Frank
was born in Wausau in 1913 and has lived on the east side of Wausau for most of
his life. He joined the Navy for a few years and then went to work at
Employer's Mutual, now Wausau Insurance, for 45 years. He was a manager of
the Audit Department for 32 years. He was chaplain at Athletic Park since
1980 for the Wisconsin Timbers.
My name is Franklin
Gering, and I live in Wausau. We’re
going to talk about the early Wausau years.
I want to start by telling you, first of all, that I grew up with a
family of seven. In my family, my
grandfather, my mother, my father, and three brothers, who were younger than
myself, and I was born on March 22, 1913.
So if you are good mathematics you can tell me how old I am now,
87…87…89. I’m 89 years old,
and what we want to talk about is some of the things that took place in the
early years of the city of Wausau. I
just want to tell you something general.
First, Wausau was first started back in the middle of the eighteen
hundreds, and there were a number of different people that came.
There was a George Stevens who came up from Stevens Point, and he came
to Wausau. There’s a bridge in
Wausau now that’s called the Stevens Bridge, and along with him as later
fellows came. There was a group
that came together, they were not officially organized, but it was called the
Wausau Group, and there were a number of men that were in it.
Most of them were lumberman, and they did a lot of things to develop
the city of Wausau. They were
known as the group, and there are a lot of famous names.
I’ll just give you a few of their names which may not mean much to
you now, but these are the men who were part of this group.
There was a man by the name of Stuart Alexander, and he had a big
sawmill operation. Walter Mackindu also had sawmill and logging operations.
The Wausau Historical Museum in Wausau is named the Janke Museum.
Woodson was his son in law. Then, there was a fellow by the name of John Ross.
He had a sawmill here in Schofield; right were the Eau Claire River
empties into the Wisconsin River. That
sawmill was called the Brooks and Ross Sawmill.
Then, there was Judd Alexander. All
these men, so far, that I’m talking about were lumberman and loggers, and
that’s how they developed the city. Then
a fellow came along by the name of Neil Brown, and he was a lawyer.
He was a very brilliant person and did a lot of brilliant things.
Among other things, he helped to start Players Mutual, which is now
called Wausau Insurance. Then, some time later, D.C. Everest came along, and, of
course your system is named after D.C. Everest, he’s the one that developed
the paper mill in Rothschild. I’d
like to tell you some of the things I did in my own life, and maybe that will
help you. First of all, not far
from were I lived- I lived on the north end of the city of Wausau- but not far
from where I lived, there was an acselser mill.
An acselser is wood that they strip down to very thin pieces. If you can imagine the kind of stuff you put in your Easter
baskets these days that was all wood. So
they had to get the wood from the woods, and then the bark had to be pealed
off of it, and then they ran it through these shredding machines.
That’s how they made acselser. When I was real small, I worked for a
time at peeling bolts. We had to take a little hand shaver and just peel the bolts.
Then, they used it and ran it through these machines and made the
acselser out of them. Also, when
I was growing up, I worked for a time at the canning factory.
The canning factory that was on the west side of Wausau and among other
things I went out on the fields and picked beans.
We had these market baskets, which were about eighteen inches wide,
eighteen inches long, something like that.
They would haul us out here in paneled or steak-bodied trucks.
We stood on the trucks, in the back, and they hauled us out here.
We picked the beans all day, and then we went back home.
A lot of the bean fields were out in this area west of here and out
towards where Camp Philips Road. I
did that at times and another time, when I was twelve years old, I worked on a
farm, which was across the river from the paper mill and down stream from the
paper mill a ways, and there I learned how to milk cows.
There were no milking machines, of course.
At that time, we had to milk cows by hand, and I learned how to hoe
potatoes, and I learned how to feed the pigs, and to do a lot of other farm
things. I could tell you
something about ice, where does ice come from?
Water.
Yeah, but how do you make it from water
to where it’s solid?
It freezes.
It’s got to be where it’s cold, sure.
Well, where is it cold? On
the river. The river is cold,
so we had a number of companies. One
of them was an ice and fuel company in Schofield.
There was also a Wausau ice and fuel company, and there were several
others. When the ice got to be
pretty thick, they would go out there, and they had horses and sleighs that
would get the ice in. They would
have a long saw that they would put down, and they would saw the ice into
blocks, take it out, and haul it out with tongs out onto the sleighs.
They would take them to the icehouses.
Now, an icehouse was a little different than a normal building because
the walls were like timbers, and they had very thick walls.
How do you suppose they kept the ice from melting all summer long until
the next winter? They covered each layer that they put down, with sawdust, and
that was an insulator. When it
came time to take the ice out and haul it by the wagon to the ice boxes in the
people’s homes and wherever then they would have to take that sawdust off
and wash it off with water, and then they would deliver the ice.
When I was a junior and a senior in high school, I worked on a farm
northeast of Wausau about five miles out, and it was a dairy farm.
We delivered milk to the city of Wausau and delivered it door-to-door.
You don’t have door-to-door delivers anymore, but we had it then, and
we had to come in five miles in the wintertime. We had horses and a sleigh and
with no problem because the streets weren’t plowed, and the sleighs worked
very well, and the horses had special winter shoes that had big knobs on the
end of it, so they wouldn’t slip on the ice.
We delivered and, during the summer time, we would deliver the milk in
wagons, a regular milk wagon, and that was a lot of fun.
I earned a big sum of fifty cents a day working there, and we got up in
the morning, usually about five o’ clock, and our chores were done at about
eight o’ clock in the evening. It
was a long day. So that was kind
of an interesting thing. Wausau had a number of sawmills, and they used to
call the Wisconsin River the hardest working river in the state of Wisconsin
because it had so many sawmills and power plants on it.
These were all operated by water, and in the early days they floated
the logs down the river. They had
pilings in the river, and they had what they called booms which connected one
piling to another. Then, they
were able to steer the logs. If
they had a sawmill up there, they would steer those logs, and the logs had
markings on the end of them. They
were stamped on, so everybody knew whose logs were whose.
They would steer these logs over here and have the sawmill here, and
they’d steer these logs here and all the way down the stream.
One of the farthest north sawmills was at the very north end of Wausau
on the west side, and then there was another one just north of Bridge Street,
off the bridge. There was a
sawmill there. When I was growing
up, I lived fairly close to that mill. I could hear them running these logs through the saws all
night long, and I can still remember that so clearly that this was the way it
was. There were some other
sawmills down near downtown Wausau, where the library is downtown, and there
is an island there. It was Stuart
Barker Island, which is now a park, and it had a sawmill there too farther
down the stream also. So, logging
and lumbering was a very important thing in Wausau.
At that time, there were some farmers who would bring in logs on their
sleighs, and their horses and the sleighs had two sets of runners on them.
They were connected together by a hinge.
So, what we used to do when we were growing up, when the sleighs were
empty and the farmers were ready to go home, they would come up the street and
get on the back end of the sleigh and swing those things around.
So, it kind of makes the horses stop, and then the farmer pulled
through sometimes. He had this
long whip and, with this long whip, he’d be trying to get us away and that
was a kind of a fun thing. Wausau
had a streetcar system. Do you know what streetcars are? Have you seen them
anywhere? Seen them in pictures? Wausau had streetcars that ran from the north
end of Wausau all the way down to the paper mill here in Rothschild.
Quite a ways down Grand Avenue, they would have a separate track along
side of the road, but otherwise these streetcars were right in the middle of
the track or right in the middle of the street.
So, sometimes in the wintertime, the only thing that was plowed was the
streetcar. It had a little
v-shaped plow in front of it, and it pushed the snow aside. So, if you wanted to walk, it was a good idea to walk down
the middle of it until the sidewalk was shoveled.
That was an important thing that went on too. Of course buses have replaced streetcars since then, and they
go all over the place… Let me tell you about hobos. Do you know what a hobo
is?
Yes.
Can you tell me?
Don’t
they live on the street?
Okay.
Boxcar
William is a hobo.
All right.
They
keep moving from place to place.
Sure. They keep moving
from place to place, that’s right, and we have our hobos, of course, coming
through Wausau. They usually
stayed along the railroad tracks because that’s how they’d hitch a ride on
the train and go from one place to the other. Well, there were two prominent
hobo places. They were called
jungles, and one of them was on the north side of Wausau right near what is
now Gilbert Park. It was kind of
a hollow there between the railroad track and the river, and those fellows
would stay there and would make whatever food they could.
They’d have a fire going. The
other was in back of the cemetery, that’s on Grand Avenue, where the
railroad track is and on the other side of it.
They would go door-to-door and try to get handouts.
Well, lets say, they stopped at your place, and your parents gave them
some food. When they left,
they’d put a neck somewhere on your property, on a fence or wherever, so the
next time they came along they’d know this was a good place.
If they stopped at your place and they didn’t get anything, they’d
mark that. So, they got to be
pretty smart. In the wintertime,
everything that they owned was on their backs.
I remember seeing some of these fellows. They’d have maybe three or
four coats on, one on over the other one, because that’s the only way they
could keep warm. So, that’s the
story about hobos… Another thing, when I was growing up in Wausau, we lived
right in the city. But one time,
we had two cows, and we had to take those cows to a pasture, which was on the
edge of the city. So before
school, we’d take the cows with a rope around their neck and take them out
to the pasture, and, at the end of the day, we’d have to get them and bring
them home and do that every day some of the older boys had a small herd of
cows and id have maybe ten or twelve cows and they would walk them right down
the street you’ve seen some of the movies that cows have gone down the
middle of a street, well that’s the way they did it that’s just not
fiction you know you see it in the movies you think that’s just something
that’s true and as they came to a certain alley the cow that belonged in
that alley just peeled off they
didn’t have to chase them off. They just knew where to go. They’d go down
to a barn. The owner’s barn would be open. The back door would be open,
along the alley. The cow would go right inside and that’s the way it went.
The roads, of course, at that time, most of them were dirt roads. There were
very few that had any kind of a macadam or concrete or anything like that on
them, very few. Also we had many places where we had wooden sidewalks instead
of concrete and the street that I lived on, that I grew up on we didn’t even
have wooden sidewalks. All we had was just a dirt path and we traveled on
that. You’re supposed to ask me questions.
How
long did you go to school for?
I went through high school. I
went to Wausau High School, which is now Wausau East, and at that time they
were the top school in the Wisconsin Valley Conference. 
How
many kids did you graduate with?
We had a hundred and ninety. Now I’ve done some speaking about the
depression days and that was during the depression.
I graduated from high school in 1930.When the depression was started.
So only twenty percent of our kids were able to go on to college because you
just couldn’t afford it. I
didn’t go to college, but I wish I had. I had to stay home and help support
my family because in 1930 I went to work for Employers’ Mutual Insurance
Company, and I got fifty dollars a month for that, and my father was an
interior decorator, and he worked in many of the homes of these fellows that I
showed you pictures of, and they weren’t doing what you know nobody wanted
to do, painting or decorating, because money was very scarce.
So I had to stay home, and do the job of helping to support the family.
So seven of us, at times, lived on fifty dollars a month plus a little
bit of money that my brothers made. They were younger than I, and they had
paper routs, but they had about ninety papers at a time, and for that they got
two cents a week for each paper that they delivered. So that would only amount
to a dollar and eighty cents a week is what they would get.
I would encourage all four of you if you possibly can go on to some
other school besides high school, could be a technical school or could be a
college, but get all the education you can.
I was one of the fortunate ones that I was able to make it without
going on but a lot of people were not able to do that. How long before this
class is over?
It
ends at fifty-five. Is there any
particular class that you didn’t like?
In school?
Yeah.
That I didn’t like? Should
I name all of them? I think the big problem I had was biology, maybe.
What
is the biggest difference between school then and how it is now?
They were more disciplined. We
were more disciplined. Dress was different.
Did
you have a dress code?
No, we didn’t have a dress code, but it was just common that we
didn’t have the sloppy clothes; you know that’s what I mean. The only ones
for example, the only ones that wore denims, which are now called bib
overalls, you know what I mean, the only ones who wore those were the farm
kids, and there weren’t very many farm kids that went to school because they
couldn’t get to town. There were no busses unless their parents brought them
in, or some of the kids came in and stayed during the week with somebody
boarded in, I shouldn’t say, but the teachers dressed differently too.
Did
you have to walk to school?
Yes.
How
far?
The farthest one was when I went to junior high school. It was a
little over a mile.
Did
you have shoes?
Yes, I had shoes.
Well,
our grandparents tell us stories where they didn’t have shoes, and they had
to walk twenty miles to school.
I had some friends who walked all the way from the town of Setine into
Wausau High School. Do you know
were the town of Setine is?
No.
It’s on the west side of Wausau, and they walked in.
They were girls too. They
were small girls. They were about your size. They were not very big. Okay, any
other questions?
Your
house, was it hard with all those brothers and sisters?
Yes, I didn’t have any sisters, but my brothers. Yeah. The question was, was it harder in the house we lived in?
Yes, because, first of all, the kitchen stove and a space heater in the living
room heat the house and the rest of the house. We slept, my four brothers
slept in one room upstairs, two of us in a bed, and it got cold.
We didn’t have any running water in the house. We got water from a
pump. We had outdoor pluming and somebody left water in a washbasin downstairs
when they went to bed; they left a little water in.
In the morning, there were times when it was frozen, sometimes frozen
solid, and it’s that cold. So when you got up in the morning, you had to
really fight to get closest to the stove to get dressed, but it was good it
was a good life. I enjoyed it.
My
grandpa was born in 1904.
1904. Okay.
But he died in 2000.
Oh, okay. He lived a long life.
Ninety-six years, but in his life, he didn’t have shoes to go to
school, that’s why I asked.
Is that right? Well that’s possible.
I don’t think he had shoes for a couple of years, or if he even went
to school. I never asked him.
Well, I know that there were times when we went barefoot most of
the summer because we didn’t have shoes. You know we couldn’t afford them,
and I’ve seen some of the fellows whose soles got so thin in their shoes, so
they would put cardboard inside the shoes to fill up the holes, I’ve seen
that.
My
grandpa that’s still living, his dad, who died, said that if you wanted to
keep your feet warm in the winter, and you didn’t have any shoes, you would
stick your feet in cow manure.
That’s possible, sure, that’s very warm. Cows generally are very
warm. I don’t know what you
know about cow barns, but if you go into a cow barn, they don’t put any heat
in a cow barn because cows throw off a lot of heat. When I was in high school,
a junior and senior in high school, I had a friend, and we bought a sweater
each, matching sweaters, and that’s all the sweaters we had those two years
while we were in those two grades. We learned a few things. We learned how to
value what God gave us and put a lot of confidence in God.
I knew Jesus Christ and I still know him, and what he means to me, and
I know how helpful he was in some of the things that went on in my life. I
learned the value of money. You didn’t have such things as credit cards or
even charge accounts, and it was kind of tough at times. There were days when
there was no TV, no radios, no ball point pens, no McDonald’s, no a lot of
things.
Back when you were young, would
people ever take a chance at robbing someone, or no?
I don’t think there was as much going on like that, as there might
be today.
Yeah, like crime.
Crime was very low because people learned to care for each other, to
watch out for each other, and through their own friends, and through their
churches. They were very careful about taking care of each other, and that was
an important thing in those early years because if you go back before my time
when Wausau was just a little growing community and times were really tough.
Back in 1912, there was a big flood that went through the city of Wausau, and
the Wisconsin River flooded. Several of the bridges were taken out; even
railroad cars were swept right down the river. Who flew the first airplanes?
The Wright brothers.
Wright brothers, do you know that not very shortly after that, that
there was an airplane that flew in the city of Wausau. A man built it by the
name of John Swisters. He built it in 1910, and he flew from where the
Rothschild pavilion is to where the Wausau downtown airport is, that’s as
far as he flew.
That’s a long way.
And there’s a book by Bob Wily. It’s a very good book if you’re
interested in aviation. A very good book on the history of aviation in the
central Wisconsin area, and he’s done a great job on it, and he’s got all
kinds of pictures including the one I just had here.
And
when were you born?
I was born in 1913. There was another flood back when I was
twelve years old, and they were afraid that the dam at the Rothschild paper mill
was going to go out, and I was working on this farm below the paper mill, and
they let the water out to keep the dam from going and the snake bridge, do you
know were the snake bridge is? Was totally flooded over, so we weren’t able to
take the milk to town, and we lost some cattle. The water went over the fence,
so the cattle just floated down stream, and they drowned during that time. My
parents myself and my brothers and my three children all went to the same
Franklin school in Wausau which is kind of unusual.
Oral
History Project 
