"Rare was the UW-Madison student backpack in 1969 that did not have a pocket lined with the crumbs of a guerrilla cookie," George Hesselberg wrote in 2004.
Ted Odell, the innovator behind Madison's legendary Guerrilla cookies, popular in the late 1960s to early 1980s, once told a fellow baker there were no copies of the recipe and that it would die with him.
True to his word, Odell took the recipe with him when he died of cancer Jan. 2. He was 81.
"Like anything, it's over," said his younger sister, Mary Odell. "People can have the memories, but they can't have the cookies."
Odell
While the recipe remains a mystery, Wisconsin State Journal reporter George Hesselberg got close in a 2004 story that listed the closely guarded ingredients: rolled oats, cane sugar, turbinado sugar, raisins, dry milk, wheat bran, egg whites, butter, almonds, egg yolks, soy nuts, sunflower seeds, canola oil, cracked wheat, almond butter, peanut butter, soy grits, brewer's yeast, vanilla, molasses, cinnamon, baking soda, salt.
"Rare was the UW-Madison student backpack in 1969 that did not have a pocket lined with the crumbs of a Guerrilla cookie," Hesselberg wrote.
Mary Odell said her brother's career was devoted to the cookies, which were sold at the former Mifflin Street Co-op and a few other outlets.
Ted Odell graduated from West High School and UW-Madison. His family's property along the Sugar River in Brodhead, 35 miles south of Madison, "was his first and only love," according to his obituary, which said that he "invented" the Guerrilla cookie at a cabin on the property surrounded by white oaks.
Odell named his bakery Quercus Alba, which means "white oak" in Latin. The obituary said the name reflected his interest in Latin and the fact that white oaks are sturdy and hardy.
"They were good. They were a hearty cookie and very tasty and very popular," said Mary Odell, a school teacher in Monroe, who worked for her brother making the cookies for a short time. "I knew I wasn't as good at it, but I tried."
Mary Odell, who lives in Madison, said after her brother retired from baking he lived full time in the "woods" until health problems forced him into an assisted living center in Janesville.
While there was some dispute over whether Odell invented the recipe or modified someone else's, he would never reveal his secrets and could be difficult when challenged.
"You could describe him in all kinds of ways," Mary Odell said, "but the most polite way to say it is that he was a private person."
Hesselberg wrote that in 1967, Mary MacDowell, a graduate student living in a small apartment on West Washington Avenue, noted a cookie recipe on the back of a box of a powdered milk drink called Tiger's Milk, and modified it.
Her husband came up with the name Guerrilla cookie, she said, "because we were anti-war activists and it was a good name for struggling against authority."
One day, MacDowell said, a neighbor — Odell — was visiting and asked about the cookies. She gave him a couple, as well as the recipe. "He made some alterations," MacDowell said. "I know he put cracked wheat in his. And he started baking them and selling them."
A co-op employee, Glen Chism, told Hesselberg the cookies were sold until the 1980s, when "Ted took his recipe into retirement."
Ted Odell once wrote to the UW alumni magazine "On Wisconsin" that "as their true and only creator (popular journalism to the contrary notwithstanding), I testify under oath: they came into existence and were made in the service of certain principles. To release them into the public domain advantages those who exploit them contrary to principles. (Consumerism is an example of what these principles are not)."
In 2010, a blogger who goes by Karen M, wrote that Chism's attempts to get the recipe from Odell failed, and that when he tried to communicate with Odell he got a series of bizarre letters, "complete with interesting pieces of sheet music and sort of disturbing drawings."
Odell told Chism, according to the blog, that "he stopped selling the cookie because it had become a symbol of what is most wrong with our world."
Mary Odell didn't want to make public her brother's political views late in his life.
"He hung out with different people," she said. "His political views turned around, around, around from 180 to 180 to 45 to 90, to whatever."
UW-Madison terrace chairs
-1-
Unlike the rest of us, the chairs take winters off. We freeze. They hibernate.
By March, our landscape is brown. Our moods are gray. Things start to change when signs of spring emerge. In Madison, chief among them is the metal sunburst chairs reassuming their position on the Union Terrace at UW-Madison in late April. In their oranges, greens and yellows, they color up the Terrace. The sight raises smiles and inspires fist pumps in the soul. They whisper a message: Relax, people. Better days ahead.
Before long, the lake goes liquid again. Sailboats bob in the waves. Spring turns to summer. Sunbathers carpet the piers.
The chairs fill with friends old and young, drinking, chatting, grooving to the bands that play on the lakeshore stage. Nights go on and on.
The Terrace has always been Madison on its best behavior and at its most picturesque.
It’s democratic, too. You don’t need to swipe a card or pass through security to sit lakeside and catch the dreamy vibe.
The chairs act as paradise’s furniture, a symbol of that feeling you get sitting for hours without worries as the summer sun heats the world and sets nightly over the lake.
Too soon, fall arrives. Campus swarms with students again. Saturdays on the Terrace come with the sounds of crowds and bands and football from nearby Camp Randall Stadium. Sunsets come earlier over Lake Mendota.
And then, poof, it’s over. We settle in for what awaits. The chairs go back into storage, with a promise they’ll return. They always do. And the vibe they bring never gets old.
Paul Soglin's mustache
-2-
It’s always been there.
It was there when U.S. troops finally started to trickle back from a long war in Vietnam. It was there to mark the beginning of the career of the city’s youngest mayor. It was there when it was in style — and it was there when it wasn’t.
It’s been trim and neat; it’s been walrus and substantial. It’s gray now, but it used to be strikingly dark.
It’s difficult to talk about Madison’s past, present and immediate future without talking about Paul Soglin. And it’s impossible to picture Madison’s mayor of 17 years without his mustache.
Soglin’s ’stache is as Madison as Soglin is, and no one has influenced the city’s personality in quite the way he has.
Soglin might have the strongest case for having lucky facial hair, and that may be why he has never shaved it clean.
It’s been there each of the 10 times he’s been elected to a seat in Madison’s city hall — seven times as mayor and three times as an alderman.
It represents the advocacy that put the city on the map as a place where liberal politics would always be welcomed, and where many still look to government to solve society’s problems.
Today, it softens a man who has spent enough time in city hall to know better than you — and he’ll let you know it.
Giant shoe slide
-3-
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
In Vilas Park in Madison, right next to the zoo.
For thousands of children and their babysitters, too,
And their brothers, and sisters and friends, all who
Have happy memories, of picnics, and hiding,
Of peeking out the windows, of climbing and sliding.
She must have been smart, that woman whose shoe
Was so inviting to children, she knew exactly what to do.
* * *
The Vilas Park shoe slide has been the go-to spot for romping children since the 1950s.
It is a whimsical throwback, a comfy place when all else fails, a connection to make-believe.
City record keepers say it is a mystery how the slide came to be. Art Cart students painted it for the first time in 1976 and paint it anew inside and out every year. So it changes annually but stays the same, too — a description that would fit most of its users.
Young lovers have been known to leave messages inside. Newcomers to Madison on their first trip to a city park need only be told to meet by the big shoe.
It is probably fitting that this refuge is within roaring distance of the lions and tigers and elephants at Vilas Zoo.
And more than a few couples have walked away from the shoe slide holding hands, big ones and little ones. For this shoe, one size certainly does fit all.
Stem cells
-4-
A room full of newborns brims with potential. Which one will become a teacher, a triathlete, a police officer, the president?
Turn back the clock nine months and the unlimited possibilities emanate from a cell — a primordial cell in the early-stage embryo that could become part of the kidney, the heart, the brain.
A stem cell.
No scientific discovery has put Madison on the international map more than human embryonic stem cells, first grown in a lab by UW-Madison researcher James Thomson in 1998.
The breakthrough came with its own unscripted path.
Would ethical opposition to the destruction of embryos bring the research to a halt? Would cell therapies cure patients with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease or spinal-cord injuries? Would Madison morph into a stem cell mecca?
In 2007, Thomson and a Japanese researcher co-discovered a way to reprogram mature cells to their embryonic state without using embryos, easing critics’ concerns.
A California company is conducting clinical trials involving stem cells in patients with eye disorders. Dozens of UW-Madison researchers are using stem cells to better understand biology and disease. Madison-based Cellular Dynamics, co-founded by Thomson, is selling vials of specialized stem cells worldwide.
Like the biography of a baby, the stem cell story might be just beginning to unfold.
Alternate-side parking ticket
-5-
It arrives each year with the holiday season. But unlike Thanksgiving turkey, snow and “stockings hung by the chimney with care,” it’s the gift nobody wants.
Which doesn’t stop the city from giving ... and giving ... and giving.
Alternate-side parking was launched in 1980 as a way to ensure city plows are able to get at both sides of the street during and after snowstorms between Nov. 15 and March 15.
Outside the Isthmus, that means residents who park on the street have to park on the odd-numbered side of the street on the odd-numbered days of the month and the even-numbered side of the street on the even-numbered days of the month, regardless of what the weather is like. Forget the date and you risk a $20 ticket.
Due to a shortage of on-street parking, those who live on the Isthmus — roughly between Park and Proudfit streets on the west and south and the Yahara River to the north — get a break: They only have to follow the odd/even rules when the city declares a snow emergency, or when at least 3 inches of snow has fallen. Failure to abide can result in a $60 ticket.
It’s not as simple as it sounds because the rule applies from 1 to 7 a.m., so if you’re parking your car for the night at, say, 8 p.m. on Jan. 5, you want to park on the even side.
Maybe this accounts for some of the reason police have issued 267,256 alternate-side parking tickets over the last 10 winters.
Paul Bunyan Axe
-6-
Some of the most compelling moments of any University of Wisconsin football season come in the moments following the annual border battle between the Badgers and the Minnesota Golden Gophers.
Since 1948, the winner of the most-played rivalry in college football’s top level has been awarded possession of the Paul Bunyan Axe, a prize that can bring 300-pound linemen to tears and make them act, well, silly.
Badgers and Golden Gophers have been spotted riding the Axe as if it were a horse. Victory celebrations always feature the winning team pretending to chop down the goal posts, a time-honored tradition that led to a standoff between the teams following UW’s 20-7 victory last season in Minneapolis when Minnesota protected the goal post in front of its band and refused to budge.
Nonetheless, the result of that game was added to the others on the Axe’s handle, which is 6 feet long.
This is actually the second edition of the Axe; the original, which was replaced with a much sturdier version in 2004, was donated to the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana.
Prior to that 2004 game, then-Badgers coach Barry Alvarez noted that UW had built a trophy case for the Axe. “And it’s empty,” he said. “That’s not good.”
The Badgers beat the Gophers 38-14 that year and haven’t given back the Axe, which is displayed in a case in UW’s locker room.
When UW and Minnesota close the 2014 regular season on Nov. 29 at Camp Randall Stadium, it will have been 3,675 days since the Gophers last touched the Axe.
Orpheum Theater sign
-7-
[Editor's note: Since this list was first published, the work on replacing the Orpheum sign has been completed. The original text of our homage to the sign appears below, but the picture above shows the refurbished sign.]
Give this sign some time.
The vintage Orpheum Theater, with its once-regal presence on State Street, is getting a facelift from the inside out. New co-owner Gus Paras is sprucing up the long-neglected auditorium. Interior artwork and stenciling are being restored with painstaking care. New front doors, resembling those that first swung open in 1927, are coming soon.
So are veiny black granite panels, meant to replace the blond brick that was put on the theater’s facade when it was “remuddled” in the 1960s.
“Remuddled” is the term of architect Arlan Kay, who has restored many a historic building and is overseeing changes to the Orpheum. Those changes are meant to undo alterations made to the movie palace half a century ago in the name of modernization.
The sign we see outside the Orpheum today is from that mid-century period. But oh, you should have seen what she looked like in her glory days.
Lights raced up and down the original sign, crowned with an Art Deco flair. The theater, designed by Chicago architects Rapp and Rapp, had cost a whopping $750,000 to build.
Now scarred with rust, the current sign stays in place because hanging a replacement over the sidewalk would violate city ordinances. City leaders are working on a solution.
It will take time — and many dollars — but one day the sparkling name Orpheum, like the theater itself, could again be a glamorous Downtown star.
Mt. Zion choir robe
-8-
They pour into the aisles from the back of the church, draped in blue and gold, clapping and swaying, defying you to stay seated.
The robe is their calling card, a shimmery warning to life’s troubles: You’re done. You don’t have a shot here.
The gospel choir at Mt. Zion Baptist Church is far from the only attraction at the city’s largest historically black church, but it’s the one you won’t be able to get out of your head. For decades, the distinctive letters on each robe — “M T Z” — have signaled technical precision and irresistible emotion. If God has an iPod, they’re on it.
The robes are well-traveled, their inhabitants generous in sharing their talent.
They’ve popped up at the UW Marching Band spring concert, as part of a mayoral delegation to Madison’s German sister city and on the program at Gov. Scott Walker’s inauguration prayer breakfast.
When pop singer Michael Bolton played the Dane County Coliseum in 1991, it was Mt. Zion’s choir that arrived on stage in a giant church pew, singing backup on “How Can We Be Lovers When We Can’t Be Friends?” Yolanda Adams, Lyle Lovett, the Blind Boys of Alabama — they’ve all sought the choir’s glow.
Beyond the hallelujahs, the robes are a symbol of a church very much of this world, one with a century-long, storied history of fighting for civil rights and advocating on behalf of all of Madison’s disenfranchised residents. Sweet music, indeed.
The Plazaburger
-9-
A decade or so ago, a New York City resident named George Motz did a documentary film, and later a book, spotlighting the best hamburgers in the United States. He has since been anointed the nation’s unofficial burger expert.
Motz’s open secret was that while a burger needed to be great to the taste to make his list, it also needed a back story. No surprise, then, that when Motz arrived in Madison in 2005 — he was in the process of expanding the eight burgers in his movie to 100 for the book — he found his way to The Plaza Tavern on North Henry Street, home of the fabled Plazaburger.
The Plaza Tavern’s history dates to Prohibition, but the burger didn’t become a true star until 1964, a year after Harold and Mary Huss bought the place. Harold had worked there since 1945. In 1964, Mary developed a secret sauce for the burger that created a sensation. Soon, dribbling the sauce from a Plazaburger on one’s chin was a requisite part of the full Madison experience.
The secret nature of the sauce was part of the allure. When Harold and Mary’s children sold The Plaza to longtime bar manager Dean Hetue in 2003, the sauce recipe — speculation involves sour cream, mayonnaise and celery seed — was part of the deal.
Motz bellied up to the bar of The Plaza and ordered a Plazaburger in November 2005. He dispatched it in a few bites, and when he published his book, “Hamburger America,” Motz included the Plazaburger among the nation’s best.
Otis Redding memorial bench
-10-
Madison has had its share of music triumphs. A good deal of Nirvana’s classic “Nevermind” album was recorded here, for example. But one of music’s great tragedies, the plane crash that killed soul singer Otis Redding, most of his band and the pilot, happened here as well.
Commemorating that awful day are three marble benches, arranged in a semi-circle, overlooking Lake Monona, where Redding’s plane went down on Dec. 10, 1967. High up on the east end of the William T. Evjue Rooftop Garden at Monona Terrace, they provide a spectacular view of the lake, the east end of Downtown and the Near East Side. And it’s a wonderful spot to reflect on the life of a man who was already a star but whose fortunes were still growing as he crossed over from R&B into the mainstream pop music charts.
Redding and his band, the Bar-Kays, were flying into Madison aboard Redding’s twin-engine Beechcraft to play shows at a bar called the Factory. Only days earlier, Redding had finished overdubs at Stax Studios in Memphis on a song co-written with legendary sideman Steve Cropper, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” which would top the U.S. pop charts after its release in January 1968.
While the story of Redding’s death was well-known in Madison for years after, it wasn’t until 1987 that the city erected the benches and plaque in Law Park. They went into storage while Monona Terrace was built over the park, then placed on the rooftop garden in 1997.
Crossing flags
-11-
The simple act of crossing a street in Madison on foot can take guts.
Traffic often won’t stop, drivers might not be looking for pedestrians, and even when some drivers stop, others might decide to go around stopped cars. It can be like playing a real-life game of “Frogger.”
Sometimes it takes a little extra power. The kind you get when you raise a flag. Not a white flag, but a red one. A red flag that shouts, like Ratso Rizzo in “Midnight Cowboy”: “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!”
They’re ubiquitous around town now, but the first of those red flags appeared in 2002 on Monroe Street, at the intersection with Sprague Street on Madison’s West Side. It could not have been a better location for the Safe Community Coalition’s pilot red flag project.
Imagine taking your family or friends out to Pasqual’s for burritos or a double taco dinner and looking out across the street from your table and thinking, “Some frozen custard from Michael’s would finish this off rather nicely.” But the traffic is relentless.
Grab a red flag from the holder and, for 15 seconds or so, you are in charge. Everyone yields to you. The flag is your royal scepter, and you shall have your turtle sundae.
Pasqual’s has since moved on from that spot near the first red flag crossing, but Michael’s is still there, and there’s still nothing like frozen custard in a waffle cone and the power to stop traffic.
Blue fist
-12-
The raised fist has been a symbol of civil rights and labor struggles for decades.
But it wasn’t until 2011 that the ubiquitous Blue Fist — a raised, Smurf-blue fist in the shape of Wisconsin, surrounded by a sea of red — was born.
The fist — which features Madison as a white star — debuted early that year amid massive demonstrations over Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial measure to all but end collective bargaining for most of Wisconsin’s public workers. The protests brought tens of thousands of people to the state Capitol for days on end.
The Blue Fist could be seen on Wisconsin state AFL-CIO posters — which typically read “Stand With Wisconsin” — carried by people filling the rotunda and marching around the Capitol.
It was on bumper stickers of cars, some of them honking to the tune of protest theme, “This is what Democracy looks like!” as they circled the Capitol Square. The fist still hangs in shop windows and homes. Some protesters had it tattooed on their arms.
The Blue Fist has even made appearances at concerts and shows. The Decemberists displayed it when they played the song, “This is Why We Fight,” on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
The image was designed by Appleton native and former UW-Milwaukee fine arts student Carrie Worthen, who wrote on the AFL-CIO website that her goal was to make it “bold and clear, loud and simple.”
On her own website, Worthen explained the symbolism: “It shows Wisconsin as a revolutionary raised fist in Democratic blue, surrounded by an expanse of Republican red with Madison as a white star.”
Carousel at Ella's Deli
Epic’s Systems Corp. has bought Ella's Deli historic outdoor carousel and its collection of whimsical art and toys that made the former Madison restaurant a favorite of children and adults before it closed in January after 41 years.
Heisman trophies
-14-
The panoramic view of Camp Randall Stadium from the lobby of the University of Wisconsin football offices is spectacular.
But it might take a visitor a while to even arrive at those windows because of everything else to look at in what is referred to as the “Wow Room.”
The display includes notable program achievements such as hardware from Big Ten Conference championships and bowl victories. It also features individual recognition, with a pair of trophies made out of cast bronze that weigh 25 pounds apiece serving as the headliners.
They’re the Heismans won by UW greats Alan Ameche and Ron Dayne, and they draw plenty of “wows” from onlookers.
Ameche won his Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the most outstanding player in college football, in 1954. A bruising fullback and linebacker who was called “The Horse,” Ameche became UW’s first 1,000-yard rusher in 1952, when he helped lead UW to its first Rose Bowl. He finished sixth in the Heisman voting as a junior and then won it as a senior after rushing for 641 yards to reach 3,345 for his career, the most in NCAA history at the time.
In 1999, Dayne capped a record-breaking career of his own by winning the Heisman in a landslide. Dayne’s 6,397 yards is still the Football Bowl Subdivision record; his career total is actually 7,125 yards including bowl games, which don’t count in the NCAA’s official records.
UW is one of only 17 schools with more than one Heisman Trophy winner.
Programs not on that list include Alabama, Penn State and Tennessee.
Hoofers sailboat
-15-
In the elusive pursuit of privacy, the last place to look can be the first place you see: The lake.
Watercraft of all types traverse the Madison lakes. For 75 years, the Wisconsin Hoofers — the UW-Madison student outing club — has provided access to the lake via sailboats, the smallest and most easily recognizable to Madisonians being the Badger Tech.
The curious are drawn to those little sailboats, probably first seen in a line upside down and stored along the shore of Lake Mendota at the Memorial Union, near the start of the Lakeshore Path. Now add permission, learn how to steer it and you have instant freedom. Just add water.
That little sailboat — a dinghy of which up to 25 are available every day — constitutes a secret to the Hoofers’ success and is the first lure cast to potential members. It is a gateway boat. Start here and you might end in the America’s Cup. (It has happened.)
The Hoofers’ history calls the boat perfect for instruction — sturdy-hulled, easily rigged and, most important, “easy to un-capsize.”
The Badger Tech design goes back decades, to wooden sailboats designed by the Naval Architecture Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, the Badger version was adapted, and more than 45 years later, it is still the learner-sailboat of choice and the most recognizable on the lake.
The Madison lakes have cruisers, pontooners, groovy kayakers and portaging-paddlers. The mascot and the cutest personal island of freedom, however, will always be the little Badger Tech.
Sid Boyum sculptures
-16-
You see Sid Boyum’s concrete sculptures all over the East Side’s Schenk-Atwood neighborhood.
There’s one called “Tree Limb Faces” in a patch of public grass across from Wilson’s Bar and Grill, a geometric structure near where Williamson Street splits off into Eastwood Drive, and what looks like a man-eating mushroom near the bike path at Atwood Avenue and Jackson Street.
Perhaps the most popular piece is the chair in the shape of a reclining polar bear that graces Elmside Circle Park. Just north of the Goodman Community Center, the placement of Boyum’s hippo has more or less changed the name of Wirth Court Park to, you guessed it, hippo park.
Sure, some of the folk artist’s work is a little bit weird, but there are probably a lot of Madisonians who consider them more aesthetically pleasing than other, more prominent works of public art — say, the rock-and-steel-girder display “Timekeeper” off John Nolen Drive at Monona Terrace, or “Nails’ Tales” at Camp Randall Stadium.
Boyum died in 1991, leaving behind a house on Waubesa Street with back, front and side yards filled with his works. In 1999, his late son, Steve, donated more than a dozen of them to the city, and with the help of a city grant and lots of sweat equity, they were moved into their current locations a year later.
There are still several pieces in Boyum’s backyard and, reportedly, in his home, which still belongs to his family but doesn’t appear to have been lived in for many years.
Tiny houses
-17-
Americans are getting bigger, and so are their houses.
Last year, the average size of a new home built in the U.S. hit an all-time high of 2,598 square feet.
Madison’s tiny house movement counters that with a structure of just 98 square feet.
That’s 33 percent smaller than the average bathroom in a typical new house today. Even Thoreau had a comparatively spacious 150 square feet at Walden Pond.
Granted, you won’t be able to watch a big-screen TV or host the family for Thanksgiving. On the upside, you will not spend a lot of time dusting.
Nationally, tiny houses have acquired a bit of trendy cachet, even a whiff of self-righteousness, as people seek to downsize and reduce their carbon footprints.
Madison’s effort acknowledges those lofty motivations but was born of necessity.
The Occupy Madison movement is constructing a fleet of the $4,500 houses to provide at least a modicum of shelter and dignity for the homeless. A village of tiny houses — the latest in Madison’s penchant for social experimentation — arrives this fall.
Like its bloated nemesis the McMansion, the tiny house has attracted its share of haters, people who see lax building codes and misguided generosity in every elfin clapboard.
Yet supporters view the tiny house as a chance for this counter-culture city to not only creatively address poverty, but to again zig as the world zags; to shrink while others swell.
Southside Raiders helmet
-18-
For the children who wear them, the Southside Raiders’ silver and black helmets signify more than football.
They’re a sign of pride in their community, a reward for doing the right thing, and a responsibility — to uphold the legacy of Raiders past and present, and to represent their neighborhood.
Thousands of children have played for the Raiders. A couple of them have even gone on to play in the NFL.
But for the 150 kids who take part in the football and cheerleading program each year, coach Wayne Strong says, becoming all-stars isn’t the point of the Raiders.
It’s about staying on the right path: doing well in school, keeping out of trouble and taking part in a South-Side tradition that stretches back more than four decades.
When those helmets come out for August practice it means the South Side is getting closer to the Raiders’ fall game days, when hundreds of friends, family members and neighbors come together in Penn Park to watch the children play each Saturday.
Known for its vibrant culture and rich traditions, even the South Side’s biggest proponents will tell you the area also has its challenges. The same goes for Penn Park.
But the Raiders are about fixing those problems — about putting the neighborhood’s children on a path to success.
For the Raiders, their helmets stand for toughness and pride. Perfect for the South Side, and perfect for the Raiders.
Nails' Tales
-19-
There are public art controversies, and then there is “Nails’ Tales.”
The sculpture by celebrated artist — and UW-Madison graduate — Donald Lipski has caused an intense reaction, largely negative, since it was first unveiled in November 2005 outside Camp Randall Stadium at the corner of Breese Terrace and Regent Street.
Actually, the angry howls of protest began before it was unveiled. A drawing of the proposed sculpture caught the attention of a State Journal columnist, who mocked it in print.
Things didn’t get much better after it was in place. Critics said it looked like an ear of corn or an appendage unique to the male anatomy. Hank Reese, a longtime employee at the nearby Mickies Dairy Bar, was asked his opinion by a reporter for a local television station. Later, Reese said, “I was diplomatic and called it a monstrosity.”
On the day of the unveiling, Lipski paced in front of the sculpture like an expectant father. He said he named it for his college roommate at UW-Madison, Eric “Nails” Nathan. The artist said he had tried to provide a piece that “projects power and strength.” Was he happy with it? “I’m pleased as can be,” Lipski said.
Around Madison in the years since, it has been hard to find many others who feel the same way. There are some, of course, among them a few who think the piece was intended as a satire on the over-emphasis of football on campus. The majority of Madison residents haven’t delved that deeply. They just look the other way.
The Wienermobile
-20-
[Editor's note: Since this list was published, Oscar Mayer's parent company, Kraft Heinz, announced it would close the company's Madison headquarters. The text below remains as it was published in 2014.]
Los Angeles has its movie stars at the beach. New York has its celebrities at Knicks games.
In Madison, we have the Wienermobile at a car wash.
For all the beauty of the lakes or the state Capitol, one of the true joys of life in Madison is seeing the Wienermobile in its home environment.
The worst traffic on the Beltline can’t suppress the smile that comes when the Wienermobile passes by. It’s a way of catching a local celebrity living like its peers, kind of like running into one of the Beatles in Liverpool.
None of that dulls the excitement when the Wienermobile is on the job promoting Oscar Mayer products. That’s been its role since 1936, and Madison has been the Wienermobile’s home since the company moved its headquarters here in 1955.
Nearly 60 years later, no one seems tired of the Wienermobile. When one of the six in the fleet is parked at a grocery store or community event, it draws people like a mosquito to a bare ankle.
Parents take pictures of their kids in front of it, and then just as often give the phone to the kids and have them take their picture.
Modern times have been kind to the Wienermobile. It has its own Facebook page, Twitter feed and blog. Photos of it veering off a snowy road go viral. The built-in goofiness of a 27-foot vehicle shaped like a wiener is seemingly why the Internet was invented.
Fame can be exhausting, so sometimes even the Wienermobile needs a break. And when it does, its neighbors are always here with a wave to welcome it home.
Whad' Ya Know stage set
-21-
[Editor's note: Whad' Ya Know aired its final radio broadcast on June 25, 2016, but remains a podcast. The text below is what was published in the State Journal in 2014.]
There are a lot of things you don’t see when listening to Michael Feldman’s “Whad’ Ya Know” radio show. Even regular listeners to the 29-year-old program can’t sense announcer Sara Nics’ constant hand gestures as the show makes transitions .
You also don’t see the endearing garage-sale quality set on the lower level of Monona Terrace where Feldman hosts his live two-hour comedy show, beamed to 155 public radio stations (48 others run an edited version).
There’s the orange Naugahyde bench where Feldman interviews audience members as they team up with phone-in guests to answer silly questions for the chance to win Wisconsin-made prizes. (One contestant recently wrote in to ask why he never got his llama manure.)
There’s the threadbare stuffed emu with headphones that sits next to Feldman, and a pineapple-shaped metallic table lamp — formerly owned by Feldman’s mom — perched behind him.
With a $10 ticket, available from www.notmuch.com, you can also see the map from which Feldman draws his “Town of the Week,” a randomly chosen burg to be featured on a future show.
Tired of the dart landing on Nebraska, Feldman cut apart the states and stuck them where he thought they should be. On Feldman’s map, Wisconsin is in southern California.
As a listener, you also don’t fully feel the rapport the sometimes-acerbic Feldman has with his audience. That’s what makes being at “Whad’ Ya Know” so much better than just listening to it.
Babcock Hall ice cream
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Madison is blessed to be nestled in the bosom of America’s Dairyland.
But it’s the 63-year-old Babcock milkfat tradition that is the focus here. Made on the west end of the UW-Madison campus, it has an element of science and a bit of academia to it.
And, as anyone with more than a first-grade education will tell you, it has a bit of otherworldliness to it.
Only a handful of other universities produce their own ice cream, including Cornell University and Penn State. UW produces 75,000 gallons a year, bringing in about $700,000 in revenue. That’s just shy of what the Memorial Union sells in beer.
And if you think the UW spends too much of its budget on Barry Alvarez, some of us spend too much of our household income on Babcock’s “Berry Alvarez” with its swirls of blueberry, raspberry and strawberry.
Lines can be long at the two student unions on campus as well as at the Babcock Hall Dairy Store, 1605 Linden Drive. If you’d rather not look for campus parking, take-home containers are available in many local stores, including Metcalfe’s Market, Hy-Vee Westgate and Capitol Centre Market.
Choosing where to buy this legal drug is the easy part. Picking your flavor isn’t. There are 42, with 20 to 30 for sale at a time. Hard-core fans of orange custard chocolate chip, mocha macchiato or chocolate peanut butter know your scooper will gladly let you mix and match flavors, because cones are so generous — a single $3 scoop is actually a double.
Arboretum lilacs
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Seriously, we go there for the intellectual stimulation. Not the looks. We are not so shallow.
We treasure these 1,260 verdant acres dedicated to “the science and art of land reclamation.” We like that it is connected to UW-Madison as closely as a wild genius-child to patronizing parents.
Yes, we go to the Arboretum for the facts, many of them in Latin.
And yeah, we stick around because she’s a great dancer.
And smells fine, too.
Consider that 135 varieties of crab apple trees that bloom in the second week of May are not even the main show. Not even.
Because they are followed by 230 species of lilacs, the annual blossoming of which is anticipated as keenly as a first maternity. Will they bloom for Mother’s Day?
Noses lose their way here among the lilacs. But the scents don’t follow you home. Temporary, these are, envied and then forgotten. Flings, really, the names only vaguely recalled: Wolkonsky? Lemoine?
That’s science in Madison for you, all facts and emotion, too. They merged then emerged with the Arb in 1934 in the swamps of Lake Wingra, a baby lake, no more. It started as a vision from no less an earth-idol than Aldo Leopold.
The Arb is where that folly, Lost City, can still be found, in overgrown, barely visible boulevards — the irony.
Come for the science, the secular, the seeds and the stems. Stay for the walk in a place once called “a leafy green hole in the noise.”
You’ll be back, in May, for the lilacs.
Bucky Badger
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Other major universities have mascots that need no image makeover. A Texas Longhorn is tough and scary. Notre Dame has a lucky leprechaun.
Then there are schools like Wisconsin, which is stuck with a small antisocial member of the weasel family as its mascot. Through great student ingenuity, the school has transformed the badger into one of the most recognized, popular mascots in college sports.
A cartoonish figure in a red-and-white suit, Bucky Badger enjoys universal approval and seemingly offends no one in this city where being offended is a birthright. No matter the coach, the year, the sport or the team, if it’s a Badger game, Bucky will be there pumping up the crowd and taunting the opponent. Even the staunchest sourpuss can’t help but get a little giddy.
About six undergraduates get chosen for the role every year after spring tryouts. The job requirements? Be endlessly boosterish. Dance and jump around in a goofy, endearing way. Be athletic enough to pump out hundreds of pushups after touchdowns, and run around without pause for hours while dressed in a heat suit. Be nimble on ice skates (for hockey Bucky). Have a quick, creative wit that can be used to devious ends against opponents.
UW-Madison undergraduates created the modern Bucky in 1949, replacing a live Badger who used to burrow in the sideline turf and inspire no one.
Since then, he’s become the face of the university and has helped define what Wisconsin is to the nation: Free-spirited, passionate and unapologetically supportive of every Badgers team.
Snow blower
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When the leaves fall and the Badgers play ball, when the snowflakes swirl and talk turns to turkey, Madison divides into two camps.
Those who shovel their driveways and sidewalks. And those who use snowblowers, lured by the love of machine.
Frugality and safety are on the shovelers’ side. Who wants to lose a finger clearing nature’s crystal carpet?
But snowblowers are easier on the back — and possibly on the heart, in more ways than one.
They invite random acts of kindness among neighbors who otherwise might only nod at each other once or twice during the dark months that seem indomitable.
Shovelers slip inside to warm their hands and emerge to discover geysers of snow erupting from their pavement, catapulting the white carpet onto their frozen lawns.
The snow-blowing neighbors sneak away, but their good deeds are not forgotten. Their assistance hints at the communal spirit snowfall brings. When the gods dump dozens of inches of snow on us most winters — more than 100 inches in 2007-08, remember? — we take joint ownership of whatever gets us all moving again.
No surprise, then, that the contraption ubiquitous in Madison nearly half of the year was invented by a Canadian.
A Wisconsin-esque mission led Arthur Sicard, of Quebec, to his discovery in 1925.
He wanted to clear roads so he could deliver milk from his father’s dairy farm.
Little Free Libraries
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Any comic book lover can tell you the importance of the Origin Story. It’s the narrative that shows the often modest beginnings of the most enduring characters and defines who they become.
The Origin Story of The Little Libraries shows that unassuming beginning. Hudson’s Todd Bol built the first one and placed it outside his house as a tribute to his mother, a former school teacher with a passion for reading.
Madison resident Rick Brooks heard of the idea, and soon the duo founded a nonprofit organization to promote similar installations elsewhere.
The basis of the project has always been simple: Mount a wooden box – many of which look like dollhouses or a tiny one-room schoolhouse – on a post in front of a house, a workplace, in a park, along a trail or by a school, and fill it with books.
The libraries run on the premise of “Take a book, leave a book.” There are no due dates, late fees or library cards, and they’re open 24/7.
Madison’s first Little Library — built outside Café Zoma on the East Side in 2010 — launched a Goliath-sized project. Now, the quirky Little Libraries speckle across all 50 states and more than 30 countries.
Granted, the books you’ll find within the libraries can be a hodge-podge of romance novels, children’s tales or a slew of “For Dummies” books and “Popular Mechanics” magazines. But if you’re lucky, you might also find your favorite hero tucked somewhere inside.
Monona Terrace carpet
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As Anthony Putnam, the Frank Lloyd Wright protege and lead architect for Monona Terrace, dryly observed, “it’s not your usual office carpet.”
Indeed not. Neither in size, at 135,000 square feet, nor design, with colors and patterns that sparked passions reserved for an artwork, which it sort of is.
But now, the carpet is two — the brassy, burnt-orange flooring of lore that set the community abuzz when Monona Terrace opened in 1997, and its more dignified burgundy replacement installed earlier this year. Tequila Sunrise vs. Pinot Noir.
While Wright left detailed drawings that inspired the building, he left no direct clues for the carpet. Putnam’s original splash of reds, maroons, greens and yellows on a field of burnt orange with burgundy border were to suggest the vibrant fall and offer relief to bleak winters. Its chevrons evoked ginkgo tree leaves at Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, and arches the convention center’s exterior facing Lake Monona.
Of course, it sparked a Madison furor — some brides even refused to hold weddings there — that nonetheless paled in comparison to the strife that preceded the building’s construction. In a nod of affection, or perhaps to celebrity, when the city replaced the carpet for wear with a nearly identical one in 2004, the center’s gift shop sold $10,000 worth of remnants.
Alas, the new $870,000 carpet has generated no such hubbub. The earth tones and chevrons remain, but the soothing burgundy backdrop better resists fading and spills and complements rather than competes with the stylistic interior.
And in some ways, the city has lost a pinch of its whimsy.
Thai Pavilion
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One of the last planes to touch down in Chicago the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, carried a group of Thai artisans on a mission of international friendship and peace.
The artisans were bound for Madison — to reassemble a marvelous structure, the Thai Pavilion, that had been built in Thailand and shipped in pieces to the Midwest.
A terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that day killed nearly 3,000 people and paralyzed the nation.
But despite the chaos, the Thai artisans made it into the U.S. Within days, a column-raising ceremony was held for Madison’s newest architectural gem, sited in its own special spot at Olbrich Botanical Gardens.
Tucked inside a quiet tropical area filled with large-leafed plants, ornamental grasses and hardy bamboo, the structure is the only Thai Pavilion in the continental U.S. — a gift from the Thai Government and the Thai Chapter of the Wisconsin Alumni Association.
On a hot, steamy summer afternoon, it is cool under the rich red ceiling of the pavilion. The exquisite craftsmanship and gilded pillars of the Sala shine with splendor, with black pools of water glimmering just below. Beneath the arc of a nearby footbridge, Starkweather Creek wends by.
It is free to visit Olbrich. Go there, soon, and take a quiet stroll. Find a place to sit near the Thai Pavilion, a shrine to peace and international understanding. Take a friend and sit together.
B-cycle
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You’ll get passed a lot on a B-cycle, but you won’t care.
The beefy frames aren’t built for speed. Beyond that, though, there’s the mindset. The Madison bike-sharing program inspires serenity, not Spandex.
It’s very hard to be a Type A on a B-cycle. Or in a bad mood. Start with this: Someone else does all the maintenance. It’s a world without flat tires or broken chains, an alternate universe where your laziness and lack of mechanical ability don’t come back to bite you.
Once pedaling, you’ll clear your head, see things you’ve never noticed before, forget you’re actually commuting to work, feel profound sorrow for the motorists stuck on John Nolen Drive. It is therapy for a very nominal fee.
There are 350 B-cycle bikes sprinkled throughout the city at 39 kiosks. Each comes with a commodious front basket. You’ll want to stick a baguette in it.
Madison was not the first U.S. city to get a B-cycle system. That was Denver. We were seventh, in 2011.
But our ties to the concept run deep. B-cycle’s national headquarters are on the city’s Far East Side. The company is owned by Trek Bicycle, based in nearby Waterloo.
And philosophically, B-cycle could hardly find a more symbiotic home. It aligns with so many things this community aspires to be: carbon-conscious, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, physically fit and, of course, bicycle-friendly.
Mother Fool's mural
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One of the exterior walls of Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse has undergone a number of paint jobs since 2001. More than 100, in fact.
The wall acts as a legal canvas to give graffiti artists an opportunity to show off their work as art instead of vandalism.
It started just after Sept. 11, 2001, with a troll Statue of Liberty-esque image. In the years that followed, a number of murals with messages were created — one as a memorial to a local principal, another a painted eulogy to a young man killed in Chicago, and recently a tribute to the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls.
No matter the message, the process is informal. Co-owner Jon Hain’s policy is: If you want to paint the wall, do it.
It’s that aspect that makes the project so different from the artwork that hangs on the walls inside the shop at 1101 Williamson St. Indoors, the work is juried and carefully chosen. But outdoors, any artist can use the space freely.
Roughly a dozen murals are created throughout the year, serving as a constantly rotating museum exhibit. New pieces pop up more frequently in the summer — sometimes changing every other weekend — and more rarely in the colder winter months when artists are less inclined to spend hours creating in the cold.
Even if their sketches are short-lived, the artists and their murals have staked a permanent claim on the neighborhood.
Mike Leckrone's jacket
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The tradition started 40 years ago, when Mike Leckrone sweated through his blazer at the first UW Varsity Band Spring Concert.
Leckrone — the band’s immutably enthusiastic conductor and showman-in-chief, a UW mainstay known for choreographing his high-stepping musicians and imploring crowds to do “The Chicken Dance” just a little bit faster this time — emerged for the second act of that show in an ostentatious shirt he happened to have handy.
The outfit earned Leckrone some friendly derision and begged the question that sparked a campus tradition: “What are you going to do next year?”
Leckrone’s answer has come during each Varsity Band Spring Concert in a series of custom-made, ever-flashier jackets heavy on ritz, fun and, inevitably, sequins.
They feature sparkling red and white checkers, American flags, a big silver “W,” roses.
Dozens of jackets from years past now hang in Leckrone’s closet.
He and Lois Levenhagen, the band seamstress who has sewn those sequins for 25 years, collaborate on the designs. They find inspiration from old Elvis outfits, figure skating competitions and trips to the Liberace museum.
Each year, when the concert’s second act starts, Leckrone dons his new jacket and debuts his latest work of a style he calls “Wisconsin gaudy.”
The jackets bring pomp, but still have fun; they’re for a showman who’s not afraid to look a little silly.
For Leckrone and the UW Marching Band — they of the rigid halftime formations and hair-down Fifth Quarter antics — it’s just the right look.
Rain barrels
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The Yahara River chain of lakes helped carve out Madison’s unique geography and continues to nurture its ecology today. Increasingly, residents are returning the favor by collecting the rain that falls on their rooftops in barrels, slowing the runoff that triggers erosion and contaminates the lakes.
Sustainability experts say a typical homeowner using a standard 55-gallon rain barrel will save about 1,000 gallons of water per year, letting it replace the tap water they otherwise would use for things like watering their lawn and garden, washing cars and cleaning windows.
That part of the equation of rain barrels represents the power of individual action to effect change. It’s a way for people to get their hands around a big issue like lake quality in a practical way and become environmental stewards in their own backyards.
Now add a whole street of homeowners using rain barrels, or a neighborhood, or an entire side of town, and you get the second part of the equation — when the multiplying power of collective action can be felt, too.
In metropolitan Milwaukee, where city officials have aggressively promoted rain barrel use for years, there are at least 40,000 houses with 90-gallon rain barrels capturing some 243 million gallons of water annually.
Nobody in Madison keeps records of how many residents are using rain barrels here.
Maybe we should start.
Guerrilla cookies
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Two words inspire nostalgia and cravings for UW-Madison alumni of a certain age: guerrilla cookies.
Similar to a modern-day Clif Bar, the organic three-pack of cookies sustained untold numbers of students in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they raced to class or marched in daylong protests against the Vietnam War.
Baked by Quercus Alba Bakery and sold at myriad Downtown locations, the cookies gained a cult following. They were filling, easily portable and — along with the rich, buttery Rice Krispies treats sold at Memorial Union — the ubiquitous munchies of a generation of students.
Named for the revolutionary times, the quasi-mythical cookie was loaded with oatmeal, sunflower seeds, honey and a number of other much-debated ingredients.
What became of the now fabled original cookie recipe is murky. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for years, the real guerrilla cookie recipe has been unknown.
The story goes that Mary MacDowell modified the recipe from one on a Tiger’s Milk box. Then, Ted Odell — who was living in a car behind her apartment — modified her recipe and started selling the baked good. It was sold until the 1980s, before Odell took it into retirement, blaming it for all that was wrong with the world.
Years later, some similar, but not quite the same, homage versions of the snack were sold at local co-ops, although those who tasted the real deal say that they were, sadly, just not the same.
American Girl dolls
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Three spunky little girls — Kirsten, Samantha and Molly — changed the face of Madison.
They were the original American Girls of the Pleasant Company, founded in Downtown Madison in 1986 by former teacher, TV reporter and textbook writer Pleasant Rowland. American Girl, now headquartered in Middleton, was bought by toy giant Mattel in 1998 for $700 million. And thanks to the beneficence of its creator and her husband, Jerry Frautschi, what was invented as a plaything to teach girls about history, integrity and perseverance has remade the history of the arts in Madison.
There was the jaw-dropping, $205 million gift from Frautschi — proceeds from the Mattel sale — that built the Overture Center for the Arts. And with it came critical financial support for the Bartell Theatre, home base for Madison’s most established community theater groups.
Rowland created the Great Performance Challenge Fund, resulting in a $46 million endowment for Overture’s resident arts organizations that provides $2 million in annual arts revenue.
Since 1988, the annual American Girl Benefit Sale, Rowland’s brainchild, has raised more than $22 million for the Madison Children’s Museum and the American Girl Fund for Children, which each year exposes tens of thousands of Madison-area children to world-class creativity. And Rowland and her foundation continue to give millions to support the arts and culture in Dane County.
But there’s more than the money to love. Just ask any 9-year-old girl holding an American Girl in her arms.
Crazylegs race bibs
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Officially, summer starts in June. But, for many Madisonians, the real season opener happens in April with the Crazylegs Classic race.
The race bib participants pin to themselves is more than an entry ticket. It’s a symbol of the promise of warmer weather and all that it brings.
The race means runners and walkers can replace the boots that have been a fixture in their closet for months with sneakers, and winter coats with neon Under Armour T-shirts.
This past April marked the 33rd annual event. Like all great Wisconsin ideas, the race plan was hatched over a couple beers. The plan was the brainchild of three Badger loyalists who wanted to raise money for the athletics program.
They named it for Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch — a former UW-Madison athlete, athletic director, professional football Hall of Famer and Hollywood star — who was tagged with the nickname by a sportswriter in 1942 who compared Hirsch’s running style to that of “a demented duck.” Francis Powers wrote in the Chicago Daily News that Hirsch’s “crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions all at the same time during a 61-yard touchdown run.”
Whether racers do the 5-mile run or the 2-mile walk, they leave Capitol Square bound for the stadium where Hirsch once played.
Finishing is always grounds for celebration — whether that’s because you conquered the race or survived yet another Wisconsin winter.
'Mendota Wall'
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High up on a wall of the Kohl Center, “Mendota Wall” sparkles — and tells a story of art in Madison.
The remarkable glass sculpture made by UW alum Dale Chihuly splashes across a 120-foot-long stretch of the athletic facility’s lobby. Its 11,284 pieces of blown glass, in dancing blues and greens and radiant yellows, pay homage to Chihuly’s memories of sunshine bouncing off the waves of Lake Mendota.
Chihuly is a superstar in the art world. He was one of the early graduate students of UW-Madison art professor Harvey Littleton, father of the Studio Glass Movement.
Before Littleton, glass was produced only in factories, using huge, industrial-size furnaces.
Littleton and his UW program developed smaller furnaces and processes that turned glass into an accessible, stunningly beautiful medium for artists.
“Mendota Wall” cost $750,000 to build and was dedicated in 1998. Like many pieces of public art around the state, the work was a product of Wisconsin’s Percent for Art Fund. The program, which required that at least .02 percent of construction costs for new or substantially renovated state facilities be spent on public art, was repealed by Gov. Scott Walker and the state Legislature in 2011 and is no more.
Workers at the Kohl Center painstakingly clean the glass in place twice each year using chicken feathers and cloth baby diapers, a Kohl Center tour guide recently told a visitor. It’s a reason the center draws not only sports fans, but art fans, too.
Life magazine, 1948
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At the time, the magazine’s editors admitted it was “somewhat brash.” They were referencing the attempt by Life — arguably the most prominent media outlet of the day — to identify the “ideal” American city.
Brash or not, on Sept. 6, 1948, Life unveiled its pick. The cover story trumpeted, “The Good Life in Madison, Wisconsin.”
It likely remains the most famous magazine story ever written about Madison. Money magazine named the city the best place to live in the United States in 1996, and while that generated considerable publicity, no magazine has ever had the reach Life did in the middle decades of the last century.
For its 1948 feature on Madison, Life sent the famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to the city for several weeks. As a cover subject, he chose 24-year-old Jeanne Parr Noth, a Madison native who subsequently became one of the first female correspondents for CBS News in New York.
Her son, Christopher Noth — Chris’ brother, Charles, is pictured with Jeanne on the Life cover — became a well-known actor.
In celebrating 1948 Madison, the Life story mentioned the beauty of the lakes, the city’s prosperous economy and the “steady flow of cultural and youthful ideas” from UW-Madison.
In a note inside about the cover, Jeanne Parr Noth said, “I would never live anywhere else.”
In an interview 60 years later, she noted, “When the article came out, we were already on the East Coast.”
Red heart balloon
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It may have started out as a couple of pieces of shiny Mylar filled with a blast of helium.
But the red heart-shaped balloon that hovered near the top of the state Capitol dome for months beginning in February 2011 as massive protests rocked Madison came to mean much more to many people.
Those who gathered to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s move to all but end collective bargaining for most public workers saw the heart balloon as a symbol of their fight, especially as it refused to give up its perch overlooking the rotunda — seemingly defying gravity for more than four months.
Conservatives, however, likened the balloon to the liberal lunacy they said had seized Madison. Some in the anti-balloon crowd even threatened to shoot it down.
When the balloon finally fell to earth at the end of June 2011, Ron Blair, the former assistant director of the Division of State Facilities, delivered it to the Wisconsin Historical Society, where it remains in storage as part of the permanent collection.
But the controversy surrounding it continued as more heart balloons were released in the rotunda.
That July, tired of retrieving balloons , Blair grabbed one from a frequent protester and popped it with a knife, stabbing himself in the hand in the process and dripping blood on the marble floor. The state ended up paying the shaken woman $19,000 to settle her lawsuit over the incident.
And we have never looked at red heart balloons the same way again.
Concert blankets
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Forget Badgers football or Ultimate Frisbee. The most competitive sport in Madison is blanket-tossing.
It’s not just any old blanket being tossed at any old place. This would be a regularly scheduled event each midsummer afternoon on the lawn of the State Capitol. The tossing is supposed to begin at 3 p.m., but by the looks of the lawn at that time many people take that to mean 3 p.m. Eastern.
By all means, there is victory to be won: a perfect seat for Concerts on the Square, the free Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra performance held for six consecutive Wednesday evenings each summer. The concerts began in 1984, and each draws an estimated 20,000 people.
The music is crowd pleasing, with a range of selections from Gershwin to U2. All with an audience parked on blankets with picnic baskets and bottles of Prairie Fumé.
According to signs posted throughout the lawn, blankets spread out before 3 p.m. will be removed. Some people toss one on the lawn and go back to work. Some place it and stay with it, with a laptop or book to help pass the time.
At their worst, the blankets symbolize that human urge to just go and get what you want, ignoring rules and directives along the way. At their best, they stand for faith in humanity — that you can put down your blanket, return three or four hours later and magically it is still there.
Most of all, they represent the chance to hear beautiful music on a splendid summer night.
And that’s a blanket statement that’s safe to make.
Bascom Hill's Honest Abe
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They climb on him, sit on his shoulders, kiss his cheek — all without asking.
He’s been painted red to protest things he never knew anything about, and forced to wear hats he would never have picked out. Neither are his style.
But the guy has taken the abuse in stride, never losing his cool.
For more than a century, the bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln has sat steadfastly atop Bascom Hill, watching UW-Madison students tromp up the hill through snow to classes and sled back down in between.
His gaze stretches beyond campus, falling directly on the Capitol dome in what is perhaps a vain attempt to keep Wisconsin politicians honest.
He watches the leaves fall from the trees that line the quad’s lawn, the tulips that pop up in spring, and the students studying among them. When the calm and quiet of summer comes, he’s still there. He hasn’t missed a thing.
The striking likeness of the Great Emancipator, and the only Illinois politician to be remembered so fondly, guards the heart of UW-Madison’s campus — one of the first images that comes to mind when alumni think of their undergraduate days. That hill, Bascom Hall, and Abe.
The statue is a replica of one in Lincoln’s Kentucky birthplace and has never been copied again after much persuading by a UW-Madison alumnus not to let another campus have him.
That ownership has become tradition for UW: Abe’s left shoe is a worn good luck charm for students new to that steep climb, and his lap is the last stop when those students climb Bascom Hill for the last time.
Warfarin
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It prevents blood clots, kills rats, may have poisoned Stalin — and traces its roots to Wisconsin cattle dying after eating spoiled clover.
Warfarin — named after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, UW-Madison’s tech-transfer arm — is a multitasking substance as diverse as WARF itself.
Also known by the brand name Coumadin, warfarin is best known as a blood thinner used to prevent blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. It’s the 24th most widely prescribed drug in the country, with 34 million doses dispensed in 2012, more than ibuprofen.
It was first used as a rat poison, with a slightly different formulation, and it still causes vermin to bleed to death today.
A farmer from northern Wisconsin came to Karl Paul Link’s biochemistry lab at UW-Madison in 1933 with a can of cow’s blood that wouldn’t coagulate. In spoiled clover the cow had eaten, Link identified a chemical factor he developed into warfarin in 1948.
Warfarin patents are among 2,300 patents that have brought in more than $1 billion to WARF since the foundation started in 1925. Much of the money is related to vitamin D, computer technology, an organ preservation solution, MRI scanners and stem cells. WARF gives much of it back to the university.
In 2003, a book theorized that Soviet Union leaders used warfarin to kill dictator Josef Stalin 50 years earlier.
Another historic footnote is confirmed: In 1955, warfarin helped U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower recover from a heart attack.
Paddle & Portage canoe
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Four hundred years ago, it was the best way to cross the state. These days, it’s the best way to cross the Isthmus on a certain Saturday in July.
The canoe — be it birch bark, aluminum or Kevlar — symbolizes Wisconsin and its capital city’s abiding love affair with the water. And, as Marquette and Jolliet discovered when making the nearly two-mile trek between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers en route to mapping the Mississippi, at water’s end, it must be carried overland via portage.
Combine those two things and you get Madison’s zany Paddle & Portage canoe race, befuddling Dane County Farmers’ Market patrons since 1980.
At first, the race drew mostly serious competitors to the shores of Lake Mendota for a mile-and-a-half loop, followed by a mile-long portage past the foot of the Capitol, followed by a mile-and-a-half dash across Lake Monona to Olin Turville Park.
It was only within the last decade or so that some of the roughly 400 participants of all ages have donned tutus, polyester suits or other costumes and grabbed a beer and brat at the finish line.
The event harkens not only the state’s native and voyageur heritage, but also the canoe craze days at the turn of the 20th century, when canoe race results appeared in the newspaper alongside baseball scores.
Madison may be one of two major U.S. cities built on an isthmus, but you won’t see a downtown parade of gleaming banana-shaped shells with legs in Seattle.
Bumper stickers
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Sit at a red light and you quickly know so much about the person in front of you. They think you should eat more kale. They don’t want you to tread on them. They have run a marathon, and maybe a half-marathon, too. They stand with Scott Walker. They love Harry Potter and dislike Republicans. They adore their Lhasa Apso. They wish we all could just coexist.
Every community has vehicles with bumper stickers. In Madison, though, they’re physical evidence of that earnest way in which locals just have to speak their minds. It’s why City Council meetings have lasted past bar time and why the letters to the Willy Street Co-op’s monthly newspaper have a cult following.
Here, vehicles sometimes are novellas unto themselves. There’s no need to check your email or write a text while you’re at a red light — you can just let your mind wander about the story behind the people in the car ahead of you. Sometimes you can’t even finish reading them all before the light turns green.
Like any good story, the bumper stickers often can be of the moment and then the moment moves on well before the car does. That leaves drivers still showing love for John Kerry or George W. Bush 10 years after they ran for president.
Eventually the stickers will be on the scrap heap, along with the bumper that hosts them. They’ll be replaced with the next politicians to come around. Not to mention whatever vegetable will be trendy in 2016.
Eric Heiden's ice skates
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Long before his epic performance at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, Eric Heiden laced up his skates and hit the ice on Lake Mendota, the Vilas Park Lagoon and at Tenney Park.
Heiden was a club figure skater by age 5 and later played hockey. At 8, his talent was so noticeable that he was recruited by coaches of Madison’s speed skating team.
By 16, Heiden had cracked the U.S. national team. He made his Olympic debut in 1976 in Innsbruck, Austria, where he finished seventh in the 1,500 meters and 19th in the 5,000 . He won the overall title at the world championships in 1977, 1978 and 1979.
Heiden, his power generated from massive 27-inch-circumference thighs, had become a household name in his sport and arrived in Lake Placid as a marked man.
What happened next was a gold rush of historic proportions. Heiden, wearing skates two sizes too small because he hoped the lighter weight would make him faster, won five individual gold medals, something that had never been done before in either the Summer or Winter Olympics.
Not only did Heiden win titles in the 500, 1,000, 1,500, 5,000 and 10,000 meters over the span of nine days, he set Olympic records in four of those races and a world record in the 10,000.
Heiden, whose sister, Beth, won a bronze medal in Lake Placid in the 3,000, retired from skating after finishing second in the 1980 world championships. He turned his focus to cycling, winning the U.S. professional cycling championship in 1985 and competing in the Tour de France the following year. Now 56, Heiden is an orthopedic surgeon living in Utah.
Thirty-four years after Heiden’s magnificent performance at Lake Placid, nobody has come close to matching his golden run. And it all started here on Madison ice.
The MMOCA 'icon'
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Slicing into the sky at the corner of State and Henry streets, the soaring glass triangle makes a statement.
“Art,” it declares. “Art of today. It’s here.”
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art building at 227 State St. opened in 2006. Originally, its entrance was planned for the point where State and Henry streets meet, but that wasn’t architecturally feasible. So world-renowned architect Cesar Pelli, who designed both MMOCA and the adjacent Overture Center for the Arts, placed the museum’s front door on State Street and let the building’s sparkling edge echo the other flatiron-type buildings that radiate from the intersection.
Today, museum staff fondly call the glass prow of their ship the “MMOCA icon.” Its transparent walls are meant to beckon the public — who, remarkably, enter this splendid museum and its shows for free.
Wrapped inside the icon is Madison’s most daring public staircase: 85 transparent steps that lead you into the heavens. Peer out through the windows, and State Street parades like its own museum of motion — a blur of buses and bicycles, tourists and students, strollers and briefcases.
Climb those dizzying stairs to the rooftop restaurant and MMOCA’s sculpture garden. A stunning bird’s-eye view of Madison awaits, dotted with construction cranes that are working, still, to refit and reshape the landscape of the city’s heart.
Freedom From Religion sign
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For several years now, the baby Jesus has dropped by the state Capitol for a Christmas visit, only to discover not everyone is charmed.
A traditional nativity scene featuring the Christian savior, placed in the rotunda since 2011 by Wisconsin Family Action, competes for attention with a growing array of seasonal displays and symbols, some reverent, others openly mocking of religion.
The precedent for irreligious pushback dates to 1996, when the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation first erected its now-annual winter solstice sign in the rotunda. The sign’s message, composed by the foundation’s matriarch, Anne Nicol Gaylor, includes this line: “Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”
The sign was a response to the presence of a Christmas tree and a Jewish menorah in the rotunda, and to a nativity pageant conducted in the state’s foremost public building.
The solstice sign logged its 18th year last December and has emboldened others. There is now a “Festivus” pole inspired by the TV show “Seinfield,” and a display exalting the “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” a secular, satirical deity.
Recently, the Freedom From Religion Foundation added a “natural nativity scene.” Charles Darwin and Emma Goldman are among the wise people.
The resulting panoply in the rotunda speaks to Madison’s diversity of beliefs and non-beliefs, vivid evidence that nothing is so sacred here it can’t be questioned and perhaps pilloried.
Clyde Stubblefield's drumsticks
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[Editor's note: Clyde Stubblefield died on Feb. 18, 2017. The text below has reflects what was published in 2014.]
Interview Clyde Stubblefield in his East Side Madison living room, and he’ll bring a pair of drumsticks with him to the sofa. He uses them to make a point, tap a rhythm on the coffee table or punctuate a story from his years as one of the world’s legendary — and most sampled — drummers.
Madison’s “Funky Drummer,” as Stubblefield is known, has lived in the city since 1971. A drummer since he was a boy banging on can lids and boxes, Stubblefield got his big break when R&B superstar James Brown pulled him into his band and featured him in some of his biggest 1960s hits. Stubblefield’s groove is legendary on tunes such as “Cold Sweat,” “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” “I’ve Got the Feelin’ ” and the seminal “Funky Drummer.”
This month, that fame took Stubblefield to the Hollywood Bowl, where he performed Aug. 13 with the James Brown Alumni Band in “A James Brown Celebration.” It’s all part of the launch of “Get On Up,” a biopic about Brown currently playing in theaters. Actor Rob Demery portrays Stubblefield.
To the thrill of locals, Stubblefield — a bladder cancer survivor who must undergo regular dialysis — has performed countless gigs in Madison over the years, and been a celebrity regular on Michael Feldman’s radio show, “Whad’ya Know?”
Stubblefield’s drumsticks have been on display at the national Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Because he’s not just Madison’s Funky Drummer. He’s the world’s.
Forward statue
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"Forward" is truly a beauty.
The bronze statue of a lovely lady stands at the State Street corner of Capitol Square, her right hand extended toward the heavens. She cradles a flag in the crook of her left arm, and her dress drapes around her. Forward's hair is pulled back in a bun, highlighting her strong and resolute face.
Many call her "Lady Forward" or "Miss Forward," but the plaque on the pedestal under her feet simply reads "Forward," Wisconsin's motto.
The statue is actually a replica of the original clay version of Forward, which was designed by Jean P. Miner and displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. After the event, a group of Wisconsin women raised some $6,000 so Forward could take a more permanent form.
That Forward was made of copper and was installed near the Capitol's east entrance in 1895, later moved to the north entrance. But in 1990, workers cleaning the statue realized that Forward was deteriorating and recommended that she seek shelter inside. In 1996 — on the 76th anniversary of women's suffrage — a bronze replica was installed on the State Street steps while her copper twin took refuge at the Wisconsin Historical Society's headquarters on the UW-Madison campus.
She may not be the original, but she is "Forward" just the same. Just don't call her "Wisconsin." That's the name of the gilded statue of the woman standing atop the Capitol. They may both be beautiful, but they are definitely not the same.
Farmers' market tomatoes
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Madison food lovers don’t go in for garden variety — unless it’s really a garden variety, like an an heirloom tomato from the Dane County Farmers’ Market.
Armed with the latest Mark Bittman or Michael Pollan article or book, picky eaters in Madison believe in the health benefits of eating organic fruits and vegetables. Forget Jim Gaffigan, who said “organic” is a grocery term meaning “twice as expensive.”
We’re much more likely to eliminate the middle man and buy direct from the farmer.
No place offers a better opportunity for that than the Dane County market, the largest producer-only farmers’ market in the country, held on Saturdays from April to November. It’s also the most scenic, as about 160 vendors — at peak season — encircle the state Capitol.
Early birds get there by 6 a.m. to avoid the throng that inches maddeningly along by 10, when the market takes on a festival-type atmosphere.
New parents wear their babies and sip portable lattes, while those who haven’t eaten yet pull off bites of Stella’s Hot & Spicy Cheese Bread .
Just don’t walk clockwise against the grain. At busy times it simply won’t get you anywhere. At all other times you’ll get the stink eye.
Farmers markets can now be found in every corner of the city, and their proliferation in outlying communities continues to mushroom. That’s an heirloom mushroom to you.
Sterling Hall bombing fragment
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Just after 3 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1970, Vietnam War protester Karl Armstrong lit the fuse to a 2,000-pound bomb packed inside a stolen Ford Econoline van on the UW-Madison campus and sealed a grim milestone in Madison's history.
Armstrong had conspired with his brother Dwight, Leo Burt and David Fine to blow up the UW-Madison's Army Mathematics Research Center located on three floors of Sterling Hall. Witnesses likened the explosion and mushroom cloud that followed to an atom bomb.
It left much of Sterling Hall in ruins, killed brilliant 33-year-old physicist Robert Fassnacht — who was working in the basement on a project unrelated to Army research — and damaged parts of 26 other campus buildings. Ironically, the Army research center was left pretty much intact. But the anti-war movement, which struggled with the question of how far to take its activism in pursuit of peace, was in tatters.
Among the few remaining artifacts from the blast is a small chunk of the van's engine kept by the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1994, it was rescued from a trash bin at the Madison Police Department and donated to the Society.
The bombing would stand as the most destructive act of domestic terrorism in the United States until Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Like Sterling Hall, that bomb used a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.
Both Armstrongs and Fine were caught, imprisoned and released. Leo Burt has never been found.
The Edgewater's celebrity photos
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Very few people ever entered The Edgewater hotel without checking out the close to 150 celebrity photos, most of them signed, that lined the walls of the hotel’s Cove Lounge.
Many made a game of it.
There’s Elvis!
Bob Hope!
Alan Hale Jr.!
OK, maybe Hale doesn’t rate with the other two.
He was the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island.”
The point is, he stayed at the Edgewater, the lakefront hotel begun by Madison’s Quisling family in 1948.
The Edgewater’s first general manager, and later the owner, was Augie Faulkner, a young man who had worked at Chicago’s Drake Hotel, and knew the other hotels in that city.
Faulkner borrowed the idea of posting photos of visiting celebrities from the Pump Room in Chicago’s Ambassador East Hotel.
Years later, Chicago travel writer Dave Hoekstra visited the Cove Lounge — he noted the photos of Liberace, Xavier Cugat and Warren Zevon — and wrote, “This place is like the Pump Room on steroids.”
For many years, the “curator” of the Cove Lounge celebrity photos was the late Edgewater maitre d’ David Martineau, who eventually put together a book with brief biographies of all the celebrities in the photographs.
New Edgewater owner Bob Dunn has said the celebrity photos will be a component of a multi-media wall in the renovated hotel.
Those who remember Bob Denver — yes, “Gilligan” himself was on the Cove wall — will be pleased.
Bike elevator
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How much does Madison love bicycles?
The city has 51 miles of bike paths and 113 miles of bicycle lanes. We put bike racks on city buses, and incorporate bicycle parking into new developments. All over town you’ll see red bikes (rentals) and white bikes (the “ghost bikes” installed as memorials to bicyclists who have been killed on the road).
We’ve painted “sharrows” on side streets — double arrows that indicate bikes and cars are expected to share the full lane — and “bike boxes” at some intersections that let bicyclists pull in front of motor vehicles, like royalty, to wait for the light to change (the easier to see them by).
But perhaps nothing shows Madison’s commitment to the pedaling class more than the bicycle elevator at Monona Terrace. Connecting the Capital City Trail to Capitol Square five stories above, the elevator at the northeastern corner of the convention center is a welcome alternative to the heart-pounding crawl to the top of the Isthmus in first gear.
It also spares cyclists from having to negotiate the one-way streets and busy intersections that separate Downtown from Lake Monona.
Mind you, it’s nothing fancy. Cramped, stuffy and packed at rush hour, it’s like a freight elevator with windows. You’re also aware, as the floors tick by, that you’re cheating. Biking is supposed to be work, after all.
But in the grand scheme of things, couldn’t we all use a lift from time to time?
'Sifting and Winnowing' plaque
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Bucky Badger gets the smiles and high-fives. Abe Lincoln draws legions of photo-seeking graduates.
But if you want to know what UW-Madison is really all about, look to the big bronze “Sifting and Winnowing” plaque at the entrance of Bascom Hall.
For students on their way to lectures or administrators heading to work, it can be an easy thing to pass by — another historical marker on a hill dotted with them.
But it’s worth stopping for a second to ponder the words on the plaque, first written in 1894 by university regents who refused to censure a professor accused of being a pro-union socialist.
You’ll realize they form a mission statement for UW-Madison:
“Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.”
The statement grounds UW-Madison in a tradition of free thought, declaring the university a place where ideas are presented, challenged, analyzed and advanced.
The words tell students and visitors they have arrived at a place that welcomes their perspectives and encourages them to take in those of the people who are here with them.
UW-Madison has produced tie-dyed hippies and buttoned-down conservatives; Ayn Rand disciples and, yes, even some pro-union socialists.
The plaque at the center of campus gives you an idea why.
Indoor mini-golf course at Vitense
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For a crash course on Madison’s most popular spots, it would be tough to find a better tutor than the indoor mini-golf course at Vitense Golfland on the city’s Southwest Side.
Opened in 2006 and aiming to be both fun and educational, the Madison landmarks course offers 18 holes featuring colorful replicas of some of the city’s most recognized buildings, businesses, public spaces and signature events, including Monona Terrace, the World Dairy Expo, Tenney Park and Memorial Union.
There are interactive elements, such as the covered slide shaped like a hot dog bun at the Oscar Mayer hole, or the basketball court where you can slam-dunk an orange felt ball behind the Kohl Center hole. The prize for funkiest hole probably goes to Rhythm & Booms, with its trippy black light and glowing wall art, while some of the neatest details can be found at Olbrich Gardens, hole 6, with its tiny Thai Pavilion, and at hole 12’s Concerts on the Square, complete with multicolored carpet pieces doubling as blankets draped across the Capitol lawn.
Halfway through the course is what Vitense co-owner and course designer Joel Weitz sees as its centerpiece: the state Capitol, in all its white-domed, four-wing glory. Surrounded by water elements mimicking lakes Mendota and Monona, the replica is true to the Capitol’s design down to the lights along its top and sides, which are always left on and can be seen shining through Vitense’s wall of windows from the parking lot.
Camp Randall Memorial Arch
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Camp Randall has long held a prominent position in Madison’s cultural landscape.
During one of the darkest chapters in American history, 70,000 Union troops trained at the site before being shipped to the battlefields of the South, while several thousand Confederate soldiers passed through the camp as prisoners of war.
Recognizing that significance, a group of veterans lobbied the state Legislature in 1893 to purchase Camp Randall to save the grounds from being developed. The land was gifted to UW-Madison as a memorial athletic field, and two years later it hosted its first football game.
Once a site of deep divisions, Camp Randall has morphed into a place of strong unity, where people come together as football fans — as Badgers — seven Saturdays a year.
But more so than the expansive stadium bowl or imposing architecture of the Field House, the Memorial Arch has become the resonating image of Camp Randall.
Dedicated in 1912, the arch serves as a reminder of the more than 91,000 Wisconsin enlistees, the 12,216 who perished and countless others who made contributions to the war effort on the homefront. Statues on either side depict a young recruit and an aged veteran, keeping watch over the grounds. A walk through the arch’s passage reveals manicured lawns, adorned with Civil War cannons — a peaceful reminder of a tumultuous time.
However, when the UW Marching Band makes its way through the arch on those football Saturdays, differences are left at the gate, and Wisconsin is one.
Capitol tulips
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The state Capitol tulips aren’t just a sign of spring. They’re a sign of hope.
When the brilliant blooms open — typically in early May, although it varies depending on Wisconsin’s unpredictable weather — it’s like nature is quietly assuring us better days are ahead.
Each year, the Capitol tulips are harbingers of some of Madison’s most glorious days. Soon, picnic baskets and blankets will cover the Capitol lawn for Concerts on the Square. Restaurants will unpack their outdoor dining tables and chairs to get ready for long summer nights.
There is no shortage of Capitol tulips, as about 26,500 bulbs are planted each fall, typically in October. But after the tulips bloom and are cut, there’s a frenzied rush for the flowers. Capitol groundskeepers slice their stems and lay the tulips on the lawn so they can prepare the beds for the next batch of flowers, and they’re almost always scooped up by tulip lovers within minutes.
Then, when the soil is tilled and the bulbs are uprooted so gardeners can plant the next batch of flowers, there’s another mad dash to the flower beds for the bulbs, which are available on a first-come, first-served basis. People grab them by the bagful in an effort to bring some of the Capitol tulips’ magic to their own gardens.
Anyone hoping to take home some tulips or bulbs needs to be fast. For, as fleeting as the tulips’ blooming season seems to be, the flowers or bulbs’ time on the grounds after they’ve been cut or uprooted is even shorter.
Backyard chicken coop
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Why have a chicken coop in your backyard?
Because in Madison, you can.
In 2004, Madison joined the growing ranks of municipalities that allow backyard coops. Before that, it was legal to have chickens but not a dwelling in which to house them, raising the question of where any such birds might have been roosting to keep them safe from the raccoons, possums, coyotes, hawks and other predators that enjoy a chicken dinner as much as many human carnivores.
But eating isn’t what most Madisonians have in mind for their feathered friends — unless its just-laid eggs they’re after. In fact, it’s illegal to slaughter chickens in the city, or to keep roosters.
The four hens per yard allowed with a city license — 202 have been issued this year — are usually near and dear to their owners’ hearts, more akin to beloved pets that are like members of the family.
Hence the need for suitable accommodations, impenetrable to predators, with the requisite accoutrements: a perch for roosting, a nest box for egg laying, ample leg room, and fresh food and water. An enclosed outdoor run is also recommended.
Beyond that, a backyard coop can be as fancy or as funky as desired, from a high-end chicken chalet to a hippie-construction condo cobbled together from wood, crates or pallets gleaned from city curbs. Just make sure it’s 25 feet from your neighbor’s house.
For those who want to know not only where their food comes from, but from whom, the short trip to the egg box of your chicken coop brings the farm to your own backyard.
Brats
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It’s certainly not our foodstuff — the Sheboygan metro area, home of Johnsonville Sausage, claims that honor — but Madison sure does love its bratwurst.
This fatty, savory coarse-ground pork sausage, perfected by kraut and brown mustard and debased by ketchup, is held up front and center by perhaps the premier establishment on our most beloved thoroughfare. State Street Brats has taught generations of UW-Madison students the distinction — largely unnecessary outside those walls — between a white brat and a red brat.
And every summer is kicked off with the brat bacchanalia that’s audacious enough to put “World’s Largest” in front of what everyone calls it: Brat Fest. Organizers claim to have set the brat sale world record repeatedly leading up to Memorial Day weekend in 2010, when they sold nearly 210,000 brats (and, ahem, tubular soy sausages).
That figure hasn’t been touched in recent years — this year’s total was 165,870, with $140,000 raised for local charities — and one of the big reasons is pure Madison: politics.
Amid 2011’s furious protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s throwdown with public employee unions, it became known that executives of Johnsonville not only donate the Brat Fest brats but also donated to Walker’s campaign. That was enough to spark three alternate brat cook-offs in liberal-leaning Madison that weekend; one, the Wurst Times music and sausage party at the High Noon Saloon, has endured to 2014.
Statue of Liberty
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As the sun rose over a snow-covered Madison one February morning in 1979, anyone gazing out across the frozen expanse of Lake Mendota must have stopped in their tracks.
It looked as though Lady Liberty had stepped off her pedestal in New York Harbor, marched halfway across the country and sunk into the lake’s icy depths, just offshore from the Memorial Union.
Her pointed crown, eyes and torch were all that remained above the snowy surface.
It was one of the city’s greatest pranks, perpetrated by its greatest band of pranksters: the infamous Pail and Shovel Party. The UW-Madison student government party’s history reads like a script from the “Animal House” genre of college comedies.
Party members were voted into office having campaigned on a platform of absurdity. The party took its name from a proposal to convert the university’s budget into pennies, dump them on Bascom Hill and let the students take what they could with pails and shovels.
When some protested the use of $4,000 in university money to construct the “sunken” Statue of Liberty, party leaders refunded the aggrieved students their share of the cost by writing each a check for 10 cents.
An arsonist destroyed the original Lady Liberty, but a replica has occasionally returned to Lake Mendota.
Her future, however, is in doubt. Damaged by vandals in 2011, the statue is stored in Middleton and needs lots of restoration before she can reappear.
But memories of her heyday — preserved on popular postcards still sold on State Street — have secured Lady Liberty’s status as a Madison legend.
World Dairy Expo globe
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Since 1967, visitors to the World Dairy Expo have been greeted by a 1-ton globe that symbolizes the international scope of the world’s largest dairy-related trade show, which draws guests from 92 countries each October.
Built from two silo caps welded together, the globe remains a constant amid the growing and changing Expo that drew nearly 71,000 visitors last year. New state-of-the-art pavilions will house more than 2,500 head of world-class cattle at this year’s Expo after the show had outgrown the county-owned Alliant Energy Center’s original barns that had fallen into disrepair.
The globe has stood the test of time with the help of a 1972 Gran Torino engine that causes it to spin one revolution per minute — it only spins for the duration of the five-day show — and a truck axle that acts as its axis and is tilted at the same angle as the Earth. It actually turned the wrong way on its axis for the first several years until a worker noticed it and alerted authorities.
It was erected for the first Expo — called the World Food Exposition until 1971 — and found a fitting location next to the Dane County Coliseum that had opened five months earlier in 1967. A retired UW-Madison agriculture journalism professor, Pete Willoughby, designed and painted the globe. He painted continents green if they had adequate food supplies at the time. The continents he painted orange had food shortages.
Electric car charging stations
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It sounds like something straight out of Orbit City. But while electric cars can’t fly through the air like George Jetson’s — yet — they do seem right for our modern, hip city.
And they could soon become more mainstream, thanks in part to efforts by Madison Gas & Electric to place charging stations just about anywhere you might run out of juice.
Already, more than 25 charging stations for electric cars dot the city map — mostly on the Isthmus.
You can charge up while grabbing a six pack from Hy-Vee or a bag of organic apples at the Willy Street Co-op. You can take your electric ride to check out a weekend’s worth of books from the public library’s Monroe Street branch or to a date at the Overture Center without worrying about where to plug in.
And just last year, MG&E installed the state’s first public fast-charging station at a gas station near Interstate 39-90-94 on East Washington Avenue, making it possible for Wisconsinites to take long trips in their clean cars by providing near-full charges in about 30 minutes, compared to the 2 hours typically needed to fill up.
The charging stations provide the security to drivers wanting to go electric but nervous about the lack of places to go if their batteries run low.
The number of stations ballooned in Madison from six in 2009 to 26 in just three years.
Now it’s not uncommon to see Chevy Volts, Toyota Priuses or the pricier Teslas zooming down the Beltline, illustrating Madisonians’ tendency to spend their money on green alternatives.
'Fighting Bob' La Follette bust
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Not long before thousands of protesters laid flowers and tributes at his pedestal, former governor and U.S. Sen. Robert M. La Follette received the ultimate snub.
Past governors took their oath of office in the Capitol rotunda near the governor's office and, since 1980, in front of the visage of the state's Progressive lion.
But newly elected Gov. Scott Walker wanted to do "something a little unconventional," as he later explained at the Goldwater Institute Annual Dinner.
"We started out by moving the swearing-in ceremony from the East Wing where there is a bust of Robert La Follette, who was an icon to some in the state of Wisconsin, one of the leaders of the so-called Progressive movement," Walker said about relocating the ceremony to the wing where the state constitution is enshrined.
The snub was a prelude to Walker's public union reforms, which liberals view as antithetical to the legacy of La Follette (1855-1925), who railed against greedy industrialists, championed a host of government reforms (minimum wage, workers' compensation, income tax, women's suffrage and the Wisconsin Idea among them) and opposed intervention in World War I.
If liberal Madison could choose a patron saint, it would canonize "Fighting Bob" La Follette.
The bust, by La Follette contemporary Jo Davidson, was purchased for $12,000 in the 1977 state budget. Davidson's full La Follette statue is on display in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, one of only two Wisconsin figures — along with Father Jacques Marquette — so honored.
Essen Haus boot
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The second Wednesday of every month is sacred at the Essen Haus, Deutschland’s foothold in Downtown Madison with 16 German beers on tap.
The daily Oktoberfest atmosphere there is enhanced by the monthly Stein Club, where a $100 membership makes you a member for life, and among other things, entitles you to a free, 2-liter glass of beer in the shape of a boot on your birthday.
Legend has it that during World War I, German soldiers lacking glasses began passing around a leather boot filled with beer. Over time, it evolved into a tradition enjoyed daily — or more often, nightly — at the Essen Haus, where the feeling of “gemütlichkeit” — the German term connoting joy, camaraderie and fellowship — is infectious.
Glance around the room or patio as boots are being passed around, and as the person chugging nears the bottom of the boot, his or her friends shout and pound the table.
Drinkers ting the boot’s heel with a finger before and after for good luck. Custom is to pass the boot without setting it down on the table.
Another tradition is that if you finish the boot, the person drinking from it before you has to pay.
The trick is not to let the beer splash you in the face when a giant air bubble gets trapped inside the ankle as the glass is nearly drained. (The secret: Point the toe toward you).
Finishing a boot can be punishing. As a former Essen House bartender once said: “It’s a memorable thing that you can never remember and always regret.”
Prost!
St. Raphael Cathedral steeple
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For generations of Madison’s faithful, looking to the heavens meant glancing at the St. Raphael Cathedral steeple on the way up.
The 104-foot structure towered over the Isthmus for more than a century. Then, in 2005, an arson fire shockingly gutted the mother church of the Madison Catholic Diocese.
The cathedral had become a cherished Madison landmark, admired by the secular community for its architectural grandeur, embraced by believers as proof that even in this city of iconoclasts, religion matters. Its steeple, piercing the sky just a block from the Capitol dome, signaled that while there may be a wall between church and state, the former would not be easily overlooked.
When the St. Raphael cornerstone was laid in 1854, the church was only the fifth to be built in Madison. Now, dozens of Christian churches dot the city landscape, and religious diversity thrives. There are Jewish synagogues and Buddhist temples, Quaker circles and Islamic mosques.
The first steeple was not added to St. Raphael’s until 1882. The one that survived the fire was actually a replica of the original, put there just months before the fire as part of a renovation project. The cathedral was deemed a total loss and torn down. The steeple was saved, although its damaged base later was dismantled for scrap metal.
What remains today is the spire, the upper-most conical part of the steeple that includes the cross. A bit of it can be glimpsed by motorists at its outdoor storage site along East Washington Avenue.
One day, the diocese hopes to rebuild the cathedral. The spire would then assume its watchful perch over the city once again.
Hippie Christmas pile
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Out one day. In the next. For thousands of students and Madisonians living on the Isthmus, the mid-August moving day presents a logistical headache.
Making overnight sleeping accommodations can be as simple as finding a friend who isn’t moving, or paying a visit to that suddenly close acquaintance who lives away from Downtown.
But those darn possessions. What to do with all the stuff that accumulated in the previous apartment while its owner is homeless for a night?
Enter the great Madison tradition that coincides with moving day: Hippie Christmas.
It’s the day Downtown transforms into half-landfill, half-thrift shop as many of the movers scour the area for discarded upgrades to their own possessions, or new items they never knew they needed.
A touch of Windex, a mist of Febreze and — voila! — it’s ready for another year in its new home.
There’s a method to the madness. Items piled on the terrace between the street and sidewalk are fair game. Items stashed between the sidewalk and residence are not.
The holiday’s most ambitious connoisseurs can be found by the glow of their flashlights. The less-zealous participants can be found scrambling to beat city garbage crews.
Of course, there’s a fair share of curbside carnage that just isn’t fit for another home. But what would be the fun if Madison’s streets were lined purely with treasures?
Tenney Locks
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Boating in any vessel celebrates speed and freedom. Going through Tenney Locks — a necessary step to get between lakes Mendota and Monona — celebrates temporary confinement and claustrophobia.
The little stretch of water between Madison’s main lakes holds boats for four minutes, pinning them into a small holding tub with up to five other vessels, high concrete walls on either side. Chains hanging from the walls complete the prison motif.
Yet you’ll never find a more charming prison in which to float. The gigantic steel gates on either end of the lock rise and fall depending on the direction you’re heading.
The 56,000 gallons of water roil and gurgle as the gates let in water or hold it back. Hang onto the chains lest the current suck you too close.
Heading out to Lake Mendota, your boat rises five feet to meet the water level. Going the other direction, you slowly drop those same five feet to put you on a level with the Yahara River, which feeds into Lake Monona downriver.
In either direction, you’ll pass under the raised gate, which drips lake water on you, often flavored with moss and crud.
Between 150 and 250 boats per day go through the locks on weekend days in summer. You see the variety of craft that enjoy our lakes. Jetskiers coexist with anglers and party boaters and kayakers. A barge even rumbles through occasionally, built specifically to fit through the lock.
It’s a quick way station between here and there, a chance to soak in nautical vibes and chitchat with others enjoying a day on the water.
Ice shacks
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An ice shack is a simple shelter. But it can also serve as a refuge, even in the heart of the state’s second-largest city, feet from speeding traffic on John Nolen Drive and on top of one of the best urban fisheries in the Midwest.
Add a small propane heater, and soon you’ll be shedding your jacket, playing cribbage without gloves and pulling bluegill and perch through the ice in almost spring-like conditions. Even with the state Capitol in view, a winter outing can feel almost solitary.
Most shacks have a plastic base that doubles as a sled, a frame of aluminum poles and a nylon shell that blocks the wind and absorbs the sun.
The vast majority of the shacks on the Madison chain of lakes start out lightweight. Soon, however, they become weighted down with gear that can include lawn chairs, a power auger, fishing tackle, a grill, food, a heater, propane, packaged goods and even children.
Three to six inches of snow cover is about perfect. Anything less and it’s too slick. A foot or more of snow and it’s a sweaty workout to get to your desired spot.
For those who chase walleye and monstrous northern pike, the shacks serve as a warm lookout station. Anglers peer through cloudy plastic windows secured with Velcro in search of the upright flag of a tip-up indicating a fish has found an interest in a 3- or 4-inch shiner or a 2-inch fathead minnow.
Regardless of the fishing success, the ice shack is a constant and a familiar sign that winter has again returned to our city.
Lake Monona art
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Artist Timothy Browning has made dinosaurs come out of extinction, the Loch Ness Monster surface in Madison, and Grateful Dead bears dance on ice.
Lake Mendota has its legendary Lady Liberty — the seemingly partially submerged Statue of Liberty replica dating back 35 years. But thanks to Browning, Lake Monona has seen its share of winter art out on the ice.
On the 5.1-square-mile blank canvas of Lake Monona, Browning has “decorated the lake” every winter for 15 years, turning cardboard or plywood into pigs with wings, submarines, penguins and a miniature Eiffel Tower.
Late last year, he drilled holes in the ice to install his public art depiction of moonshine stills accompanied by two “Drinky Winkie” characters, which Browning described as distant relatives of the Oompa Loompas of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fame.
Browning sites his lake art installations about 50 feet off the shore, visible to the 40,000 drivers who pass the intersection of John Nolen Drive and Broom Street daily as they approach Monona Terrace.
It’s a way of brightening their day during long, cold winters and making those things that are always a little tough a bit more bearable.
Dick Guyot is another Lake Monona winter art enthusiast known for the 9-foot-tall state Capitol replicas he put in the same spot for about 15 years starting in the 1990s.
Country musician and artist Terry Allen famously said that public art is for the birds. Browning’s and Guyot’s has been for the fish.
And for passing motorists, cyclists and pedestrians, it makes winter a tad friendlier.
A bottle of Hopalicious
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Madison began falling in love with hops in 2006.
People had just started calling it “craft beer” instead of “microbrew,” and the hop — a bitter, pungent little flower cone that’s been a key ingredient of beer for centuries — was starting to become the star of the show.
That July, a new business called Ale Asylum opened in a former print shop in a nondescript industrial strip mall near Madison Area Technical College, becoming the first brewery of the craft era to make and bottle beer in the city limits.
It launched with 11 beers, all of which would be familiar to Madison beer fans today and four of which hit six-packs in those stubby “heritage” bottles.
One, Hopalicious, absolutely took off.
An American pale ale — not an IPA! — loaded with piney, citrusy Cascades (a variety of hops), it was hoppy enough in aroma and name to hook itself to the hottest class of craft beers while being balanced enough to appeal to Madison’s masses.
Within five years Ale Asylum was making so much Hopalicious that it had more or less maxed out its brewery and began planning for its current facility, which opened in fall 2012 off Packers Avenue near the Dane County Regional Airport.
This year, it will make about 20,000 barrels of beer — about half of that Hopalicious, which is now shipped across the entire state and to Illinois.
It can be found at nearly every street festival, bar and corner store in Madison, along with New Glarus Spotted Cow and Capital’s Wisconsin Amber.
But if you’re looking for a beer that’s pure Madison, there’s no question it’s Hopalicious.
Plastic pink flamingos
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Flamingos aren’t found in the wild within 1,000 miles of the Madison, but their likeness has become an enduring piece of the city’s fabric.
Pink and plastic with just the right amount of cheesy charm, the birds were introduced to Madison in a big way in 1979 by members of the famed Pail and Shovel Party, who were elected to student government at UW-Madison on a promise to take nothing seriously.
The whimsical lawn ornaments were imported from Illinois under the cover of darkness by Michael LaViolette, a student and friend of the Pail and Shovel officers and flamingo masterminds Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian.
After scrambling to assemble the birds before daybreak, LaViolette and company drove a truck onto Bascom Hill to unload the flock — all 1,008 of them.
The prank proved to be a success, drawing praise from UW students and staff, as well as the Madison community. Since then, they’ve returned periodically to Bascom Hill, lifting spirits and adding a splash of color to their busy student surroundings.
In 2009, thanks to a crusade by State Journal columnist Doug Moe, the flamingo was forever enshrined in Madison culture when it was named the city’s official bird in a 15-4 vote.
Ald. Marsha Rummel, who sponsored the declaration and was a student in 1979, wrote in the resolution that the flamingos “left an indelible mark on the history of Madison, by providing many former students with a fond funny memory, generating several postcards marking the event and even a spot in the Wisconsin Historical Museum.”
The W crest
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Since the UW Field House opened in 1930, scores of students have walked through its doors to cheer on the university’s basketball, volleyball, wrestling, boxing and gymnastics teams, hear memorable speeches by John F. Kennedy and Desmond Tutu, or watch then-amateur boxer Cassius Clay lose a fight.
But for more than half a century, the ‘W’ crest that adorns the upper half of the massive front wall of “the Barn” hid in plain sight. Its rise in popularity to the most identifiable symbol for UW-Madison — distinct from the Athletic Department’s ‘Motion W’ — started about 25 years ago due to a combination of events that included the UW School of Medicine, the University Ridge Golf Course and former Chancellor Donna Shalala.
Earl Madden, art director for the university’s Communications and Marketing office, doesn’t know who created the original crest. But he drew up a slightly different version of the crest for the School of Medicine’s new logo in the late 1980s after then-dean Philip Farrell said he wanted something classic that would look good on a golf shirt.
The logo did end up on golf shirts, but only because it also popped up as the logo for the university’s new golf course, shortly after the med school’s logo was created. Credit for that went to then-associate athletic director Al Fish.
Though Farrell had envisioned the ‘W’ logo as something unique to the med school, the copycat syndrome was just beginning. Madden showed the ‘W’ crest to Shalala, who wanted a new logo for the university. She instantly embraced it.
Now the logo is used by nearly every department at UW-Madison.
Community cars
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Like a timeshare for drivers, Madison’s car-sharing program has helped eco-conscious residents do their best to be stewards of the environment and likely has saved them some money on vehicle maintenance, too.
Community Car — there’s actually 13 of them, owned by individuals and shared with others — has been in Madison for more than a decade now. It began in 2003, when founder Sonya Newenhouse became troubled with the environmental impact of cars and decided to get rid of hers. The program now offers vehicles of all sizes, mostly Hondas and Toyotas.
Members join by paying $35 and rent vehicles for rates ranging from $8 to $9 per hour, depending on the plan purchased. To pay as you go, it’s $10 per hour and $85 to reserve a car for an entire day.
Currently, Community Car has 950 members, some of whom use the cars on a regular basis, others less frequently.
Madison is smooth sailing on a bicycle, but there are days when you actually do need a car. There’s no way you’re going to haul a Thanksgiving turkey and all the fixings for the family meal under some bungee cords. Or you realize you really, really want that coffee table from the St. Vinny’s thrift store, and getting to your doctor’s appointment is too long of a ride and the bus schedule won’t work.
You can pick up a Toyota Yaris from Flo in the 300 block of West Main Street. Or, for moving needs, Frank has a Ford Ranger pickup truck at RP’s Pasta Co., 1133 E. Wilson St.
That way, Madisonians can give up their cars and have them, too.
Recycling carts
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Like many things Madison, the size of a recycling cart has been a source of unexpected controversy.
As the city prepared to launch its automated recycling pickups in 2005, it deemed that all households would start out with a standard 65-gallon cart.
Now Madison loves recycling — to the tune of 19,400 tons that earned the city $306,432.38 last year. Even those whose backyards are home to the ubiquitous black compost bins they feed like a pet have embraced — maggots and all — a city pilot program to collect organic waste.
But for some, a loftier goal than to recycle a wealth of beer cans and water bottles is to generate less waste, recyclable or not, shunning plastic bottles and other products encased in needless packaging. They would have no part of an unsightly, oversized cart that’s difficult for some to stow or push to the curb.
So the city offers three sizes of recycling carts, ranging from 35 to 95 gallons. And unlike most municipalities that have opted for blue, Madison’s are green, in keeping with the environmental theme.
City recycling czar George Dreckmann maintains there’s no judgment associated with the size of one’s recycling cart. In fact, if he had his druthers, he’d give everyone the largest size from the get-go because of the number of people who trade up to a larger cart — about 1,000 a year.
But there are those who cling to their petite carts as a recycling badge of honor — even if they must creep around under the cloak of darkness in search of extra space in their neighbors’ bigger carts.
Central High School arch
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At one time, going to high school in Madison meant going Downtown to a school founded in 1854, just six years after statehood.
Just blocks from State Street and Capitol Square with their clothing stores, other merchants and students from nearby UW-Madison, the area around Central High School buzzed with activity during the school year.
Central (then simply called Madison High School) moved to its permanent site on Wisconsin Avenue in 1858 and into a new Cass Gilbert-designed building on the site in 1908 — four years after a fire destroyed the third state Capitol and nine years before the current Capitol building would be completed. The name was changed to Central High School in 1922 when East High School opened its doors on East Washington Avenue. West High School would open on Regent Street in 1930.
Central merged with Wisconsin High School in 1966 and became Central-University High School before closing its doors at the end of the 1968-69 school year. In 1986, the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot for Madison Area Technical College, but the school’s stone arch was preserved as a monument to the city’s first high school.
A plan by the Madison Children’s Museum to move to the site in 2002 threatened the arch, but the museum ultimately chose a different space. In 2007, the arch was repaired and restored by Jacob Arndt, a stonemason and sculptor from Lake Mills, who proclaimed the structure “robust and healthy,” saying, “with regularly scheduled routine maintenance these masonry buildings last forever.”
Film archive at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
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There are numerous scenes in Hollywood movies that involve a gang breaking into a vault.
If the gang happened to include movie buffs, and the vault was the one under the Wisconsin Historical Society on the UW-Madison campus, they might not ever leave.
The vault in question holds more than 20,000 films and television episodes, including movie classics like “Citizen Kane” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and is part of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, a collaboration between the historical society and the UW-Madison Communication Arts Department.
Beyond the film prints in the vault, the center’s holdings include the papers — original manuscripts, correspondence and more — of many film and theater personalities.
In a 1969 letter to Tino Balio, then center director, actor Kirk Douglas, explained why he was donating his collection to the center: “It is the first university, as far as I know, to see the significance of such collections in tracing the historical development of filmmaking as one of the most important modern art forms.”
Starting in 1960 as the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research, the center has grown into one of the world’s leading resources for all things show business.
Film, of course, is now included in the center’s name. It was in the late 1960s that Balio persuaded United Artists to donate prints of some 2,000 films to the center.
And the vault’s holdings continue to grow: This summer, independent producer Ted Hope donated his papers, and several films, to the center.
1941 NCAA men's basketball trophy
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When the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team dropped a 44-27 decision at Minnesota in a Big Ten Conference opener on Jan. 6, 1941, nobody could have predicted what would happen next.
The loss dropped the Badgers’ record to 5-3, which wasn’t terrible considering they already had matched their win total from an ugly 5-15 campaign the previous season.
But the defeat was UW’s third in five games, and coach Harold “Bud” Foster’s team returned home that night having been held without a field goal in the second half.
It would be the last setback of the season for Foster and Co. The Badgers won their final 15 games and delivered the program’s only NCAA title to date, beating Washington State 39-34 in the final at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 29.
When UW returned to Madison via train with its trophy in the early morning hours on March 31, there were 10,000 fans waiting to greet the champions. The celebration included Foster’s players hopping on a fire truck for a ride around the Capitol that was cut short when the engine caught fire.
It was the first thing in months to slow down the Badgers, who were led by stars Gene Englund and John Kotz. UW’s winning streak included a victory at Indiana, the defending national champion, and a payback triumph over Minnesota.
The NCAA tournament was in its infant stages and was only an eight-team event at the time. The Badgers beat Dartmouth and Pittsburgh at the UW Field House to advance to Kansas City, where they made history.
Halloween costume on State Street
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Sweet or scary, store-bought or homemade, conservative or barely there — costumes are the heart and soul of Madison’s annual Halloween celebration on State Street.
For decades, State Street has been a go-to destination for costumed revelers to see and be seen. Whether you’re writing tuition checks or collecting retirement checks, you’re certain to find more than a few peers showing their spirit in Downtown Madison.
Halloween costumes on State Street are often a sign of the times — from the current pop culture phenoms like Walter White of “Breaking Bad” or twerking Miley Cyrus in 2013, to the latest scandal-plagued politicians.
And there are recurring favorites, such as Nintendo characters Mario and Luigi, comic book heroes and villains like Batman and the Joker, and the always lovable Teletubbies.
Halloween also unleashes Madison’s creative side, with elaborately crafted costumes reflecting personal interests, plays on words or just about any item you can imagine.
Madison’s Halloween celebration has changed through the years. Gone are the days of State Street free-for-alls with police estimates of up to 100,000 people mingling on the street and in adjacent bars. Several years of rowdy celebrations marred by riots, vandalism and arrests gave way to Freakfest, an organized, gated festival with paid admission and live music.
Still drawing crowds of up to 30,000, Freakfest remains a popular destination for people-watching as costumes serve as conversation pieces, bringing together strangers who wouldn’t otherwise interact.
Greenbush cookbooks
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From the early 1900s into the 1920s, immigrant families from Sicily, Russia, Germany, Ireland and America’s South settled in the former Greenbush neighborhood, sharing their Old World flavors as they sought a better life.
Known as “the Bush,” the 10-block triangle — centered at Park and Regent streets and West Washington Avenue — was a place perfumed by the aroma of freshly baked bread, where men returned from their jobs in factories and stores to a hearty plate of spaghetti, the pasta kneaded and rolled out by hand, the sauce simmered from tomatoes grown in home gardens.
Women gathered on their porches in the evening to snap peas and swap stories. Some brought in extra money by stripping leaves at the Lorillard Tobacco Factory or by taking in boarders, often UW students. And no one left their homes hungry.
Stories of old Greenbush are told in the cookbooks written by Catherine Tripalin Murray, whose father and grandparents lived there from 1911 on, along with recipes and anecdotes passed down and recounted by their children and grandchildren.
From Antonina Masino Traino’s Rabbit Cacciatore to Rachel Sweet Dutch’s Challah to Mamie Taylor Mathews’ Sweet Potato Pie, the recipes and tales of their lives in “the Bush” evoke a time and place that seems far from Madison today.
They are among the few remnants of a lively community that found joy in simple pleasures, a neighborhood virtually gone — save for the Italian Workmen’s Club at 941 Regent St. — to make way for urban renewal in the 1960s.
L'Etoile menu
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On this menu, it’s not just butternut soup. It’s butternut squash and apple soup with brown butter, black trumpet mushrooms and sage.
On this menu, it’s not just leg of lamb, it’s Pinn Oak Ridge leg of lamb with cranberry beans, roasted peppers, lamb tongue, Swiss chard and rosemary jus.
On this menu, it’s not just chocolate cake, it’s dark chocolate tranche with smoked apricots, coconut yuzu sorbet, and Carandale blackberries.
Since 1976, L’Etoile — French for “star” — has been delighting lovers of good food, serving farm-to-table meals before it was fashionable, and providing unbridled joy to diners in a way that only a perfect meal can.
After 28 years at the helm, founder Odessa Piper sold the restaurant to Tory Miller, then her 29-year-old chef de cuisine, and his sister Traci. Now, Miller owns the restaurant with a trio of partners.
Miller moved the restaurant from its understated, second-story location on the Capitol Square to an all-windowed ground-level spot in the “glass bank” building at 1 S. Pinckney St.
He’s also captured a James Beard award for best chef in the Midwest, an honor Piper received in 2001.
These days, a three-course tasting menu is $65 and a seven-course prix fixe menu will set you back
$125.
It’s an expensive night out, for sure, but it’s L’Etoile, the pinnacle of fine dining in a city that appreciates well-prepared, local food.
The experience is as non-snooty as its owner/chef, who is not only known for his expertise in the kitchen, but for his tattoos and the hair he sometimes wears in a mohawk.
Confederate soldier's tombstone
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[Editor's note: Since this list was published in 2014, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin has ordered the removal of the Confederate monuments at Forest Hill Cemetery.]
If you meander through Forest Hill Cemetery, at Regent Street and Speedway Drive, past monuments for some of Madison’s early movers and shakers with names such as Doty, Van Hise, Hoyt and Quisling, you may find the Confederate Rest.
Just past the Union soldiers’ graves, on the other side of the mausoleum, is the final resting place for 140 Confederate soldiers from the Civil War.
Their tombstones, each 2 feet high in gray marble, sit in orderly rows within a border of limestone blocks, the names still legible 150 years later.
The servicemen, most from Alabama’s 1st Infantry Regiment and others from Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, died from their injuries or other ailments not long after arriving in Madison by train in April 1862. They were captured at Island No. 10 — a Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River where Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee meet — and held at Camp Randall, a Union army training facility that became a prisoner-of-war camp and military hospital.
Visitors from around the U.S. seeking their forebears have made pilgrimages to the small plot, and some have taken its plight to heart. Alice Whiting Waterman moved to Madison from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1866 to care for the graves. When she died in 1897, she was buried there with “her boys.”
Tucked back from the driveway by a genteel expanse of lawn and shaded by pines and a massive, old oak tree, you can almost hear the spirits of the young soldiers whispering as the wind rustles the leaves on a cool autumn day.
Lake weed harvesters
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Floating weed harvesters have opened passages through Dane County’s dense tangles of underwater plants for about 50 years.
The barges wield rotating cutting bars like those on farm combines to cut a submerged crop that is fertilized too well by runoff of nutrients like dairy manure.
Each spring, the county launches a flotilla of 10 paddle-propelled aquatic mowers to cut and remove thousands of tons of soggy vegetation to improve navigation and reduce flood risk.
Most years, Lake Monona gets the most attention and produces the biggest bounty among the six to 16 bodies of water that may be targeted in a given season.
But the fleet’s top priority is a wooded, relatively untraveled stretch of the Yahara River that flows from Lake Waubesa to Lake Kegonsa. If a channel isn’t regularly buzzed through the riverbed’s mane of wild celery, the waterway can become a bottleneck that increases the flood risk upstream.
In addition to the river and lakes Monona, Mendota, Waubesa, Kegonsa and Wingra, crews may also cut Upper Mud, Fish, Indian and Stewart lakes; Lake Belle View; lagoons in Tenney, Vilas and Warner parks; a quarry in Verona; and ponds in the Jenni and Kyle Preserve in Fitchburg.
The steel harvesters usually mow 30-foot-wide strips parallel to shore and 20-foot-wide lanes to open water.
The county could remove more weeds, but that would rob fish of habitat and allow sediment to cloud the water.
Most of the wet bounty is composted and available to the public at 7102 Highway 12-18, a half-mile east of I-90.
U.S. Open trophy
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Any listing of the greatest individual sporting achievements by a Madisonian must include Andy North’s two U.S. Open championships.
The unforgettable moment of his one-shot victory at Cherry Hills near Denver in 1978 was the pressure-packed four-foot putt that he made in howling winds for bogey on the final hole.
And few who watched North win at Oakland Hills Country Club near Detroit in 1985 will forget him leaping up in an attempt to see the end of his incredible sand shot at the 17th hole — the second-to-last of the tournament — from a trap so big that it looked like he was hitting out of the White Cliffs of Dover.
After the win at Oakland Hills, the white-shirt and white-sweater clad North lifted the U.S. Open trophy for a photo that has been published thousands of times. The trophy stays in the United States Golf Association museum in Far Hills, New Jersey. The winner gets a replica trophy that he can keep for one year.
A tremendous athlete who grew up in Monona, North is one of just 21 golfers who have two or more U.S. Open victories. Unfortunately for North, he suffered myriad injuries during his golf career and won only one other tournament. But he inspired a host of kids from Wisconsin to start playing golf, including future PGA pros Steve Stricker, from Edgerton, and Jerry Kelly, from Madison.
North earned $45,000 for his 1978 Open victory and $103,000 in 1985. That pales in comparison to the $1.6 million Germany’s Martin Kaymer earned for winning the U.S. Open this year at Pinehurst Country Club in North Carolina.
The Yost's facade
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Back in the 1990s, the bargain basement at Yost’s was the place to go for a fancy dress at last year’s prices. And for seven decades before that, the dry goods and women’s store at 201 State St. was the place to go for style.
Built in 1923, the department store was designed by Frank Riley — the Madison-born architect who also designed East High School, the Madison Club and the Governor’s Mansion in Maple Bluff. Riley, commissioned by longtime merchant Frank Kessenich Sr. to design a “modern, fireproof store,” gave the $250,000 building a French Renaissance flair.
What’s left today is an elegant stone facade that, as stated in John Kessenich Yost’s 2008 obituary, is now “beautifully incorporated” into Overture Center for the Arts — a conversion that was not without controversy.
The store’s original name — Kessenich’s — grew to Yost’s Kessenich’s in the 1930s after the Yost family rented space in it (John Radford Yost married Adelaide Kessenich, Frank Sr.’s daugher), according to a Madison Landmarks Commission report.
It was one of four large department stores State Street boasted by 1940, along with Hill’s, Montgomery Ward and Sears-Roebuck.
Today, visitors enter through the heavy glass doors beneath the arch of the former Yost’s facade to try on the arts in Overture’s concert halls, theater spaces and art galleries.
Even in Madison’s anything-goes fashion culture, people sometimes still dress up to see an Overture Center show. But whether in a tux or jeans, a visitor’s first impression through that arch is the same: pure class.
'Miracle on Ice' Olympic gold medal
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Three-plus decades haven’t diminished fans’ enthusiasm in seeing the gold medal Mark Johnson earned as a member of 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team.
Johnson loves seeing people’s reactions when he brings the medal to an event. His favorite part is seeing their faces light up when he tells them they can touch the medal.
Time hasn’t made the achievement any less special to Johnson, either.
Madison’s footprint on the 1980 Winter Games was huge. Eric Heiden won a record five individual gold medals in speedskating, while Johnson and fellow Madison native Bob Suter were teammates on the “Miracle on Ice” outfit that shocked the Soviet Union – and the world – en route to winning the gold in Lake Placid, New York.
Suter, a tough, blue-collar defender who played at Madison East High School, died unexpectedly on Sept. 9.
Johnson — a standout at Madison Memorial who was a teammate of Suter’s with the University of Wisconsin men’s hockey team that won an NCAA title in 1977 — was one of the stars for the Americans in 1980.
He scored two goals in the team’s stunning, 4-3 upset of the Soviet Union, which had throttled the U.S. 10-3 less than two weeks earlier in an exhibition.
Johnson’s goals erased one-goal deficits in the first and third periods and set the stage for Mike Eruzione’s game-winner with 10 minutes remaining in the game.
Johnson, now the coach of the powerhouse UW women’s hockey program, tallied a goal and an assist as the Americans went on to beat Finland 4-2 to win the gold medal.
First same-sex marriage certificate
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[Editor's note: After this list was published in 2014, same-sex marriage was made the law of the land in the United States by a Supreme Court ruling.]
A key document in Wisconsin history has spent much of its existence tucked inside a plain manila envelope on a bookshelf in a Madison home.
But there was little low-key about how the piece of paper certifying the first same-sex marriage in Madison came to be issued.
On June 6, a ruling by U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb set off a week in which hundreds of joyful, nervous, teary-eyed gay and lesbian couples were married here and across the state.
Crabb ruled in favor of four couples who challenged the state’s 2006 constitutional amendment limiting marriages to those between “one man and one woman.”
Within minutes of the ruling’s release, couples lined up at the County Clerk’s office for marriage license applications.
They exchanged vows in brief ceremonies on the City-County Building steps, on nearby lawns and at Monona Terrace.
Friends and family snapped photos, cheered and applauded into that evening and through the next week.
First in line for a marriage certificate application were Renee Currie and Shari Roll, who had been together for 11 years.
They were married immediately and went straight to the county register of deeds office to file the application. Five days later, they received their marriage certificate from the state Vital Records Office.
Crabb later granted state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s motion to stay her ruling pending appeals. That ended the weddings after a week.
The attorney general asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the gay marriage ban. But on Oct. 6, 2014, the high court chose not to hear appeals of lower court rulings, clearing the way for gay and lesbian couples in Wisconsin and four other states to legally marry.
WORT's record collection
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From The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut album to new Cuban music, WORT’s record collection reflects the diversity that has helped make the feisty community-run radio station a Madison institution.
Since it went on the air as Back Porch Radio Broadcasting in 1975, the station at 89.9 FM has emphasized its commitment to “radio programming with a human perspective” with a wide variety of music and talk shows.
Each local show is run live with one of the station’s 300 volunteers behind the mixing board in the studio nestled in a mural-covered building at 118 S. Bedford St.
Through local talk shows such as “Her Turn” and “In Our Backyard,” and syndicated offerings including Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” and “Workers Independent News,” WORT provides an outlet for discussing current issues and gives voice to those underrepresented or absent from mainstream media.
Music programming ranges from Rockin’ John McDonald’s old-time rock ‘n’ roll show, “I Like It Like That,” which has been on the air since WORT’s beginning, to “Back to the Country,” with local musician Bill Malone, to “Better Living Through Show Tunes,” a team effort to promote “cultural glitteracy through musical theater.” Many listeners launch their Thanksgiving holiday by tuning in to the traditional playing of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.”
Spinning underground hip hop beats late at night and spanning genres from blues and gospel to folk, jazz and world music, WORT is often the gateway that introduces new music from outside the mainstream to Madison.
Centro Hispano mural
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The story painted within a vibrant mural outside of the Centro Hispano building at 810 W. Badger Road is a familiar one to many members of Madison’s Latino community.
It is a story of immigration, of migrant workers on Wisconsin farms, of adapting to a new community and setting a path for a better life.
The mural, titled “Story of Immigration” and installed in June 2013, shows migrant workers on Wisconsin farms tending fields and hauling produce to a canning factory.
Farther down the painted path, a family is seen seeking out Centro Hispano for help adjusting to new customs, a new language and a new environment. The story continues with images of a family celebrating with new college graduates.
Most importantly, the mural tells the story of how one generation endured hardship and difficulty so their children might pursue a better life.
Created in 1983 by a group of community volunteers, Centro Hispano is dedicated to assisting families with education, jobs and youth programs, while serving as a resource for the Latino community.
As Madison’s Latino population has grown, adding to the richness of the cultural fabric of the community, Centro Hispano has expanded along with it.
At the end of the mural is a quote from Cesar Chavez emphasizing giving back and investing in the community.
“We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community,” it reads. “Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”
Nitty Gritty birthday bell
-88-
If they can’t tell it’s your birthday from the balloon bobbing above your head or the official birthday mug holding your free drink of choice, your fellow patrons at the Nitty Gritty certainly get the message when the bartender gives a celebratory ring of the bar’s birthday bell.
The Nitty Gritty birthday bell is rung about 57 times per day and more than 20,000 times each year, once for each birthday celebrant who walks in the door.
Since 1898, the building at the corner of West Johnson and North Frances streets evolved from a general store to a neighborhood bar first known as Glen’n’Ann’s before becoming the Nitty Gritty.
The original Nitty Gritty opened on Oct. 3, 1968, and it too transformed over the years, from an informal meeting place for opponents of the Vietnam War to a popular Midwest blues bar with live music seven nights a week.
But today, the Nitty Gritty is best known as Madison’s birthday bar.
Former Madison TV personality and Nitty Gritty founder Marsh Shapiro brought the idea of the bell back from his days in the Navy, where the ringing of a bell signified meal times or important announcements.
And at the Nitty Gritty, announcing birthdays is a top priority.
The bell has been replaced several times because of the wear and tear it receives — each time with an old-fashioned, hardy ship’s bell.
But don’t worry. There’s an extra bell in the basement if it’s needed when it’s time to announce your birthday.
Willy Street Co-op Reader
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Letters have inspired books and movies, but few have inspired a sock puppet production.
Such is the appeal of the Willy Street Co-op Reader, the monthly newspaper published by Madison’s influential grocery cooperative that has seen massive growth in the past decade.
Along with news and great recipes, the Reader has gained a cult following due to its letters detailing concerns such as gender-neutral bathrooms, sharp corners on outdoor planters and acid rain landing on shopping carts (and we won’t even mention the Jenifer Street driveway).
The letters can be a source of amusement for some — that made them fodder for sock puppet performance readings of them last winter and spring at Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse. But they often offer specific answers about issues, including sustainability and organic foods, that members trust the co-op staff to provide.
If the letters sometimes have the feel of someone who thinks they own the place, it’s because they do. That’s the point of a cooperative — with members or employees owning a share of a business — and in Madison that economic structure thrives. Union Cab, Lakeside Press and Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing are among its other cooperative businesses.
Co-op staff members answer letters politely and have a sense of humor. While the co-op had nothing to do with the sock puppet production, it did lampoon itself with an April Fool’s cover this spring.
That, however, didn’t go over well with everyone.
At least one customer wasn’t a fan of it — and wrote a letter.
Harry Harlow's imitation mother monkeys
-90-
If you’re determined to rile people up in Madison, your safest bet might be to bring up Harry Harlow and his fake monkey moms.
“Sadistic torture,” some will say. “Brilliant research,” others will answer. “Those poor monkeys,” most will agree.
Harlow, a UW-Madison professor from 1930 to 1974, was a pioneering psychology researcher. His most important research involved the bond between mother and child in the primate world. Harlow took baby rhesus monkeys away from their birth mothers and exposed them to mother substitutes — a “cloth mother” and a “wire mother.” The cloth mother was a frame covered by a soft cloth. The wire mother was just a frame.
Harlow’s experiments showed that baby monkeys would cling to the cloth mother, even when the wire mother was constructed to feed the babies. Harlow showed that baby monkeys not only need interaction with mothers but need their mothers to push them out into broader relationships. Some of his most controversial research demonstrated that abusive mothers could scar their children for life.
He is one example of the university’s longstanding position as a behemoth in the scientific research world, which continues today. Harlow also was an early entrant into the university’s long-running debate over the ethics and limits of animal research. The debate flared again recently as UW moves forward with new research that again will intentionally deprive newborn monkeys of their mothers. Critics inside and outside the university have called for a stop to it.
CSA box
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It’s like getting a present every week or two during the growing season, a healthy, nutritious gift that feeds the body, mind and spirit.
Open your CSA box to find a wealth of yummy riches freshly plucked from the fertile earth of Community Supported Agriculture farms in and around Madison.
Golden carrots. Ruby red tomatoes. Jewel-toned eggplants. It’s a surprise every time, a cornucopia of just-ripened goodness that eliminates the need for a trip to the grocery store and inspires creativity in your culinary repertoire.
Some CSAs, including Troy Community Farm on Madison’s North Side, allow members to come out and choose what goes into their boxes. And some offer members a chance to pick their own fruit or flowers, attend special events or just pay a visit.
But CSA isn’t just about its recipients — it’s a way to invest in area farms, many of them organic.
In the Madison FairShare CSA Coalition alone, 37 farms have a total of about 300 pickup sites in the city.
CSA members pay a fee to farmers before the season to finance their operation and provide them with the security of knowing their products will be appreciated .
About 7,200 area residents — most in the city — are able to cut their costs with health insurance rebates .
That means if you split a box with someone, you can end up paying next to nothing, making your CSA share even more like a gift.
Mallards duck cap
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A green cap with an elongated yellow bill and cartoon-like eyes, the popular Madison Mallards hat is meant to mimic the look of a drake. But the wacky cap embodies the experience that is Mallards baseball.
Attending a Mallards game is not a traditional baseball experience. It’s a festive atmosphere that includes mascots zooming across zip lines, a giant gorilla looming over the outfield fence, wild mid-inning entertainment and occasional fireworks .
And that’s a big part of why the Northwoods League franchise has been such a success story.
Prior to the Mallards’ inaugural season in 2001, baseball had been a losing proposition in Madison. From the Muskies to the Hatters to the Black Wolf, nothing had stuck in Warner Park. The game alone was never enough to maintain interest .
But Mallards owner Steve Schmitt has created a summertime entertainment juggernaut that pulls people from across the area in search of a good time.
The all-inclusive food and beer ticket for the Duck Blind is a popular sell to thousands of people who may or may not ever see a pitch of the game. But so is the outfield berm, where tickets are cheap and children can roam freely .
After 14 seasons and consistent improvements to Warner Park, the “Duck Pond” has become a favorite spot for baseball and non-baseball fans alike to spend a summer evening.
Rose Bowl ring
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Not only are Barry Alvarez’s fingerprints all over the six Big Ten Conference championships the University of Wisconsin football program has won since 1993, they can be spotted on the rings the Badgers received for those achievements.
Alvarez’s legacy includes leading UW to the Rose Bowl after the 1993, ’98 and ’99 seasons. He became the school’s athletic director and watched as his hand-picked successor, Bret Bielema, led the Badgers to back-to-back-to-back Big Ten titles from 2010-12.
Here’s what you might not know: Alvarez played a major role in designing the rings players, coaches and support personnel received after those championship seasons. Alvarez believes that a ring has to tell a story.
The one from the 1993 season includes a Japanese flag insignia because UW’s final regular-season game, a win over Michigan State that clinched the Badgers’ first Rose Bowl berth in 31 years, was played in Tokyo.
The front of the most recent ring has a Motion W with three diamonds to signify three consecutive Big Ten titles.
UW was 0-3 in the Rose Bowl until Alvarez led the Badgers past UCLA in the 1994 game. The Badgers beat UCLA again five years later and Stanford in 2000 to become the first Big Ten team to win back-to-back Rose Bowl titles.
Alvarez’s perfect Rose Bowl record came to an end in the 2013 game when he was the interim replacement for Bielema, who left for Arkansas. The Badgers lost to Stanford, the third in a line of heartbreaking defeats that included losses to TCU and Oregon.
Epic Systems electronic health records
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A patient’s health history used to be stuffed into a bulging manila file folder, with hard-to-decipher physicians’ notes, X-rays and prescriptions.
Now, the minutiae that constitute our health story are all neatly recorded and archived in digital form, taking up only virtual space in the “computer cloud.”
Epic Systems Corp. is one of the top U.S. companies piloting that transformation.
Founded in Madison in 1979 and now encompassing 950 acres, 12 office buildings, a learning center, large dining hall and huge auditorium — with more buildings on the way — the privately owned, Verona electronic health records developer has 7,800 employees and 300 interns and brought in $1.66 billion in revenue in 2013.
It is a big economic engine, prompting new bus routes and apartment towers like The Constellation in Madison, 30 percent of which was rented to Epic staff as of June.
And it is changing the way we connect with our health care providers.
As patients, using programs such as Epic’s MyChart, we can now track our health records online, schedule appointments, access test results and even exchange secure email messages with our doctors.
Health care providers, with a touch or two on a tablet, can see if we’ve had a flu shot or a heart attack, are allergic to certain medicines, or track our recovery from an injury.
Digital access may not be as comforting as a house call. But it salves our desire for instant access and fast answers, and thanks to Epic, feeds a good chunk of the growth in housing, amenities and even new tech firms sprouting in the Madison area.
Hmong story cloth
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In vivid colors and measured stitches, Hmong story cloths tell a tale. The fact that they can be seen throughout Madison — in museum collections, in schools, on public library walls — also tells a story about a culture, once far away, that is now woven into the city’s life.
Though it uses a traditional form of embroidery and appliqué called paj ntaub, the story cloth is a relatively young form of folk art. Its creation goes back to the Vietnam War, when Hmong people aided the U.S. in its fight against the North Vietnamese. After the war, Hmong families fled to camps in neighboring Thailand; eventually some 100,000 would enter the U.S. as political refugees.
There was little to do in the Thai refugee camps, so some turned to story cloths — the men drawing patterns, the women filling them with precise stitches. It passed the time and became a way to relate stories of Hmong life and history. Story cloths were sent to relatives in the U.S., Australia, Canada and France, and sold to raise money for the artists.
One, attributed to Youa Lor and depicting a journey from Laos to Madison, ended up in the gift shop of the Wisconsin Historical Museum, where local folk art collector Bobbie Malone bought it. Malone has lent it to exhibits throughout the city.
Wisconsin has the third-largest Hmong population in the U.S., behind Minnesota and California.
Like the immigrant populations that came before them, Madison’s Hmong families are stitching together new lives, creating vibrant new stories for themselves and generations to follow.
Unitarian Meeting House prow
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As with any building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, there are so many stories — scores and scores of wonderful stories — connected with Madison’s Unitarian Meeting House.
The volunteer tour guides who show visitors around this fascinating structure — declared a national historic landmark in 2004 — share those tales. Like when an early church member complained to Wright that whenever he entered the building under its low, sloping copper roof, he hit his head.
Wright’s response? According to tour guide Helen Dyer, it was about practicing humility when entering a spiritual place. Or in Wright’s words: “‘Lower your head.’”
Wright designed the meeting house as “a little country church” made from natural materials such as pine, cement and tons of limestone that parishioners themselves hauled from a Sauk City quarry.
It is filled with — made from — triangles. Three-sided geometry is everywhere, from floors to ceilings, in literally every room (even the women’s washroom). Best-known is the building’s “prow” facing University Bay Drive, with interior ceilings designed to resemble the wings of a bird in flight.
Wright, the son of a Unitarian minister, began work on the meeting house at age 78 and was 84 the year it was completed, 1951. He designed its ingenious three-sided tables and even a huge bell, made from triangles of sheet copper, that was meant to hang in the prow.
But the bell, when hung, swung wildly in the wind — a nerve-wracking situation next to scores of rhomboid-shaped panes of glass.
Today the humbled bell sits inside the building.
9XM radio equipment
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It might be hard to imagine a time before computers and the Internet, before television, even before radio.
Way before programs like the nationally produced “All Things Considered” or the locally originated “Michael Feldman’s Whad’ Ya Know?” were even imagined, some of the earliest radio signals were broadcast in Madison.
In 1914 — 100 years ago — UW electrical engineering professor Edward Bennett set up a wireless telegraphic set on campus, obtained a license, and called it 9XM. UW-Madison says it’s the oldest station in the nation.
In the early days, you would not have heard voices, only signals in Morse code dots and dashes, translated by ham radio operators into weather and market reports.
The station’s vacuum tubes were not available in stores; they were formed in the UW’s glass-blowing lab, and no one knew if they would last through a broadcast.
Physics professor Earle Terry led the radio experiments and began regular transmissions from Science Hall on Dec. 4, 1916.
In 1917, Earle played the first records over 9XM and music and talk programming began. After President Woodrow Wilson ordered a brief shutdown of civilian broadcasts during World War I, fearing they’d tip “the enemy,” 9XM did experiments with the Great Lakes Naval Station, north of Chicago.
Regular programming began around 1919, and the station became WHA in 1922. Professor Terry took his share of ribbing, in the early days, for spending so much time on his hobby.
“Wait and see,” he said. “Radios will be as common as bathtubs in Wisconsin homes one day!”
Effigy mounds
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Sometimes, Madison gets divided by those who are from here and those who aren’t. It’s not a very good way of dividing people because, technically, very few of us are.
That becomes obvious by the ground that rises at sites throughout the city, many in the capital’s most picturesque spots. There’s the shape of a bear in a Near West Side park called Bear Mound Park. A bird with a 624-foot wingspan sits on the grounds of the Mendota State Hospital. Undetermined shapes overlook Lake Monona on the Near East Side.
They are the burial places of those who were the true natives here: effigy mounds that are the final resting places of Native Americans, sites still considered sacred. Wisconsin has the most effigy mounds in the U.S., with a high concentration in Madison. At one point there were 15,000 mounds in the state with 1,500 of them in today’s Madison.
The mounds date from 700 to 1200 A.D. The builders’ descendants became the tribes of Wisconsin. An estimated 80 percent of the mounds were lost to agriculture or urban development. Early 20th-century efforts by the first state archaeologist, Charles Brown, led to the preservation of those that remain.
The city of Madison lists nine parks that have mounds, and others are on private property. They are throughout UW-Madison property, on the Edgewood College campus and state land.
The mounds are now protected by state law prohibiting their disturbance. They serve as a reminder that the landscapes Madisonians cherish today were first beloved by those who came before and remain through eternity.
Rennie's soda fountain
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They weren’t pharmacies then, they were drug stores. Yet the more plainly descriptive name belied the different role they played once upon a time — a destination that could be the heart of a community.
You didn’t just go to a drug store to renew your angina meds, you went for a hot fudge sundae. You might meet your friends or a date there, a notion that today would make you seriously question your choice of companions.
In Madison, that spot was Rennebohm’s. Or, to the locals, Rennie’s. The first, built in 1924, was a hangout for students, faculty or hospital and Downtown staff. It stood at University and Randall avenues, the first of many locations to come for one-time governor and drug store mogul Oscar Rennebohm.
This being Wisconsin, people think fondly of the dairy products that were served there — shakes, floats, grilled cheese sandwiches. By 1980, the Rennebohm company was sold and its 17 stores became Walgreens locations, and the original store was razed to make way for the UW-Madison’s Institutes for Discovery.
When that facility opened in 2011, it featured a new Rennie’s. The dairy bar tipped its hat to what was once on that site, but closed a year later.
Rennebohm’s lives on in the memories of people who try to find and then swap its recipes or visit a Facebook page dedicated to it. New diners have opened with a retro feel, yet the lunch counter and soda fountain foremost in many people’s minds no longer exist.
Those wistful for the old Rennie’s are afflicted with nostalgia, a condition for which no drug store or pharmacy can provide a cure — with or without a hot fudge sundae.
Capitol dome
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You’ll find it on manhole covers and police badges, on overpasses and the top of this newspaper every day.
More than any other, the Capitol dome is the symbol of Madison.
There are obvious reasons for that: It dominates our skyline; it appears on the city seal; it’s the defining feature of the statehouse in this, the state capital.
But when you live here, the Capitol dome means even more.
It is the focal point of life in our city, that brilliant white dome topped by Daniel Chester French’s gilded bronze “Wisconsin” statue at the center of everything in Madison.
If you’ve had to leave this place, you know how hard it is to watch that dome shrink in the rear-view mirror of a packed-up car or U-Haul truck.
If you’ve returned, you know the relief of seeing it from the window of a descending plane, or picking it out from the water towers on the horizon as you roll in from the interstate.
The dome will stop you in your tracks in smaller moments, too.
Cross East Washington Avenue, look up from the Capitol Square sidewalk, catch it between buildings on a glance over your shoulder — do any of those at just the right moment, on just the right day, with just the right light, and you’ll swear you can feel everything crystallize.
You’ll know why you’re here. You’ll know why last winter was worth it. You’ll know why this place, at this moment, is exactly where you want to be.
You’ll know why this is home.
Objects 101, 102, 103 ...
When we set out to define Madison in 100 objects last summer, we knew it was a fool's errand. How does one capture the joy and everyday experience of life in Madison, its current moment in time and its colorful history, in just 100 objects?
At some point, you just have to close your eyes, point and move on.
The objects we decided to profile were the product of several brainstorming sessions by our staff, supplemented by suggestions from readers. Those suggestions continued to pour in throughout the months the series ran, some still arriving in our inbox as late as last week.
What follows is a partial list of those objects that didn't make the cut, including many that strayed quite far from our requirement that the object be, in fact, a physical object. Although they didn't make our list, they are perhaps no less-loved by at least some of you.
- 101. A beer bong
- 102. A Betty Lou cruise boat
- 103. A dog park
- 104. A Frisbee, preferably an ultimate one
- 105. A Green Cab
- 106. A late-night six-pack from Vic Pierce Liquor (allowed to stay open past 9 p.m. because it's in the town of Burke)
- 107. A Madison police horse
- 108. A Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI) T-shirt
- 109. A plate of fish at a VFW Friday fish fry
- 110. A Toyota Prius
- 111. A small scooter with a giant football player riding it
- 112. A sofa from St. Vincent de Paul
- 113. A steak from Smoky’s Club
- 114. A tap at the Great Dane
- 115. A teddy wedger from Teddy Wedgers
- 116. An Ironman souvenir
- 117. An issue of The Onion, which started in Madison
- 118. An orange construction barrel on the Beltline
- 119. Bernie's Rock Shop
- 120. Boat house at James Madison Park
- 121. Broom Street Theater tip box (it’s the actors' only pay )
- 122. Capitol City Band
- 123. Capitol City trail
- 124. Cherokee Marsh boardwalk
- 125. Christmas tree at the Capitol
- 126. Coffee beans from Ancora Coffee
- 127. Coffee cake from Mickey's Dairy Bar
- 128. Column by Roundy Coughlin (the State Journal's legendary sportswriter, who worked for the newspaper for nearly a half century)
- 129. Community Gardens (there are now 60, with almost a third serving as food pantry gardens)
- 130. Construction cranes
- 131. Crew rowing on Lake Mendota
- 132. Der Rathskeller at Memorial Union
- 133. Food carts
- 134. Gail Ambrosius chocolate
- 135. Greenbush Bakery donut
- 136. Hot cheese bread from Stella's bakery
- 137. Hoyt Park lookout
- 138. Ice skates
- 139. Italian Workmen's Club
- 140. John "Snowball" Riley's window-washing pail (Riley was a legendary Madison character who washed windows on State Street for 40 years)
- 141. Le Tigre Lounge
- 142. Library Mall
- 143. Local jazz great Ben Sidran’s piano
- 144. Lou Berryman's accordian
- 145. Mac & Cheese pizza from Ian's (which famously sustained protesters during the 2011 anti-Walker protests)
- 146. Madison juggler Truly Remarkable Loon’s purple T-shirt
- 147. Madison street musician Art Paul Schlosser's kazoo
- 148. Manhole covers with Madison logo
- 149. Med Flight helicopter
- 150. Memorial Union
- 151. Moving vans on Aug. 15
- 152. Muir Knoll (at the edge of Bascom Hill, named for conservationist John Muir, who attended UW-Madison)
- 153. Octopus Car Wash rotating octopus
- 154. Old Abe (the stuffed bald eagle in the state Assembly chamber that recalls the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry in the Civil War. The original was lost in the 1904 Capitol fire.)
- 155. Old fashioned (the drink) from The Old Fashioned bar and restaurant
- 156. Painted cow sculptures
- 157. Park Street Shoe Repair shop
- 158. Former UW athletic director Pat Richter
- 159. Pedal pub
- 160. Peregrine falcon nest box at MG&E
- 161. Picnic Point
- 162. Pontoon Porch (a two-level boat with screened porch available for parties and company outings)
- 163. Potholes
- 164. Red-and-white overalls (popular among students attending Badgers football games)
- 165. Reusable grocery bag
- 166. Ripped jeans from Ragstock
- 167. Rocky Rococo (the pizza chain originated with a restaurant on Gilman Street in Madison in 1974)
- 168. Rooftop solar panels
- 169. Solidarity Singalong songbook
- 170. State Street
- 171. Street musician Catfish Stephenson’s guitar
- 172. Tenney Park bridge
- 173. The hidden mural under the overpass at Monona Terrace
- 174. The architecture of Frank Riley (his home, public buildings)
- 175. The bar at Glass Nickel Pizza, encased with nickels
- 176. The bronze badger outside the governor’s conference room in the Capitol
- 177. The carillon tower at UW-Madison
- 178. The Effigy Tree, a Harry Whitehorse sculpture
- 179. The "Goosinator" (a remote-controlled drone painted to look like a predator to scare geese away from public areas)
- 180. The MG&E smoke stacks at Blount and Main streets
- 181. The mural on side of the old Mifflin Street Co-op
- 182. The Olin Park Christmas lights
- 183. The Oscar Mayer Memorial Fountain
- 184. The plaque marking the site on North Stoughton Road where Elvis Presley once broke up a fight
- 185. The President's Oak (a 300-year-old bur oak tree at the top of Observatory Hill on the UW-Madison campus)
- 186. The presses at the Wisconsin State Journal
- 187. The Pro Arte Quartet
- 188. The Progressive magazine cover
- 189. The question mark sculpture at the Central Library
- 190. The reading room at the Wisconsin Historical Society
- 191. The row of arbor vitae that line University Avenue decorated with Christmas lights each winter
- 192. The sound board Butch Vig used at Smart Studios to record Nirvana's Nevermind
- 193. The Vilas Zoo
- 194. The vintage hearse in front of Cress Funeral Home on Speedway Road
- 195. The wall at Breese Stevens Field
- 196. Triangle market on State Street
- 197. Twinkling stars on the ceiling of the Barrymore Theater
- 198. University Dairy Barn
- 199. Washburn Observatory and its old refractor telescope
- 200. Water-skiing ramp in Lake Monona
January 19, 2021 at 05:32AM
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