Wales or Spring Mountain with our camera phones and took
a snapshot or a panorama scan – what would we see? Or if we climbed into an airplane and
departed one of the air strips in Hillsboro or Viroqua, and then swooped down
over the village and photographed it from above
(Which has been done so many times as the Kickapoo floods ravished the
town from 1935 right up through the devastating 2008 flood. Does anyone fly above La Farge and photograph
it when there isn’t a flood? Of course
they do, but we don’t tend to see those photos.), what would we see now? How would the La Farge of 2017 compare to
that view of La Farge in the early 20th century taken from Fort
Wales? (By the way, that photo was the
cover of the Volume I book.) Would you
recognize the La Farge of 2017 in a photo taken from an airplane if you compared
it to the 1935 aerial photo of the flooded village that was the front page of
the Milwaukee Sentinel?
And sometimes, even now,
When I’m lonely and beat.
I drift back in time and I find
my feet
Down on Mainstreet.
Verse from the song “Mainstreet”
By Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band (1977)
If you would like me to send you a copy of the new Volume II, send me a $25 check (covers all packaging and postage) to P.O. Box 202, La Farge, WI 54639. Make sure to include your address if it is different than what is on your check.
