John Gurda - Cream City Chronicles: Stories of Milwaukees Past

I was in fifth grade the first time I heard, or rather saw, history defined. Sister Josetta, one of the more formidable spirits at St. Marys School in Hales Corners, wrote history on the chalkboard, paused to see if the class was paying attention, and then deftly altered the word to make it his/story. The study of the past, she declared, was the story of man.

Sister Josetta was missing more than half the population, of coursesome later scholars would insist on her/storybut the point she made was valid: History is, above all, story. Too often presented as a lifeless catalog of dates and events, presidents and kings, history is in fact a rich chronicle of human experience that, wherever you start, has a beginning, a middle, and any number of ends, including the present.

Cream City Chronicles is a book of history as stories. They had their first incarnation as columns in Milwaukees Sunday newspaper, beginning with the Milwaukee Journal in 1994. The Journals editors were launching a feature called Our Town, and they invited me to write about the citys history. My first column, a short piece describing the old Falk brewery, appeared on March 6, 1994. Barely a year later, the afternoon Journal and the morning Sentinel merged to form, naturally, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Our Town didnt survive the move, but the history column did, and its been appearing in the Crossroads section of the Journal Sentinel ever since, on the first Sunday of each month.

Writing for the newspaper meant following in the footsteps of columnists like Bill Hooker, Russell Austin, Robert Wells, Jay Joslyn, Jay Scriba, and others who looked back to Milwaukees roots on a regular basis. Some of those figures, particularly Scriba, were heroes of mine, and I felt both honored and a bit intimidated to be carrying on their tradition. At the same time, my goal for the column was crystal-clear: to connect what was happening in the present with what had happened in the past. That meant supplying the historical context for the newest landmark, the latest ethnic shift, or the freshest scandal, most often descriptively but also, when the occasion called for it, critically. The columns became a sort of running historical commentary on the passing scene. One unintended consequence was that some began to seem dated only months after they were published. All have been revised for this book, some substantially, in an effort to make them evergreen for a new (or returning) round of readers.

However well-read and however well-written, newspapers commonly end up wrapping fish or lining litter boxes. Im grateful that the Wisconsin Historical Society has seen fit to rescue these stories from such an ignominious end. Im also pleased that Cream City Chronicles will become, as Sister Josetta might have said, part of our permanent record, taking whatever place it may find in the distinguished roster of Society publications going back to the states formative years.

My own approach to history is unabashedly presentist. I have the utmost respect for those who study Phoenician trade routes or colonial American handcrafts, but my interest centers on how we got here, to this time and place. And so history, in these pages, is Milwaukees storyhis and hers and ours and theirs. Wherever we reside, the story of the community around us can provide a lively context for our personal stories. But history has even more to offer. An awareness of the past can foster qualities all too rare in the swelling tumult of the twenty-first century: insight, a sense of proportion, and hope for the journey ahead. May Cream City Chronicles be an agreeable companion as the storyand the journeycontinue.

John Gurda