Dave Wood

This past spring, I received a package from a dear friend, the extraordinarily witty nonagenarian Ruth Brown, one of my favorite River Falls personalities. What would it contain? A jar of Ruth’s delicious homemade pickled herring, a clipping of a recent column by Chris Hardie, whose father was a friend of Ruth and who wrote a favorite story about being bitten in his vitals by a deer tick?

Nope. It was a copy of a recent New York Times Book Review magazine, a publication to which I do not subscribe for reasons that will soon become apparent. Attached was a note that read “Dear Dave, do you know about this book reviewed in the magazine? I read this essay and have concluded that we must have been tough cookies back in Black River Falls, where I grew up,” or words to that effect.

I phoned Ruth and told her that, yes, I was acquainted with the book. “Wisconsin Death Trip” by Michael Lesy, a bestseller about Ruth’s hometown that stunned the nation and especially the area Ruth and I both grew up in.

Oh, yes, I remember it well, in the words of Maurice Chevalier. My wife and I were living on our hobby farm 20 miles from Black River when “Death Trip” hit the bookstores and the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for an eternity. That was 50 years ago when Ruth Brown was a busy homemaker and probably more engaged in tending to her family than reading the book about all the terrible things that had happened in her natal place.

But not me. I drove all the way to Eau Claire to buy a copy and dove into it. I was shocked to find out how nuts everything was back in the 19^th century in what I figured was a quiet community in Jackson County.

It turns out that Michael Lesy was a graduate student at Madison when he discovered at the Historical Society a huge collection of photos taken by Black River photographer Charles Van Schaick, talented local photo hound whose photos included haunting portraits of dead babies in their coffins, naked men swimming in the Black River, news items of death and mayhem in Black River Falls.

Here are a few selections from the book to give a sense of its tonalities:

• “A woman was recently found wandering about the streets of Eau Clarie with a dead baby in her arms. She was from Chippewa Country and had lost her husband and was destitute.”
• “Poverty and no work cause August Schultz of Appleton to shoot himself in the head while sitting in his little home with his wife and five children.”
• “The 60-year-old wife of a farmer . . . killed herself by cutting her throat with a sheep shears.” 
• “The malignant diphtheria epidemic . . . proved fatal to all the children in Martin Molloy’s family, five in number. Three died in a day.” 
• “The 80-year-old mother of an imprisoned man threw herself in front of a train and was cut into three pieces. She was crazed by the disgrace.”

Of course, the book cast a pall over our little community, compounded by its national exposure.  I well remember a year later attending the premiere of the opera “Black River,” by Conrad Susa staged at St. Catharine College’s auditorium. I noticed an entire aisle of people I recognized as being from Black River Falls, who looked rather uncomfortable, watching singers and actors who looked like uneducated rubes obsessed with death and dying. I also remember digging deeper into the book to find my great grandpa Johnson’s best friend in a news article which implied that this friend was a nutty French hermit who lived in a cave. (He was no nut.  According to his biography, Great Grandpa enjoyed discussing authors like Leo Tolstoy when he visited the Frenchman in his cave and welcomed him to his farm in Hale Township to discuss other classics.)

So why did the New York Times dig up this story in 2023? Because it was the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication. They dedicated more than a page of type to celebrate the book as a testimony to the craziness and superstitions of the upper Midwest.

Essayist Dwight Garner failed to mention how controversial the book was, how the American Historical Association came to Black River Falls and concluded that Lesy cut lots of corners, cherrypicked the news items from all over the upper Midwest and edited and touched up the photos and laid them at Black River’s doorstep. The University of Wisconsin accepted “Death Trip” as a doctoral dissertation, Lesy became a professor at Hampton College, Amherst, Maryland and laughed all the way to the bank.

In a fit of pique, I self-published my first book, called it “Wisconsin LIFE Trip,” which sold 5,000 copies to readers from as far away as the East coast, all thanks to the parochialism of the New York Times, which periodically figures that Flyover Country isn’t worth the trouble to cover it accurately. 

Years ago, a French philosopher was asked to name the best newspaper in the U.S. He replied, “The New York Times, alas.”

That’s what I told Ruth Brown on the phone. “Ah,” she said, “But did you know that I have met the photographer, Charles Van Schaick?” “Really?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “When I was four years old, I sat on his lap when he was playing cards with my parents.”

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.