Posts Tagged ‘new auburn’ | Next Page ⇒  

After me and them Long Beds finished up at Phoenix Park the other night, we set up and played loud at the Mousetrap.  Mike O’Brien shot some photos and now they’re viewable over on the Volume One site.

Man, it was hot in there.  Thank goodness I brought not one but two New Auburn Area Fire Department sleeveless t-shirts!

As the photo below reveals, I am a singer of great sensitivity:

Over there in Door County the Peninsula Pulse (yep, Wisconsin has a peninsula) has excerpted Truck for part of their Sustainability Issue.  It’s the section about tossing busted washing machines out the back door.  You can read it here.

A related video here.

Remember a little while back I said I got to fight a wildfire with my old NAAFD crew (and the DNR rangers, and the Weyerhaeuser crew) when I was up north?  Just got some aerial photos of the fire, taken after we had the upper hand.  I was working up around the outer edge of the smaller lobe.  Foam, mostly, but also spent some time lugging a backcan (backbag, actually).

In the process of researching the history of my hometown (New Auburn, Wisconsin) (now Population: 562) (urban sprawl!) for the book Population 485, I discovered that the town’s founder David Cartwright had written a bestselling book in 1875.  I tracked down an actual copy of the book, but it took some doing.  This morning a reader sent me a Tweet with a link showing me that along with everything else in the world the book has now been scanned into Google and you can read it here.

Here’s a portion of how I described the book in Population 485:

I have never seen any photographs of Cartwright, but the title page of Western Wild Animals is faced by an engraving tagged with the caption, “David’s Return to Camp.”  He wears a white beard and a flat cap, and he is striding down a wooded trail, a rifle in his right hand and a dead deer balanced over his left shoulder.  In short, he looks like a forbidding version of the Quaker Oats man.  A selection from the preface seems a continuation of the furrow in his brow:

He is…not a professional book maker, and he knows that it is only by practice that there comes any great degree of perfection in any art or trade.  What he gives you, he puts upon the basis of an experience of forty years, and gives it with that assurance that he believes should come of practical knowledge, as opposed to any hypothetical and visionary trash.

No dancing ‘round the campfire with patchouli and rain sticks, then.  All well and good.  But here’s where my ears really pricked:

Since the author of this book claims for himself an incompetency to the task of putting it into shape, and the more exact wording of its pages, and has placed that part of the work into the hands of another, it is due to him to say that…

Just a cotton-pickin’ minute.  Back to the title page.  Western Wild Animals, etc, and etc.  By David W. Cartwright.  In much smaller print: Written by Mary F. Bailey.  Turns out David W. had a ghostwriter.

Thanks to nanaze for the note.

Snuck up to Jamboree Days Sunday.  It was good to see folks.  My wife and I and our two little ones wandered around through the carnival, ate charcoal chicken and homemade hot dogs, sat on the sidewalk and caught candy during the parade, and watched some softball.  I got to see many of my Nobbern firefighting pals.  Always so good to visit.  The photo above is of me and my friend, neighbor and fellow firefighter Bob the One-Eyed Beagle.  Not only is Bob a good guy, he is a master at turning our pigs into neat little packages of smoky delight…

If you don’t know the story of how Bob got his nickname, it’s in here.

P.S. It used to be the beer tent, but now it’s the beer barn.  They’ve done quite a job of tuning up the park there in Nobbern.  I remember when I moved back in 1995, there was a falling down softball backstop and some old horseshoe pits.  Now it’s a going concern.  Tip of the cap to all the volunteers sung and unsung.