Wisconsin Journal Number 1 25 August 1997 Some of you receiving this will remember my reports from France from eight years ago, during my last sabbatical. I've decided to do the same for my current sabbatical, if for no other reason that I enjoy so much going back now and then and reading over the events of that year. For those of you I haven't been in touch with recently, I am spending the 97-98 academic year as a visiting professor in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I'm continuing with some research projects from OGI, working on a book and hoping to learn some new things, but cutting way back on teaching and administration. I do plan to collaborate with the database faculty, who are very good. But on to the good stuff. Kaye and the kids headed off driving to Wisconsin a few days before I did, taking the more northerly route. I headed out later by a different route because I had to be at a conference in Olympia until the 15th, and wanted to attend a workshop in Colorado on the way out. All in all, the rest of the family had the more interesting trip out. For example, coming through Montana, they encountered a 3-day Testicle Festival (motto: "Have a Ball"). My rule of thumb is never eat Rocky Mountain oysters in a month with a vowel in it. They passed through the town where Dante's Peak was filmed, saw Devil's Tower, the Custer Battlefield, Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial (a mountain carving on a grander scale, but far from finished) and, of course, Wall Drug. I set out at about 10:25 on the 15th of August, then again at 10:30. (Forgot my wedding ring.) The trip up the Columbia Gorge was familiar territory, at least as far as Pendleton. My main observation is that some people are better at tying stuff to the top of their cars than others. Near The Dalles, a tire came apart on the log truck right in front of me. I was doing okay dodging the pieces, until I noticed a chunk arcing through the air about 50 ft. up, looking to land in my lane. Fortunately, there was no one close behind, and I was able to slow down and let it drop in front of me, rather than on top of me. I stopped in Ontario, Oregon for the night, and found out that three weeks of humid weather was ruining the onion crop there. Saturday took me through Idaho, Utah and into Wyoming. I saw a biplane doing crop spraying, which was a first for me, and got a good view into the Snake River Canyon a couple of places, but it was mostly a driving day. I can tell you they are hiring drivers for the sugar beet harvest around Boise, that the town of Kimberly, Idaho is proud of all the dry bean processing that goes on there, and that there are 20 signs on I-80 telling you that Little America is up ahead. (Luke tells me that that is nothing compared to Wall Drug.) Favorite place names of the day: Sublett, Farr West and Malta, Utah. Sunday I headed into Colorado, turning south a little bit before Cheyenne. I was greeted by a hailstorm at the Colorado border. I stopped for lunch in Fort Collins, which has a nice downtown/old town area. Wild West Fest was going on that day, which seemed to be a cross between a county fair and a craft fair. A lot of booths featuring fringe beliefs: aromatherapy, the Urantia book, Mary Kay Cosmetics. I noticed one bar in a basement of an old building had sandbags around its stairs. I found out later that there had been flooding about three weeks before. At Colorado State University, they had all their rare books moved to the basement of the library during construction, and a lot of them sustained water damage. I headed on to my workshop, which was at a lodge up above Estes Park, at about 9300 feet. It was a beautiful site, but I felt short of breath now and then for the first couple days. Dinner that night included venison sausage, and I watched the full moon rise over the Rocky Mountains before heading to bed. The highlight of the conference for me was a chance to go horseback riding, which was something I'd never done before (not counting a pony going around a track when I was about 5). My horse was named Thunder. Like me, he preferred to eat rather than work, so I spent a lot of time keeping his nose out of the grass. We got rained on, and started heading up above 9300 feet. My hands were getting real cold, but then the rain stopped and we came around to the sunny side of the mountain. There were lots of rocky parts on the trail, but the horses did a good job at picking their way through them. I only hit my head on a branch once. The day ended with a cookout at Elk Park Ranch, and a ride back on a bus that didn't want to start. I hit the road again on Wednesday, which consisted mostly of Nebraska. High point of the day was seeing a convoy of new school buses in the opposite lane, headed somewhere for the start of school, undoubtedly. Thursday, I decided to take the morning off for some sightseeing. I went to the Harold Warp Pioneer Village in Minden, Nebraska. Harold Warp grew up on a farm in Nebraska, and made his fortune with Flex-O-Glass, which was a plastic sheeting for making windows, particularly on chicken coops. It great advantage was that it let in much more ultraviolet light than other glazing materials then available. The UV light helped avoid certain illnesses with the chicks and made the chickens grow faster. There was also a red-tinted version to prevent cannibalism among the chickens. A chicken with even a spot of blood will get pecked to death by other chickens. With red-tinted windows, everything looks red and the chickens don't see the blood. Warp Plastics made several other products, probably the best known of which is Jiffy Wrap and Jiffy Sandwich Bags. Warp started the museum in 1953, with the intent of showing man's progress since 1830. While the museum has a bit of everything, the most interesting parts are the chronological collections showing the development of cars, farm machinery, appliances, lighting, snowmobiles, and other items important to the midwest. (Coming from Oregon, however, I did notice a lack of items connecting with timber harvesting and mills. For example, no historical sequence on the development of the chainsaw.) The collections are housed in large sheds plus a collection of historic buildings that have been brought to the site. The most interesting one for me to see was a sod house. Just after I entered, everyone in the museum went to the windows to watch a storm. I heard on the radio later that it dumped an inch of water in about 10 minutes, and had 40 mph winds that knocked down some trees in nearby towns. It had hail ranging up to the size of small grapes. The grounds couldn't drain water very fast, so I had to puddle-jump to get into some of the buildings. I spent the whole morning walking through all the buildings. (There are 25 of them, some quite large with two stories.) Several things I had never seen before: fencemakers that produced mesh and slat fencing on location; a combination dishwasher/clothes washer (I wonder what happens if you wash china with red socks); and an early Ansa-Fone answering machine that sat under your telephone and actually lifted the handset to take messages. The average visitor there seemed about 20 years older than me. In kind of a reversal of what you see at malls, I often saw wives sitting on benches at one end of a building while the husbands carefully looked at each tractor in a row of fifty. Nevertheless, the museum is definitely worth the detour off I-80 if you are ever cruising through Nebraska. In looking at the map for a place to stay that night, I noticed my route to Madison took me near Amana, Iowa. So I stayed near there and visited Amana the next morning. The Amana colonies were settled by a religious group founded in Germany in the 1700's that was very religious and lived communally. The group first came to the US in the 1800's, and founded the town of Ebenezer, New York, near Buffalo. However, as Buffalo grew, the group decided to move west, as land near Ebenezer was getting more expensive and the elders felt the influences of the city were too close. Thus, they acquired land near Iowa City in the late 1800's, and gradually sold off the land in New York and moved people to the towns that they founded in Iowa, collectively known as the Amana colonies. (Communal settlements were springing up all over the eastern US during this time. There were almost none in the west, however. The only communities west of the Missouri were at Icaria, Texas and Aurora, Oregon.) Members of the colonies were given living quarters, provided with meals and issued credits at the general store to buy items that weren't made in the colonies. They seem to have been able to produce a lot of what they needed themselves, however. They had tinsmiths, broom makers, printers, harness shops, blacksmiths, weavers and basketmakers, plus they farmed and raised livestock. They sent some of their young men off to college so that they would have their own doctors. Their cloth and produce was highly valued outside the colonies, and they sold it in order to buy supplies they didn't make. Amanans got their meals in communal kitchens. There were over 50 of these throughout the seven villages, each serving up to 30 people. Each was overseen by an older woman, known as the "kitchen boss", who would typically have three girls working for her. In addition to preparing meals and cleaning up, they were expected to tend a kitchen garden and can produce for the winter. Also, every kitchen had to send one girl to work in the fields during potato harvest. While it was a highly religious group (up to 11 church services a week), it wasn't puritanical or anti-technology, as far as I can tell. They made wine and beer. The winery was often the church basement. The wine was used both for communion, and also was given out to families with a system of ration cards. A farmer might have 2-3 glasses of wine a day, starting with one at 9am with breakfast. They married (though celibacy was encouraged) and had big parties when they did so. While the adults were having communion, children under 16 would have their own service with hot chocolate and coffee cake. The exhibit in the museum said that the children were given spoons to stir their hot chocolate with, which I would find unremarkable, except that both my kids inherited their mother's habit of eating hot chocolate with a spoon. Up until now, I hadn't realized it was a religious experience. While they didn't have phonographs or radios, they didn't eschew machinery. I saw one picture showing a power thresher, for example. The communal organization was abandoned in 1932, because of financial pressures brought on by the depression. The religious aspects were still run by the elders (services in German and English continue to this day), but the farming and manufacturing activities were turned into a cooperative, with shares issued to community members. One of the first new businesses started after this split was Amana Refrigeration, around 1934. They initially made coolers and air conditioning systems for businesses, but got into the home appliance business soon after. Their first "home" refigerator/freezer was a walk-in job that included hooks for hanging sides of meat. Their first really popular home appliance was a chest freezer. Over the years, they were acquired by Raytheon, who helped them pioneer the microwave oven business, and themselves acquired Hotpoint and Kitchen Maid appliances. I gather that Raytheon recently sold them to a Texas holding company. >From Amana, I headed directly to Madison to join my family, arriving concurrently with 70,000 Green Bay Packers fans. More on that later-- the piano needs watering.