‘Years Ago’ is a compilation of newsy tidbits as published in the Crawford County Independent & Kickapoo Scout on this week ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago.
TEN YEARS AGO
JULY 9, 2009 – The Project Recovery Puppet Theater will be making an appearance at the Gays Mills Public Library. Project Recovery Puppet Theater is designed for children ages pre-K through fifth grade. The plays being presented will give children helpful advice and tips on coping with stress, anxiety and recovering from a difficult event… A benefit will be held at the Soldiers Grove American Legion Hall for the Copeland family. Jim Copeland was hospitalized in March due to complications from a routine surgery and passed away on April 16, 2009.
TWENTY YEARS AGO
JULY 8, 1999 – Shannon Winkers, 22, of rural Fennimore didn’t quite make it into the hospital’s delivery room to give birth to her baby. She did however make it as far as the sidewalk out front of Boscobel Area Health Care, where her husband Dave ended up delivering their new baby himself. Little Kaitlyn Janelle joins the family and her older brother is four-year-old, Logan who asked, ‘You had that baby too late didn’t you mom?’... Joey McCullick and Zach Stevenson of Seneca were part of a group of 65 teenagers attending the 1999 annual Youth Citizenship Seminar sponsored by the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.
THIRTY YEARS AGO
JULY 13, 1989 – Donnie Boland of rural Gays Mills created ‘Woody,’ who watches over the cows in a pasture between Mt. Sterling and Seneca. Woody was created from a dead tree because Boland ‘didn’t have a big enough saw to cut it down.’ Woody has paint can lids for eyes and a wide red mouth with two long, vicious-looking fangs… A construction worker on The Wisconsin River bridge project at Bridgeport fell onto a barge. Phillip Allert, 24, of Cornell, was operating a crane on a barge in the middle of the river when the accident occurred. He reportedly was standing in the door of the crane when his feet became tangled and he fell backward to the barge six or seven feet below. He was being evaluated at the hospital.
FORTY YEARS AGO
JULY 12, 1979 – LaVon Hansen, one of the local contractors doing rehab work in Soldiers Grove, had a crew this week working on Estin Salmon’s house. The house is one of 10 houses in Soldiers Grove being rehabbed with federal money sent to Soldiers Grove as part of the village’s Community Development Block Grant funding, a program of the Department of Health and Urban Development.
FIFTY YEARS AGO
JULY 10, 1969– Dan Sime, 18, a 1969 North Crawford High School graduate, was drowned last Friday afternoon, July 4, after falling from an aquaplane being towed by a motorboat on the Black River, north of Black River Falls. Sadly, Dan was unable to swim and missed the life jacket thrown to him… The Kickapoo Valley Association river crew is creating a little interest along the river near Petersburg and below, where huge, perennial log jams are being ‘shagged’ loose. In many places there is evidence of beaver activity where saplings have been carefully ‘planted’ in the mud to form barriers for debris coming downriver. A boat landing at Plum Creek is almost completed, and work continues.
SIXTY YEARS AGO
JULY 9, 1959 – Hubert W. Hafs, county farm and home development agent, pointed out that the Kickapoo and other area streams were carrying muddy water, much of it runoff from cornfields and other protected land. Hafs writes that the advantages of wheel-track corn planting over the conventional methods is proving to stop runoff from the fields. Haf indicated that he witnessed the lack of runoff when he visited two farms following an inch of rain. Merrill Pugh, Halverson Ridge, and Bill Peterson, Eastman, used the wheel-track method for planting their corn this year. Their fields showed practically no washing in the wheel-track planted corn, but other disked and dragged fields nearby had small trenches washed across the rows. According to Hafs, wheel-track planting saves soil, field operations and produces a conventional yield.
