My homestead was demolished on Thursday, August 14. Born in Altoona in July 1941, I spent all my growing-up years in that home at 719 3rd Street West.

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   During my childhood in the 1930s, the winters were bone-chilling cold and the summers were blazing hot. We personally experienced these extremes day-in and day-out for months on end. Our brief respites from this suffering were few and far between. But their rarity made them all the more important and memorable to us. The following article relates to this time and to our experiences.

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Gerald Hagen, in his “A History of Altoona,” states that Altoona purchased a 1929 Model A Ford Fire Truck in January of 1930.
   That made the truck two years younger than me, but to me, it was always that old fire truck.

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   Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of the “Memories of Altoona: Hot dogs from Equity Co-op,” which was published in the June 27 issue of the Altoona Star.
   We used to go for the hot dogs and the free pens that were there for the farmers. The hot dogs were only a dime and the pens were free, but we took more than our share over the years that we used to visit the auctions. The equity held its auctions twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there was a noticeable increase in pickup trucks and heavier truck traffic through Altoona. Most of the time the pickups were driven by farmers who had their calves tied in the back beds. My wife, Kathy, can remember going frequently to the Equity with her dad, Buck, taking a calf or two to sell.
   According to Hank Harris, who managed the Altoona Equity Co-operative Livestock Sales Association in Altoona from 1958 to 1973, there are nine Equity markets in Wisconsin. The Association started in 1922 to enable farmers to take their livestock to a central location for sale to meat packing businesses, charging a small service charge for this transaction. Before 1957, it was illegal to have the public auctions that the Equity is known for today. That year the law was changed and meat prices that the farmers received for their stock rose considerably.
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   Another memory involved what was probably the biggest fire in Altoona history, and it happened during an auction day on Thursday, August 12, 1971. It was a hot, humid day, with temperatures in the 90’s. They had just received a new load of straw for bedding the animals, and they figured the fire started where the straw was stored. It started small, but the 30 mile-per-hour winds whipped the fire into a firestorm. The animal pens were made from recycled wharf dock oak from the docks at Duluth and had recently been treated with creosote for preservation purposes. When the pens went up, they created dense, heavy black smoke.
   About 100 head of cows and 300 calves died in the fire, but several hundred were saved. Four volunteer firemen were injured fighting the fire; they included Chuck Brost, John Bresina, Tully Stolts, and Father Norbert Wilger. The heat was so intense that it buckled the spur tracks behind the building, and set two box cars full of wood sitting alongside the Equity on fire. Sparks from the fire rained down in Seymour and started five separate brush fires.
   Because the original building had been built in 1946, and the railroad and the county shops hemmed in the four-acre lot, rebuilding on the site was determined not to be an option. Land was bought from Henry Horlacher out on U.S. Highway 53, and ground was broke in October 1971. The construction of the new Equity took place during the winter of 1972, with the grand opening occurring on April 10, 1972. The new building’s square footage more than doubled the old building size.
   They never did determine was caused the fire. Kids had been playing with matches in the pine trees west of the Equity, but they didn’t think that was a factor. Spontaneous combustion occurs in hay, but the new bedding received was straw, so that was not very likely. Hank thought the fire was intentionally set, and that a radical farm movement might have had something to do with it, but that was never proven.
   Spooner Avenue had a lot less traffic after the Equity fire, and I sure did miss those hot dogs. I am always looking for something I remember from my childhood when we go antiquing, and I recently ran across one of those barrel pens from the Equity. It had a basic tube that advertised the Equity, with a big eraser on one end, and a small pencil stuck into a metal cup that you pulled out and stuck in the plastic tube to enable you to write. Even though I paid $6.00 more than I ever paid for one at the Equity, I thought it a steal.

   To a child growing up in the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Fourth of July was equated with fireworks. While there were undoubtedly some traditional, albeit pompous, speeches about liberty and the fight for independence, we youngsters were mercifully shielded from them. To us, the fourth was fireworks, fireworks, fireworks.

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   We used to go for the hot dogs and the free pens that were there for the farmers. The hot dogs were only a dime and the pens were free, but we took more than our share over the years that we used to visit the auctions. The Equity held its auctions twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there was a noticeable increase in pickup trucks and heavier truck traffic through Altoona. Most of the time the pickups were driven by farmers who had their calves tied in the back beds. My wife, Kathy, can remember going frequently to Equity with her dad, Buck, taking a calf or two to sell.

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   Who are you more like, your mom or your dad? Who had more of an influence on who you are today by what happened 40-plus years ago? You look more like one than the other does, or do you really?  Maybe you think you look more like Mom than anyone else, but then you see a picture of one of them that proves you wrong. I think that my appearance more resembles my mom than my dad, as my brother Tom looks more like my dad than any other member of my family. But on the other hand, my cousins claim I look just like their dad, who is my dad’s younger brother. Maybe it’s an optical illusion; maybe it’s just a trick of the mind.

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   When the Altoona dam was built in 1938, much of our Eau Claire River fishing vanished. Our old fishing sites were flooded; the steepness of the new Lake Altoona’s bank discouraged the development of new ones. And while the lake was regularly stocked with fish, any “keepers” were few and far between during the early years.

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   Editor’s Note: This memory is a continuation of “The bloody knuckle: Nighttime fun” that was published in the May 16 issue of the Altoona Star. 
   There used to be three in a row, but now there are only two with the middle one gone, obvious in its absence like a missing middle tooth. At one time, the three taverns on one block used to make up about 30 percent of the downtown Altoona business population. As time goes by, the memory of the Rail Haven will fade, and it will be forgotten, except in the memories of us “old farts” who cut our teeth on visiting the “grown-up” saloon. We were resigned to the 18-year-old bars ‘til we reached 21, and didn’t have to drive out to the country to socialize and have a cold beer. 

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Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of the “Sunny pastimes on Lake Altoona,” which was published in the May 9 issue.
   Weather and river permitting, we would set up shop on the riverbank on top of the shambles of a beaver dam site. Our fishing gear consisted of 60-70 foot “set lines,” at the end of which would be tied a large steel nut, the sinker. These nuts had fallen off trains, and were collected by us. Three feet up from this sinker would be a two-foot line, tied to this set line, with a hook at the end to accommodate the bait. The bait: specially boiled pieces of potato, soft enough to be hooked and hard enough to remain hooked. Large sinker, bait, and taters would then be twirled and tossed far out into the river where they would sink to the bottom. Our target: bottom-feeding fish, mostly inedible carp, dogfish, and suckers. Then, in blissful solitude, we sat back, lolled in the sun, and fished.

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