Larry Scheckel

I sent the manuscript of our next book, Country School Days: True Tales of a Wisconsin One-Room School, to the publisher last week. It will hopefully be out by early Fall. Ann and I are in the 11^th year of retirement. I believe everyone asks themselves as they approach retirement, “What am I going to do in retirement?” I had personal, perhaps odd, things on my list: Learn to play chords on guitar, learn to fly a radio-controlled plane, and write a memoir of growing up on the farm outside of Seneca, Wisconsin. I’m still working on the chords on guitar, although I have played notes for a number of years. I learned to fly RC planes last summer, not a master aviator, but can fly without crashing most of the time. Have 5 planes for outdoor flying, and 2 for flying indoors. You can’t have too many radio-controlled planes!  In the winter, we fly small stuff in the Barney Center in Sparta, basically a basketball gym. The farm memoir, Seneca Seasons: A Farm Boy Remembers came out in 2014.

We have a number of science books out there, a true-life 1926 murder story book, and now a memoir of attending Oak Grove School from 1948-1956. It is also an account of many rural one-room school in Crawford County.

A most beautiful time of the year. The whole countryside is greening up, trees are in the “leafing out” process, geese are honking their way north, and farmers are set to plant soybeans and corn. Our big maple tree (Acer) in the back yard is in the reddish seed pod (samaras) developing stage. They will later turn a tan color when ripe and then will rain down in whirlybird helicopter spinner style. It’s the maple’s way of propagating. It is a delight to watch.

Dandelions are populating the area parks and lawns. It’s odd that such an exquisitely beautiful flower is considered a weed. I harken back to my days on the farm and our war with the Canadian thistle. Each plant had a lovely fragrant pink flower. Neighbor John Payne called them the “lettuce from hell” thistle. The leaves have an array of prickly barbs that seemed to say, “stay away from me.” If you stood back away from a Canadian thistle plant and waited a few minutes, you could count on a bee using the flower as a landing pad.

We now have a stunning view of Lake Tomah. Obstructing brush has been cut away and numerous diseased ash trees have been removed. Fishing from the shore is popular and we see boaters on the water.

NASA (North American Squirrel Association) is building a handicapped accessible playground on the western side of Butts Park, the park across the street from our house.

I sent the manuscript of our next book, Country School Days: True Tales of a Wisconsin One-Room School, to the publisher yesterday. Hopefully out by early Fall.

Spring is a season of renewal and restoration. So, it is fitting that St. Michael’s Indian Creek Catholic Church, a few miles south of Oakdale, Wisconsin is receiving a complete interior renovation. Each day a dozen parishioners and Tomah Knights of Columbus members are laboring to revive its original look. On Monday, April 12, we removed the pews that were carted off for the Amish to be refurbished. The old wall paneling came down on Tuesday. Wednesday, the false ceiling was taken out. Parish ladies, Juanita Arttus, Marge Shie, and Therese Schuh serve a lunch at noon.

The parish was established in 1860 by immigrant German farmers that had a deep and abiding faith. The Church, as it looks today, was built in 1910. One of the smaller parishes of the Diocese of La Crosse, St. Michael’s sits alone on a hill on the eastern edge of Monroe County, bordering Highway N which parallels Indian Creek, a brook starting in the hills along Highway A, and joining the Lemonweir River at New Lisbon.

St. Michael’s is not unlike numerous Catholic and Lutheran churches that dot the Driftless Area countryside, their cross-topped steeples reaching for the Heavens.

            Good friends presented us with a hyacinth plant, and it is now blooming. The pleasant fragrance fills the living room. The six sedum plants along the north side of the house are poking through the ground and are about 2 inches high. The huge maple trees (Acer Saccharinum)  in the back yard are shedding their reddish buds and sprinkling the patio. In a few weeks, the seed pods will develop and will helicopter down in their whirlybird fashion. We planted two maple trees in 1974, the couple years after moving to Tomah from La Crosse. Our two sons, ages 4 and 2, helped me. A neighbor sauntered over and we engaged in conversation.

“I see you’re planting a couple trees,” he said. “Yes, and normally it would take me about a half-hour, but with my boys helping, it’ll only take me one hour,” I replied. The four-year-old spoke up and said, “Dad, you got that backward.” Of course, I didn’t, but that is the joy of planting a tree. Now, with the whole countryside greening up, the woods take on a beautiful light green hue that will last about 10 days to two weeks, until the foliage turns to a darker green. It’s a beautiful transition and one I look forward to and very much enjoy.

            In contrast, we attended a funeral in Cashton on Thursday. A man, brother to a member of our Church and a Knights of Columbus member, passed suddenly and way too young at age 76. Said to have died on the operating table. The contrast is striking, the slow awakening and rebirth of Spring and the unexpected and abrupt end of life.

Easter at Oak Grove School was celebrated in a quiet way. The week before Easter, Holy Week in the Catholic Church, the Teacher ran off sheets of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies from the hectograph machine. The lower grades could color them and the obligatory hanging them on a wall for display.

            School was out at noon for Good Friday. Many Churches held Good Friday services in the afternoon. Thursday became our Easter celebration day. We brought little baskets of candies, cookies, and brownies, to distribute and share.

         We were tasked with selling Easter seals. Teacher gave each family a sheet of 50 or 100 and they were to be sold for one cent each. Money went to help crippled children, especially those harmed by polio.

            The Kozelkas had a big brown lab dog that answered to Curly. In his prime, Curly walked to and from school each day. Curly hung out around the school building, and truly earned his keep by chasing after and retrieving the softball that was hit over the fence and into the woods.

            Curly wore out his welcome when he ate the eggs set out for the Easter Egg hunt. Curly had his fill, but we kids had our fill of Curly. He was literally in the doghouse from then on!

Spring is here. The ice went out of Lake Tomah on Sunday morning, March 21, close to the official start of Spring. Early Sunday morning witnessed about 30 acres of ice, but the wind was out of the SSW, blowing the ice mass against the northern shore. By noon, the last remnants of ice were gone. We’ve kept track of the dates when Lake Tomah freezes over and when the ice disappears, since we moved here in 1972. The earliest the ice was gone was March 3, 2000 and the latest was April 26, 2013.

The sedum is coming up on the north side of the house. There is no sign of Paul’s Glory, a plant given to us by Jennie Zeitler in memory of our son, Paul, who passed away in 2017. The leaf color changes throughout the season.

Among the outdoor Springtime chores is dethatching the front lawn. I have a dethatching blade on an old push-type Lawn Boy lawnmower. The blade has a 3-inch prong on each end that digs down into the lawn and digs out dead grass. The hard part is the follow-up raking.

Touch-up paint on the garage is another annual task. The garage is coming up on 50 years old, and bits of paint on the siding flake off over time. That was a Tuesday job, with bright sunshine and mid-50s temperatures. I was serenaded by a Mourning Dive perched on the neighbor’s house, every five seconds with the familiar soft “perch-coo” followed by three louder coos.

The maple trees in the back yard are coming alive. The buds are bursting and soon small green leaves will emerge. A month ago, Tomah city crews cut many diseased ash trees in Butts Park affording us and our neighbors a more panoramic view of the Lake and I cut brush along the lakeshore. Already we see people fishing from the shore.

We heard a Red-winged Blackbird this morning, a most beautiful bird, and first of the Spring season. I harken back to September 6, 1948 describing our walk to the Crawford County one-room Oak Grove School.

Red-winged blackbirds, with a conk-la-ree song, hid in the tall brush alongside the road. The red-wing blackbirds didn’t bother us on our walks in the Fall of the year. Their youngsters were all out of the nest and on their own. It was the Spring of the year when they would swoop down close to your head in an attempt to protect their nest. Some of those were really pesky.  Get too close to their nest they’re trying to protect, and you get dive-bombed by desperate mother birds. As a newly-minted first grader, I wondered how they got that bright splash of red on the inboard section of each wing, fringed by a bright yellow band.

I had a genuine fear of red-winged blackbirds after Don Laskaski told us younger Scheckel boys, “Yeah, those red-winged blackbirds will dive down and take your head clean off, and while you’re lying dead on the ground, the crows will come along and peck at your tummy and eat your guts out.” I told this harrowing tale to Mom and she just laughed and said, “Birds will do no such thing. He’s just trying to scare you.” That comforted me somewhat, but I always kept a leery eye out for those red-winged blackbirds.

We saw our first robin on Thursday March 11, 2021. She was strutting around in the back yard, picking at the dead grass, and no doubt getting ready to build a nest. It is one of the first signs of Spring, along with more hours of daylight, winds coming out of the South, the ice on Lake Tomah getting grayer each day, and the buds on the maple trees swelling. We also noticed the return of the mourning doves.

An annual ritual at our house: Get the Spree (small motorcycle) running, pack a pruning cutter, and motor on Fairgrounds Road (Hwy CM) that runs on the south side of Lake Tomah to cut some pussy willows, bring them home and set them in a vase of water. The 6 sedum plants on the north side of the house are poking through.

I harken back to the days on the farm in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. The long, long “V” formation of honking geese heading north into Canada was a good sign of Spring. The Scheckel farm was smack in the middle of the Mississippi River flyway.

The barn swallows would appear. They were graceful flyers. They started building their mud nests clinging to the rafters in the Small Barn. The meadowlarks were seen in the fields. And although they stayed around all winter, the cardinals started singing, which they did not do all winter. Well, I could understand why. Who feels like singing when you’re freezing your feathery fanny?

Our newest book, Country School Days: True Tales of a Wisconsin One-Room School is being edited and we hope to publish by late Fall of this year, 2021.

The main focus is the one-room Oak Grove School that the Scheckel children attended. My tenure was from 1948-1956. To get info, I am viewing microfilms of The Courier-Press newspaper published in Prairie du Chien.

At that time, the goings-on of every community were sent in and printed in the Courier-Press; Steuben, Wauzeka, Seneca, Eastman, Mt. Sterling, Gays Mills, Steuben, Lynxville, Niland Ridge, Ducharme Ridge, to name a few. It was a litany of who visited who, what family went shopping, who came back from serving in the military, and babies brought back from the hospital.

Looking at the Seneca entry from March 19, 1946. “The wood chopping bee sponsored by members of St. Patrick’s parish on the Dave Boland Jr. farm last Thursday, proved to be a successful undertaking: 40 men took part in the work and many cords of wood were the result. Eleven ladies served an abundant lunch of hotdog sandwiches, cheese, and piping hot coffee.”

We could see the Dave Boland farm from our Scheckel farm. Unusual in that they had all white buildings and sat on a high point in Crawford County. In the summer, the Sun rose over the tops of the Dave Boland farmstead on the northeastern horizon.

Life is filled with triumphs and tragedies, and we all experience both. From a February 24, 1946 Seneca column, “A pre-nuptial show was held, in the gym Sunday afternoon in honor of Maxine Monahan of Soldiers Grove and Ed Cody Jr. A pleasant afternoon was enjoyed by friends and neighbors and many useful gifts were received by the bride to be.”

Another entry from the March 16, 1946 Courier-Press, “Mr. and Mrs. Ed Cody Jr. returned from their wedding trip last Wednesday. They will operate the Cody farm.”

From an entry a few years later, “Mary Delores Cody was born on March 6, 1947 at Saint Ann’s Hospital in La Crosse, WI. She was the first-born child of Edward Henry and Maxine Marie Monahan Cody. In September of 1953, she enrolled in First Grade at Stoney Point School, near Seneca, WI and was a member of the first-grade catechism class of St. Patrick’s parish. On Friday, Nov. 13, 1953 at about 3:15 p.m. she ran in front of the farm truck her father was driving and was struck by the rear dual wheels. Delores loved people and she will always be remembered for her vivacious friendliness.”

Another entry, “Richard Homuth has bought the lot from M.B. Dagnon where the Neil Tollefson Hotel was located and will build a house there when possible.” Dick Homuth was the very successful and well-liked agriculture teacher at Seneca High School.