The Corona Dairies Vol 6: Many Minutes in Manitowoc

October 2020

Back in September I took some time off from work and headed north as is customary for folks in southern Wisconsin/Chicagoland. The Frau had surgery in June and a lengthy period of recovery ate up all of her vacation time so it was to be a solo trip. I carefully scheduled it so as not to interfere with any big projects at work and yet be early enough in the month so that I could expect fair weather. After announcing my trip to her, the Frau pointed out that I would be out of town on our wedding anniversary. Oops! I swear to you, dear reader, that this was not intentional. Still, she gave my voyage her blessing and received a wooden cat-shaped puzzle box in return. It is hard to believe we've been married 5 years!

On the way north I drove by a silo with a giant Chief Oshkosh Beer logo painted on it. I was a couple miles down the road before it occurred to me that I should have taken a photo. My guess is that I was absorbed in a song by Rush instead of contemplating photo ops. This is rather odd because the scenery was prime photo material. While most of the trees were still green, the landscape was dotted with orange and yellow and red.

My first destination was Manitowoc on the shores of Lake Michigan, the titular town of comedian Charlie Berens' Manitowoc Minute. I have not spent much time in eastern Wisconsin. Well, north of Milwaukee, anyway. I've never even so much as set foot in Door County so I figured it was about time to check out more of this part of the state. Manitowoc is just north of Sheboygan where I believe I have distant relatives.

A cousin I never knew I had until a few years ago has been assembling a family tree and she sent me a German-language newspaper notice announcing the marriage of my great-great-great grandfather Heinrich (originally from Hanover) to a Fraulein Henriette (born in Wesenstedt) in Sheboygan Falls (just west of Sheboygan) in 1845. I think the family name was anglicized at some point by folks in Sheboygan.

And so I learned that I am of northern German extraction. However, I still reserve the right to wear lederhosen on occasion. I've also learned that I have a little Dutch blood in me and that a great-great-great uncle served in the Civil War. Or was he only 2x great? I cannot recall now.

My first stop was the Wisconsin Maritime Museum where the big attraction was the U.S.S. Cobia, World War 2-era submarine.

While I dearly wished that my brother was with me to indulge his enormous interest in World War II, I was still excited to go aboard. (I have toured U-505 at the Museum of Science and Industry, but that was ages ago.) I kept thinking about the movie Das Boot while taking the tour, especially those tracking shots following men as they pass through the bulkheads as they are running from one side of the boat to the other. Oh, and about how much I'd panic and freak out standing there watching rivets pop as the compartment I was standing in filled with water. There were thousands of switches, valves, and levers and it's amazing to think that men actually knew what each and every one did without having to consult the thick manuals to be found scattered around the boat.

When we got to the galley I was surprised to see what appeared to be ceramic plates neatly stack on shelves with no visible way to stow them securely. If a depth charge were to go off just a few fathoms too close, wouldn't they all fall to the deck and shatter? Maybe I just missed a safe storage compartment or the plates I saw were simply for show and the ones that would have been aboard when the sub was on active duty were made of Bakelite or some such thing.

There's much more to the museum than the submarine. Some friends and I are playing a Pathfinder game (think Dungeons & Dragons) in which we are pirates so it was fun to be surrounded by all things maritime. Yes, we drink rum while playing. We even drank bumboo a few times after our characters had plundered some town and decided to go upscale with their grog. Manitowoc has a long shipbuilding history and the museum showed it off proudly. I learned a lot from the exhibit that explains how the hulls for schooners were built.

The history of Great Lakes shipping was fascinating as was seeing how the cargo ships built in Manitowoc kept getting larger over the years. There was also a shipwrecks section. I knew about the Rouse Simmons, which sank just north of Manitowoc's shores in 1912, as I'd attended a lecture by one Fred Neuschel when he was here in Madison several years ago to discuss his book Lives and Legends of the Christmas Tree Ships. The Rouse Simmons was carrying a load of Christmas trees from Wisconsin's pinery (what was left of it, anyway) to Chicago when it sank during a nasty storm in November 1912.

I chuckled to myself when I saw a life-sized cardboard standup thingy of Tami Thomsen, a diver who was at the Wisconsin Historical Society when I worked there. My memories of her are of someone who was rather short tempered and complained about her computer more than giving us a chance to fix it. Despite a disagreeable disposition at times (she could also be very friendly, truth be told), she is a highly accomplished diver. A selection of her photos of various wrecks and detritus in Madison area lakes was published in the paper last year.

To help make up for the fact that I'd be away on our wedding anniversary, I bought the Frau a t-shirt emblazoned with "I'm a lady with the vocabulary of a well educated sailor" across the chest.

My next stop was the old lighthouse and so I started walking along the river path out towards the quay. I looked up as I was taking some photos only to see the S.S. Badger coming into port. It is a ferry which takes people and their automobiles across the lake to Ludington, Michigan.

I'd never seen it before and it was much larger than I had expected. But I suppose it was my expectations that were really off. I mean, it had to be large in order to haul cars across Lake Michigan and be profitable, right? It was an awesome sight to see it pull in and I was genuinely startled when it dropped anchor. And it reminded me of how little I know about sailing as I was surprised to see that it turned to the north side of the mouth of the river and then backed into port on the south side.

After this, it was off to the old lighthouse. My understanding is that it had fallen into disrepair and was to be scrapped when it was sold to a billionaire who'd always wanted his very own lighthouse. (Must be nice.) He whipped it into shape and now you can walk out to it.

While you cannot go inside, you can go up one level and peer in through the windows or walk out to the front. It was, methinks, my first visit to a lighthouse so it was really neat. I must admit that, when I was walking out there, I flashed back to the Neptune speech by Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse, one of the most disturbing films you'll ever see.

Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK! Hark Triton, hark!

If you've never seen the movie, the infamous scene is here.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around downtown. You can't miss the Briess malting facility. I suspect that the vast majority of the beer I drink had its grains malted at Briess.

The facility in Manitowoc is huge. (There's a smaller facility in Chilton, about 30 miles to the west, which I had seen earlier on my drive here.) I'd bet it was 4 square blocks at minimum. When I opened the curtains in my hotel room, the Briess mural loomed large in the distance.

Briess wasn't the only place to have a mural. They were all over downtown, in fact. I guess that they're a cheap way to at least give the appearance of gentrification.

This one of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" was done to honor Manitowoc's sister city in Japan that I cannot recall the name of.

And of course I took photographs of any ghost signs that I came across.

This looks to be for Princess Ice Cream which rings no bells with me and my cursory search of the Internet has yielded nothing.

The county courthouse was built in 1904, if I recall correctly, and it was a magnificent building.

There were several buildings having their facades restored which was a good sign. But I really don't know how well or how poorly the town is doing. I spied some empty storefronts downtown but there are empty storefronts everywhere these days. My impression was that Manitowoc was doing alright but had obviously seen better days. They seem to be doing a good job marketing themselves as a maritime town and showcasing its proximity to water. In addition to the maritime museum, I saw anchors adorning a park and the river path, a bar & music stage on the riverfront, the city's shipbuilding history portrayed in murals, and so on. Playing to their strength, I suppose you could say. It's on the way to Door County so I imagine that it gets some of that tourist traffic.

After checking into my hotel, which was much better occupied than I would have thought considering the pandemic, I had dinner at a brewpub a couple of blocks away. During my meal a co-worker texted me saying that his wife really likes a bakery in Manitowoc but that she couldn't remember the name. The Internet told me that there were a couple just north of downtown so I set out on foot to get my dessert plus some treats for my friends whom I would be seeing in a couple days. One of the bakeries had kolache! I bought prune and poppy seed.

I returned to the hotel and had a little dessert before testing the mattress for firmness and comfort as I did some reading. (The further adventures of The Vinyl Detective.) Tomorrow I would hit the road for the banks of the Oconto River.

Bonus photo – our neighborhood has a big cock and here it is.