Tuesday 6/9/26: Guerrilla Gay Bar, Walker's Pint, spiritualism in Whitewater

David Lee: Support for WUWM podcasts comes from Potawatomi Casino Hotel, Milwaukee, home to 24/7 excitement, dining, and an on-site hotel at 1721 West Canal Street. More information at potawatomi.com.

Audrey Nowakowski: From 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR, this is Lake Effect. I'm Audrey Nowakowski. Today we'll share the story of Geurrilla Gay Bar, when a group of LGBTQ+ people took over traditionally straight bars here in Milwaukee.

Michail Takach: Guerrilla Gay Bar was really born and inspired from this idea to disrupt the status quo, to like shatter expectations, and like remix everything.

Audrey Nowakowski: Then we'll visit Walker's Pint, the only lesbian bar in Wisconsin, to learn why having that space is so important for its patrons.

Caitlin Gallagher: You will find in this small little bar in Walker's Point just an absolute army of people would do anything to keep this bar going, to keep this space existing.

Audrey Nowakowski: Plus, we'll learn about the Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater and the practice of spiritualism there. All that's coming up on Lake Effect.

This is Lake Effect from 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR. I'm Audrey Nowakowski. Thanks for joining us today.

We'll start today with a piece of Milwaukee LGBTQ history, one you might remember if you were enjoying Milwaukee's nightlife around 15 years ago. That's when Geurrilla Gay Bar was at its peak. Anonymous leaders would rally dozens, sometimes hundreds of LGBTQ people and take over popular straight bars in Milwaukee. Michail Takach is the president of the Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project and also one of the main organizers of Guerrilla Gay Bar. He shares how it all started.

Michail Takach: You know, Oak Creek was basically a farm town. It was not, it was not the suburban metropolis that it is today. There was no Ikea. There was no movie theater. There was not Target. There nothing. I mean, when we had McDonald's open, my school actually went on a field trip to see it, like it was some kind of like, you know, technological advancement.

So when I was 15, I started going to La Cage, which was like the big dance club of the ‘80s in Milwaukee. My friend’s sister was in the drag show. She got us in constantly. I mean, like, there was no question asked. I was never ID'd, carded, nothing. I don't know if it was because I was young, blonde, and cute or what, but, you know, we would get in, and then I would kind of get to see what adult nightlife looked like, and it was quite different.

At that time, La Cage and 219 were probably the only gay bars in Milwaukee that would let straight people in comfortably and actually welcome them. And I know that at one point, because of the drag shows at those two bars, which were like epic productions, unseen ever since, it was like full ensemble shows that went on for hours and had like all these like stagehands and, you know, special effects and like amazing costumes and all this stuff. So people would come just to see the shows. And like, if you were straight, it was no big deal to go to these bars to see these shows, but you probably wouldn't want to be seen going in them any other time.

And it was not really the safest environment at Walker's point. Um, I remember people, you know, if you went to two 19, which was at, of course, 219 S 2nd St., you would not walk to La Cage, which was five blocks away. because it was dangerous. Like someone might drive by and, you know, throw something at you. Someone might drive by and yell things at you. People might get out of the car and chase you. There was real, distinct homophobia in the air down there back then. And, you know, people got bashed and brutalized and robbed and all kinds of terrible things that are unthinkable today.

You know, over the next 15 to 18 years, I mean, rave culture exploded and kind of competed for a while with the bars. And that was like the height of inclusivity because anyone could go to raves, no matter what color you were, no matter what gender you were, no matter what sexuality you had. Everyone was welcome, and it was literally the more the merrier. That was like the apex, like the early 90s, of inclusive nightlife. And after that, like when rave started trickling off and it kind of just back, like approaching the millennium, most of the big dance clubs in Milwaukee started disappearing. And there was this polarization in nightlife, like towards this binary decision of like, “Are you going to gay bar or straight bar?” And it was really weird because right around that same time was when a lot of the legacy gay bars started closing. Things were much more rigid then. I'm sure older millennials can tell you, if you went out and you went to a straight bar, you were constantly looking over your shoulder. You felt uncomfortable. You felt nervous. You feel like they might make fun of you or not serve you or ask you to leave. I don't know. Or if the business didn't, the other clients might.

A rather enigmatic MySpace post went out calling for organizers to join this group that was going to be planning nightlife takeovers. And if you were interested, you were to send your information to an email address and explain why you wanted to be involved. So I reached out and I said, you know, “This sounds fun.” And at that point in my life, I had lived in Milwaukee for so long and like had just gotten so settled in my ways that I was just eager for something to change. And that year really, really brought the change.

On Thursday at midnight, we would announce where we were going. The details would only be available on social media. We did not tell the bars ahead of time. There's a long myth that we were in cahoots with the bar owners, they knew we were coming, so it really wasn't a surprise. But that isn't true. I mean, we never told any bar we were at coming ever. We just showed up at 9:30 p.m. sharp on Friday night and just like pour it into this bar. And ultimately, you know, over the course of that night, we showed the economic power of our dollars to bars that maybe had never really had gay crowds in before.

Geurrilla Gay Bar was really born and inspired from this idea to disrupt the status quo, to like shatter expectations and like remix everything by taking all those rules and just throwing them out the window and getting a whole bunch of people together who otherwise would never be under the same roof. And it worked like magic in Milwaukee, because I think Milwaukee was starving for something new at that time. They're starving for experience. And on a monthly basis, we went out every first Friday and took them on a tour of their own city. They were a tourist in their own town and got to be a little bit subversive in the process.

It was a really wild, diverse group of people. I mean, we had tons of people of color who I had not seen in other bars in the city ever. We had trans women who would come out in droves because it was so safe and so fun. And, you know, maybe these are places they would have loved to have gone, but they wouldn't go alone. I mean, who can blame them? We'd have older people who like don't go clubbing anymore and feel kind of out of place. And something like this, it was, they'd come out every month. That'd be like their big night out. We tried to avoid small spaces that would be dangerous, you know, like where if people went and they really poured in, that it would create some kind of liability for the business. We didn't want that. So, places like Landmark Lanes, Victor’s, you know, places that were huge and well known, but people didn't necessarily know them because they might not have ever been to them.

Then we also chose the stereotypical straight bars like Steny's, where, you know, people for years were afraid to go in there or even cross the street in front of Steny's because they thought, you know, “They're going to yell at me. They are going to make fun of me. They're going to, I don't know, rush me.” I mean, there have been fights between La Cage and Steny's customers going back to the ‘80s, like pretty bad ones, too. There was a famous case where some guys at Steny's harassed some of the drag queens in the show, and one of them who was like 6'6 and weighed 350 pounds got into a rumble with the guys and beat the hell out of them. So there was kind of this history of tension between those bars. And we were able to show that that was then and this is now.

I think that the customers thought it was cool and kind of fun to see like these strange shenanigans going on. And then when people would tell them what it was, they would be like, “Oh, that's cool.” And I think in the back of their minds, they're like, “Wow, there's a lot of them. There's a whole lot of these people. How did you get them all to come?” The businesses’ reactions ranged from fear... There were a few that we announced that we were coming there, and then they would post a comment or send us a message and like, you know, “We're kind of nervous about this. Like we don't know why you chose us, what do we need to do?” And we'd just be like, “Just have enough staff on hand for a busy, busy night. That's really all you need to do. It's not like people are going to come in there and break windows.” At the end of the night, we would have like bar owners reaching out to us and saying, “Oh, hey, when can you come back?”

The only place we ever did twice was Victor's because that was the most famous, popular, attended event we ever had. There were close to 400 people that showed up for the event in March of 2008. One, it's a dance club so people could dance. Two, it was huge. They didn't have to worry about being crowded. Three, it was on the east side so it's kind of around other bars and if it sucked they could go somewhere else. But four, I think it was just that allure of Victor's, like the reputation, the brand of Victor’s is just this like kind of edgy, kind of naughty, for lack of a better word, swingers’ club. Now, the reactions from some of the gay bars were not necessarily great. So we got criticized for taking money out of the community, which happens all the time. That's a fight that has gone back to the ‘70s in Milwaukee when some of the newer discos like Park Avenue would have gay nights on Sundays. And the gay bar owners were furious because they're like, “Why would you go there to a bar that only wants you on Sunday instead of supporting your own community?” Well, they kind of did the same thing with us with Geurrilla Gay Bar. They were like, “You know, you're taking money away from us. These people should be spending money at my bar.” And our response was, “Well, if you offered the same experience, if you offered the sensation, they would be.”

There was never a fight at one of our events. There was never a rejection of us. There was never anyone asked to leave because they were too drunk or because they were, you know, offending people. There was no like, you know, lewd or lurid behavior, unfortunately. I always hoped that something would break out that would be story-worthy the next day, but people behave themselves. And they had just had a really good time in this huge mob of people that they felt unity with. And I think that that was also important at that moment in time, as all these legacy bars are closing, to feel like you're losing this, but you still have this. I did this for nearly 10 years on a monthly basis, committed every single first Friday. It's something you do like when you're younger and you have a lot of free time and you have a lot of energy left in you to be creative and clever and, and kind of intrusive at the same time. And I think that what happened is a lot of people just grew up, and suddenly it just wasn't as fun to be, you know, this nightlife outlaw on the first Friday of every month.

I think the legacy is that we were in this window of time where people were looking for fun and there was nothing fun to do. It was, to be part of something at that moment in time. And to think about like the looks on people's faces when this mob of people come in, and to see physical affection between same-sex people, to see trans women and men, you know, in a public place, I don't think that people see things like that. They might see one or two gay people with their straight friends. They may see people that they have no idea are on the LGBTQ spectrum just because it's so normal. It's so mainstream, and for a long time, we were heading in this mainstream direction, with everything from marriage equality, to trans rights, to true equality that seems to have back flipped over the past eight years. So, you know, maybe guerrilla gay bar is needed more than ever. But, you know, I think it's up to the next generation to figure out what that looks like, how it would make a difference, and most importantly, how to achieve that visibility and voice factor because that's what drives change.

Audrey Nowakowski: That was Wisconsin LGBTQ history project president, Michail Takach. He spoke with Lake Effect’s Jimmy Gutierrez in 2024.

Need some flexibility for when you listen? You can hear Lake Effect on demand. Find it as a podcast wherever you like to listen to download and enjoy on the go.

Still to come, we'll learn about the Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater, the practice of spiritualism, and the spooky legends it inspired. But first, we'll visit the only lesbian bar in Wisconsin. That's here in Milwaukee. We'll visit Walker's Pint to learn about what it means to the patrons. Keep listening to Lake Effect on WUWM.

You're listening to Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM. I'm Audrey Nowakowski. There are only about 40 lesbian bars across the U.S., with just one in Wisconsin. And it's right here in Milwaukee. Walker's Pint in Walker's Point has become an iconic bar for the community, creating a women-forward space for the last 25 years. Kobe Brown is a former WUWM Eric Von Fellow who visited the bar in 2023 to learn about the space and speak with the patrons. We'll hear first from Caitlin Gallagher, a bartender at Walker's Pint.

Caitlin Gallagher: I think that it's completely an understatement to say it's important to have a lesbian space. I mean, just in the sense that you can come somewhere that's not intimidating, that is very welcoming to everyone, but is somewhere that is specifically meant for women who are gay to feel safe, or exploring to feel safe, or maybe just coming out and feeling like, “Oh, there's people of all ages here,” which I think is really unique to the Pint, actually. I mean, I have met the people that are going to be one day, I'm sure, in my wedding here at this bar. I've met the people who I call in the middle of the night here at this bar. I mean, it's my favorite place to be. Bartending isn't my main profession, but I do it because it's so much fun. I couldn't resist when they said, “Hey, come bartend.” I said, “I’m not a bartender.” “hey said, “Well, you could be.” I said, “alright.” And here I am.

Kobe Brown: I was going to ask what pushed you to work here, but it sounds like the community and the tight-knit-ness of it all. What are some other reasons that made you stay?

Caitlin Gallagher: I mean honestly it sounds really crazy but it's like, as difficult as bartending can be, you have to like be able to do a million things at once. Like this is my like happy, like social, relaxing time. So, I come here, and I knew I was walking here today, and I already made two new friends right here. And then I knew even a couple of my co-workers would be here, as we always are, to congregate. And then, I get to have another friend or two slide in. And then it's already complete before, I mean, the day has really even gone anywhere. So I mean, honestly, this keeps me like a grounded person and also just makes me feel like loved, as corny as that is.

Kobe Brown: No, that's not corny at all. We obviously talked about how limited the space is here for people who identify as lesbian, for women who just want to be around other people who identify as women. How do you feel that there's only such limited amount of spaces, and what needs to be done to preserve those spaces and protect those spaces?

Caitlin Gallagher: Yeah, I think actually it's kind of strange to me, because I've been so lucky to have this space that I can't really imagine what it would be like going somewhere else and not having it. So I think the thing that is going to have to be the most important to preserving it is really, when you come like you're doing right now, and you talk to those people and figure out what it means to them. Because you will find in this small little bar in Walker's Point, just an absolute army of people who would do anything to keep this bar going, to keep this space existing. I mean, this isn't just, you know, somewhere people come and have drinks. I mean, we have all kinds of different things that go on here. We have people come in and get their, like, engagement pictures done or come in. Like, they get married down the street, and they make sure they bring their bridal party in here to have a picture at the pint because that's where they met or things like that. So I think just like tapping in to the communities that already exist, you'd be surprised how strong they are and how much people would really fight to keep them going.

Kobe Brown: Absolutely. This is my last question for you. I know you're like, “I need a drink,” but what would you say to anyone thinking about coming into Walker's Pint, for women who are just looking for a space to feel more empowered? What would say to them?

Caitlin Gallagher: I would say the first thing is literally just get yourself in the door and sit down at the bar because you're going to be greeted by somebody, whether it's myself or one of the other awesome people who work here who are genuinely happy to see you, who will, like we just did a minute ago, teach you how to play bar dice, who will ask you about your life, who offer you to try a pickle shot if you haven't had one yet – very Wisconsin, not just lesbian. But, I mean, really just getting yourself in the door, because I've had so many conversations with people who have come in, sat down, and after we've been talking for a while, they let me know, “Actually, I've never been here before,” or, “I'm just trying to figure out if I should come out,” or whatever, and “I just feel really thankful that I did.” So, just getting yourself there. And there are really, really going to only be good things that come from that, in my opinion, and in my experience.

Kobe Brown: Well, thank you for sharing your experience. I really appreciate it.

Caitlin Gallagher: Yeah! I'm so glad you're here!

Kobe Brown: Yes, thank you so much!

Caitlin Gallagher: Definitely feel free to pick other people's brains.

Kobe Brown: Yeah, I was about to say, do you two mind if I bother you over here? Okay, how are you guys doing? My name is Kobe. What are your two names?

Jocelyn: Jocelyn.

Erica: I'm Erica.

Kobe Brown: Okay. And what’s your relationship? Are you friends, or just hanging out?

Jocelyn: We are married. Oh, okay, nice, absolutely.

Kobe Brown: Oh, okay, nice, absolutely. Is this your first time here?

Jocelyn: It's my third. I'm in the military so I'm stationed here, and this is our second time together here.

Kobe Brown: Okay, absolutely, and what brings you to here? What is it about Walker's Pint that makes you a patron of it?

Jocelyn: So, I was stationed overseas and I was told I was going to Milwaukee. I didn't know what Milwaukee was. I didn't know where Wisconsin was. I mean, I had to look it up. But getting stationed here, the first thing that I wanted to go into was LGBT-friendly bars and Walker's Pint showed up as one of the first ones. My first time here in 2019 was very friendly, very fun. I felt welcomed,, again because where I was stationed, I wasn't allowed to be LGBT-friendly in the area and I had to be respectful of the country. So coming here, it was really fun. Like, it was a good environment, good music, everybody was friendly. I didn't understand the bar dice, but it was good. I mean, all in all, it's been great. Now I met my wife. So she lives in Milwaukee with us, and it's great. She loves it, I love it too.

Kobe Brown: Yeah, how do you feel about Walker's Pint?

Erica: We just like coming here. We like the atmosphere of knowing that it's a place where we can meet new friends that also share the same lifestyle as we do, and just an opportunity to come and meet new people every time and make friends and just kind of find people that support us in our lifestyle and our choices and are right alongside with us.

Kobe Brown: Yeah, as you may have heard, we were just talking about there's a lack of lesbian bars across the country. How does that make you feel that, you know? To me it seems like there's growing acceptance of the LGBT community, so it wouldn't make sense that there's decline in lesbian bars. Do you feel that kind of pinch in spaces or, I mean, does Walker’s Pint really kind of alleviate that?

Jocelyn: I mean, like I said, my lifestyle has been in the military for almost 11 years now. So, due to the fact that my lifestyle is traveling a lot, I've gone to various places in the country where the first thing I look at when I get there is like, “Okay, what's LGBT friendly?” And then at the top of that, what is lesbian driven, essentially, in the community?

So it's been a little bit of a hurdle to feel comfortable in certain areas. And I really honestly feel sad that, I don't know why, but when it comes to the lesbian bars, it's just going downhill. So, I mean, in Virginia and Georgia, all the places that I've been, I think the one that I have loved by far the most is Walker's Pint.

Kobe Brown: It sounds like you both have found home in Milwaukee, a new community. What does this new home mean to you both?

Jocelyn: I mean for us, unfortunately, because I'm still active duty military, we're going to leave soon. I think, if anything, all the people that I brought in here, all of the people my wife has brought in, it continues to grow the community, and it brings awareness to, essentially, us. We're LGBT, we are lesbians, we’re proud, but essentially it's welcoming everybody in and having a good time. I think wherever we go, that's what we want to continue to provide to wherever we go. We're going to go overseas here soon, so wherever it is, whatever community we end up in, we're friendly, we're happy, and we just have a good time. We want to have a couple drinks, that's it.

Kobe Brown: How is it being able to take a little bit of Milwaukee with you, wherever you go?

Erica: This has definitely been a great experience living in Milwaukee, seeing just even like the big LGBTQ scene that's here in Walker’s Point. It's something that I definitely will look for moving forward, trying to find another spot that even resembles this because it's been such a great area just to be. I would love to find somewhere new, similar. As we said, we're going to be moving constantly due to the military. And even just having... I don't even know if anywhere will ever compare to this spot in Milwaukee, but that's something that we'll always cherish, the memories here, and know what to look forward now to in the future, and try to find somewhere even remotely close to what we've experienced here.

Kobe Brown: Absolutely, thank you two so much and thank you for your service. I'm really grateful that you both talked with me.

Erica: Thank you.

Jocelyn: Thank you.

Kobe Brown: Yeah, for sure

Audrey Nowakowski: You just heard from Jocelyn and Erica, patrons at Walker's Pint Bar, speaking with Kobe Brown, a former WUWM Eric von Fellow. You also heard from Caitlin Gallagher, who is a bartender at Walker Pint.

We'll take one more break, and when we come back, we'll learn about the practice of spiritualism at the Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater. That's next on Like Effect, on Milwaukee's NPR.

This is Lake Effect on 89.7 WUWM. I'm Audrey Nowakowski. The Lumberjack World Championships happen every year in Hayward, Wisconsin in the state's Northwoods. But why exactly Wisconsin? WUWM's Maayan Silver speaks with historian Willa Hammett Brown to find out. Brown is the author of the book, “Gentlemen in the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack.” They talk about the area's logging industry, how logging inspired timber sports, and the trajectory of women into competitions.

Maayan Silver: Can you tell me a little bit about that area, northern Wisconsin's timber industry, and like how it flourished? And, for people who are geographically challenged, we're talking about the northernmost part of the state, kind of like an hour to an hour and a half from Lake Superior.

Willa Hammitt Brown: Yep, absolutely. It was part of a whole hardwood forest, the old white pine forest that covered the U.P. of Michigan and the upper part of the mitten, then through that sweep of Wisconsin and the northern part of Minnesota as well, a huge piece of timberland. And the logging of that land was the single biggest, real transformation of American landscape, one of the biggest transformations in American history. It was the height of lumbering when that part of the land was lumbered in the 1880s through about the 1910s. And it really is what allowed the Midwest to flourish. Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Omaha, all of these cities are built with Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan, Northwoods White Pine.

Hayward itself was actually kind of famous. It was one of, each state had a few of these wild towns that really could be compared to what we think of as Western cow towns. In fact, there have been studies done that showed that the logging towns of the upper Midwest had higher crime rates and violence than the sort of famous, old Wild West towns. And Hayward was one of Wisconsin's famous “dens of iniquity,” which is why it's very cool that it's where they now do the Lumberjack World Championships. It feels incredibly apt that they would come back home to Hayward.

It was a remarkable time that has been sort of lost to history on purpose, because, in many ways, there's a great quote I love from a woman who watched this herself, who was the daughter of a lumber camp owner, who referred to the logging of the upper Midwest as “an epic and a tragedy.” And it was epic in scale, and it was tragic in outcomes. So we celebrate parts of it, we celebrate this sort of mythical, made up idea of what a lumberjack was about. And we very purposefully forget other parts of it, about environmental destruction, poverty, fire, and all the other side effects that were really, fairly tragic, particularly in Wisconsin, actually.

Maayan Silver: Logging and lumberjacking was a traditionally male-dominated profession. What was the role and history of women in this industry?

Willa Hammitt Brown: Yeah, that's a great question. It really was an extremely male profession to the point where women were banned in most camps. Women were seen as possible distractions and possible ways of tearing apart the camps. Towards the end of the 19th century, you've got these camps of 80 to 150 men working together. And so, drinking, gambling, and women are banned as and seen as ways to lower morale. In smaller camps, women would be employed, and even in some big camps, in the cook shack. Often in very small camps, that would just mean the foreman's wife was the cook. But there were cooks and cookies who were – cookies being a cook's assistant – who were women who were hired. The real largest group of women to follow the lumberjack trade were sex workers and prostitutes. There were brothels across the upper Midwest. A lot of these small towns would be, you know... I'm thinking of Seney, Michigan, a town that out of season had a population of 400, but had seven brothels, I believe. So it's not, it's not the 200 men of that town who are keeping seven brothels going. It's lumberjacks who are doing that. And you really didn't see women in... Even in the summer, the places, the spaces men were in were very male dominated. These taverns were very male places, and the few women who were in them would either be the daughters of tavern owners who would be working, or these sort of notorious women along the style of, if you think of like a Calamity Jane in the West. So they're really, the opening up of lumbering to women is an extremely modern phenomenon.

Maayan Silver: You're tuned into Lake Effect. I'm WUWM's Maayan Silver, speaking with Willa Hammett Brown, historian, speaker, and writer. We are talking about women in lumberjacking, and you said it really wasn't a thing until modern times. Before that, I want a little nugget about how lumberjacking became timber sports or, you know, that kind of competitive lumberjacks.

Willa Hammitt Brown: Of course. It's a really interesting story, because it's also the story of how we changed what we think of as lumberjacking. So, logging still happens, obviously. Forestry is still a big industry in this country. But today, it requires much more specialized knowledge of machinery than it does of shimmying up logs or log burling – that's the log rolling in a river. Those skills are attached to a largely dead form of the industry. They're attached to a sort of nostalgic late 19th, early 20th century idea of what lumbering was, and the way lumbering happened in the upper Midwest, in the Northwoods, in these winter camps where these skills were really prized. There were some competitions that began while lumbering still existed. We have burling competitions happening in the late 19th century in around Michigan and Minnesota. And some of those were actual lumberjacks sort of showing off in the summer. And there started being money made out of that. But it really takes off when we get the full-blown nostalgia for the old, “ye olde lumberjacky.” And that nostalgia bears very little resemblance to the actual industry.

So after the industry left in the 1920s, the Northwoods were just totally devastated. The largest fire in American history was the Peshtigo fire, which was one of the deadliest fires as well. May have killed up to 1,200 people. You get these fires just devastating, huge swaths of landscape. And in Wisconsin in particular, in the 1930s, there was actually a Second Dust Bowl that no one talks about, which was in the Cutover region of Northern Wisconsin, the area we're talking about. So you have these economically devastated regions also damaged by fire. There's not a lot that's easy to recover industry-wise around there, because pine grows in sandy soil, and sandy soil doesn't make for great farming soil. So what the region turns to is tourism as a way to recover and still if you've ever spent a beautiful weekend at the Apostle Islands, you know that Northern Wisconsin is a lovely place to go as a tourist.

And at the same time that that region is turning to tourism, there's also sort of a national nostalgia for the closing of the West, and a national nostalgic for what is seen as these sort of true white heroes of the west, the cowboys, the lumberjacks, your Johnny Appleseeds. And a lot of this has to do with just changing ideas of what it is to be a man in modern society. It has much more to do factory work or office work. You're not out there doing things. And so there becomes a lot of nostalgia for that work. And by the 1930s and ‘40s, there start being these fairs with reenactments. And that's where you start seeing timber sports really take off. It's a celebration of raw, really raw masculine strength and skill. It doesn't really bear a resemblance to the actual industry, which was a pretty standard industry in term in late 19th-century terms, which is to say poor workers with very little way up really bad conditions, terrible wages, very little respect from management for the actual workers themselves. It was a real industrial scale extractive industry, but what we celebrate about it is a sort of smaller scale folksy interpretation of that.

Maayan Silver: Well, two things. So the lumberjacking trade is traditionally just felling trees, right? I mean, would that be the biggest skill that you need to have?

Willa Hammitt Brown: There are actually a lot of really important skills in lumberjacking trade. So there is felling trees, which requires you to have an understanding of how trees are going to fall. That ability to look up and see, predict the direction it will fall, to notch it in the right place and fell it, which is part of lumberjack competition still. Bark stripping. Log stacking, which used to be, in the late 19th and early 20th century, that was the big show-off thing is how high you could stack a load of timber, and you get these like 10-ton stacks of timber that were totally impractical. They were just to show off. They’d make really cool photographs of these dudes standing on these 30-foot piles of these sleigh rides of logs. You would then, while it was still frozen, use ice roads to get those to the side of the river, and once the ice thawed, those would be pushed into the river and driven down the river. And that's where a lot of the really high-skilled work comes in, of being able to find out which logs you need to move along to stop a jam, of being able to walk across the logs on the river, which is where you get log rolling from, is that ability to balance on those logs as you're trying to keep them moving down the river. It was both highly skilled and incredibly dangerous work.

Maayan Silver: Is it kind of a myth, the idea that these lumberjacks would come back to town after days of lumberjacking and then they'd try to have competitions with each other to be like, “Who's the best at this?” Is that sort of like a myth?

Willa Hammitt Brown: It did start happening in the late 19th century, but really what happened is after a season of lumberjacking in the woods, they came to town, drank themselves silly, and spent all their money. The real thing they did was they called it the spree, and they were damn proud of it. The spree was essentially an attempt to see how quickly you could blow all of your earnings on drink and gambling and women. And then, you know, if you had some time in there to roll some logs, sure. But you were probably drunk. And you can think of it like a rodeo. It's not that cowboys didn't need the skills that are shown in a rodeo, but that's not what being a cowboy looked like.

Maayan Silver: Gotcha. Okay. And so then we were talking about this modern trail of women into this. What about women into timber sports? Like how did that start?

Willa Hammitt Brown: My understanding is that it started 20 or 30 years ago, but really took off in the last sort of 20 years. I think part of the thing about lumber sports and timber sports is they are so distinctly masculine in that they are this nostalgic exercise in showing the skills of an all-male industry. And all of the nostalgia is for like, for this sort of mythologized and deeply problematic, but whatever, image of the white frontier male hero. And I just love that women have taken to going into that space and showing that they can hold space there. To me it's, you know, I think about it sort of like, when you think about men's and women's sports, it's like taking on football rather than taking on. I can't think of another sport that's less distinctly masculine, but it's good.

Maayan Silver: Soccer?

Willa Hammitt Brown: Yeah, soccer, I guess, uh, it's going into the most male-coded space you could possibly find and showing that you can do it, which I find incredible. And I think it speaks a lot to the appeal to women is that there are all sorts of places you can compete, but to choose to compete on the grounds that are so tied up with our ideas of what it is to be a man is awesome.

Maayan Silver: That's a nice description of the trajectory. Willa Brown, thank you so much for speaking about lumberjacking, the history of it, and women in the sport. It's been very interesting.

Willa Hammitt Brown: Thank you so much for having me.

“The Logging Song” by Bill Haines: [lyric excerpt omitted due to copyright]

Audrey Nowakowski: Willa Hammett Brown is a historian and the author of “Gentlemen in the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack.” She spoke with WUWM's Maayan Silver last year. This year's Lumberjack World Championship is happening July 15-18, and tickets are available now.

“The Logging Song” by Bill Haines: [lyric excerpt omitted due to copyright]

Audrey Nowakowski: The spiritualist movement of the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that adherents could communicate with the so-called “spirit world.” Even from its inception, the movement was controversial, with many claiming it was witchcraft. One of its most high-profile critics was Wisconsin native Harry Houdini, who toured the nation debunking spiritualist claims. But Wisconsin is also home to the first school of spiritualism. The Morris Pratt Institute was founded in Whitewater in 1889. It was the subject of an article in Milwaukee Magazine written by Tea Krulos. He joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to share more about it.

Joy Powers: So we are talking about Whitewater Spiritualism, which is something that still exists, but I think we really have to start with one person in particular, Morris Pratt. Who was Morris Prat?

Tea Krulos: Yeah, it's a very interesting story. The Pratt family moved from New York State to Wisconsin in the 1840s. Morris and his six brothers bought adjoining farmlands, and they became farmers and had some pretty good success at that. Morris got married, and in 1850, he and his wife were interested in spiritualism, which was very quickly becoming popular. And they found a community of spiritualists living in Lake Mills nearby. One of the people in this circle of spiritualists was a woman named Mary Folsom. She's also known by her later married names, Mary Hayes and Mary Shinaweth, or some combination of. So I'll just refer to her as Mary Folsom.

People claimed that she had the ability to psychically heal people. So they would come to her with their ailments and she would sort of go into a trance. She'd sometimes speak in tongues. It's said that she would absorb their illness, and she would have blisters and rashes on her body. She didn't charge people for this, but the spirits helped her out financially in other ways by giving her sort of spirit world insider trading tips. So Mary Folsom at one point is told by a spirit that there are riches to be had in Northern Wisconsin. So she assembles a group of investors, including her two sons and Morris Pratt, who she's become friends with. And she says, specifically, they need to mine in this area that would become the area known as Hurley, Wisconsin and Ironwood across the border in the U.P.

And so they invest this money, and sure enough, they strike it rich with these iron mines. And Morris Pratt had said that if they did make money on this, he would invest some of his money back into promoting spiritualism. So eventually he gets paid out by an outside interest, wants to buy his stake in the company. And they gave him, I think it was like $500,000. Anyway, it would be the equivalent of about 6.1 or 2 million dollars today. So he makes quite a bit of money, and he keeps to his word and builds this and downtown Whitewater. He first called it the Temple of Science, but after a few years it was renamed the Morris Pratt Institute and became a college for Spiritualists. So they had your normal sort of college courses on like geography and math, but they also had classes where they learned how to conduct the séance and communicate with the dead.

Joy Powers: Interesting that was one of my big questions, yeah. What do you do at a school for spiritualism?

Tea Krulos: They had a big room where everything in it was white, painted white. You know, the furniture was white. And they would conduct seances in the special room. They had big lecture hall where people would talk about Spiritualist theory and stuff like that.

Joy Powers: Now, of course, Spiritualism was always controversial, but at the time it wasn't just revolutionary because of their beliefs, but also because there were women in leadership, which seems to have added to the kind of derision faced by locals.

Tea Krulos: Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why these urban legends, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about, start to develop, because it was very rare for women to have a leadership position in any sort of church. And, you know, Spiritualists believe that they can communicate with the dead. So, very quickly, like, whispers started to go around town about what was going on inside of this building. They're like, “There's these women that are leading this group of people, they're speaking to the dead. It must be witchcraft,” right? So the locals nicknamed the building the “Spook Temple.” And yeah, they said it was like a school for witches.

Joy Powers: As you say, around this time, the legends of the witches start. One of the things you look at in the article is the so-called Witch’s Triangle?

Tea Krulos: Yes.

Joy Powers: It’s a space that's it's created by, if I have this right, Whitewater's three cemeteries. They form a point.

Tea Krulos: Yes

Joy Powers: So is the Witch’s Triangle in the middle of the points?

Tea Krulos: Yes, yes, as happens when you have three points, you know, they form some sort of triangle. This one's a nice isosceles triangle, and it's said that all of the area within this triangle is under a witch's curse.

Joy Powers: How much of the town is in that area?

Tea Krulos: A lot. So.

Joy Powers: So a lot of cursed land?

Tea Krulos: Yes.

Joy Powers: Now, there are still elements of the Morris Pratt Institute in Whitewater. I should say the actual institute is still around. It’s moved. We'll get to that in a moment. But what are some of the bits of this spooky legacy that are left in Whitewater?

Tea Krulos: Well, the Institute operated up until the 1930s, and then interest in Spiritualism was starting to wane. The Great Depression had happened. So they ended up closing their doors by the end of the ‘30s. After that, it became a women's dormitory for the college. And I think that's where a lot of the urban legend started, because can you imagine? You're in this building that used to be a witch school, so of course you're going to share stories, and those stories are going to change. That building is gone. It got torn down in the ‘60s, 1960s, but the legends still persisted. You know, they didn't disappear, but a lot of them kind of moved.

There's a water tower in Starin Park that's called the Witch's Tower. That tower was built the same year that the Institute was, but it doesn't have any relation to it directly. But it looks kind of old and creepy, so people have stories about a demon being locked up in the tower and witches performing a black mass in front of it. There's the three cemeteries of the witch's triangle. One of them is supposed to have a spirit of a witch named Mary Worth who has cursed the town. And I love this: she's not only a witch, but in some tellings, she's also an ax murderer. So and then there's a spell book that is at Anderson Library, or that's the rumor. The book does actually exist, but it's an old hymn book. It just looks very intimidating, because it's huge, and it's leather bound, and the leather is starting to rot away. So those are just a few, by the way. There's other stories about ghosts and witches.

Joy Powers: Underground tunnels.

Tea Krulos: Yes, underground tunnels that get to the Witch's Tower, so there is no shortage of stories in this pretty small town.

Joy Powers: Now, the Morris Pratt Institute does close in Whitewater, but it didn't close up shop. It actually moved to Wauwatosa.

Tea Krulos: Yes. Yeah, it's still in operation today, which is really amazing. And as far as I know, it's the only school that has a tie to Spiritualism.

Joy Powers: Are they still a Spiritualist school? Do they still teach the same kinds of things?

Tea Krulos: Yeah, absolutely. It's a house that was remodeled and you can still kind of get the feel that it used to be a house. So the lower level they have a couple of libraries with artifacts relaying the Spiritualism, going back to the 1800s. Upstairs, there's a small classroom. There's also a bedroom for visiting teachers. They now operate as an online school. But they maintain that physical space where, you know, they do the administrative work. They sometimes will have like a special lecture or an open house. And then, you know, the library is used for research as well.

Joy Powers: Very interesting. So if you're looking to lead your own séance...

Tea Krulos: Yes, you can go to their website, and you can sign up for their courses.

Joy Powers: Very nice. Well, Tea, thank you so much for joining us here on Lake Effect and sharing your work.

Tea Krulos: Thank you.

Audrey Nowakowski: Tea Krulos is a local writer. He spoke with Lake Effect's Joy Powers about Spiritualism and the Morris Pratt Institute last year. And that wraps up Lake Effect for today. I'm Audrey Nowakowski.

If you've missed any of Lake Effect this week, you can find all of our conversations at wuwm.com. If you'd like to take the show on the go, just download the Lake Effect podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Tomorrow on Lake Effect, we'll wrap up our series on Milwaukee's socialists with a look at Milwaukee's last socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler. Plus, we'll explore how the socialist movement continues in Milwaukee today. Thank you so much for joining us today, right here on listener-supported 89.7 WUWM, Milwaukee's NPR.