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month, when a dance was held at the Grange Hall on Buffalo Street. Anybody who owned a car, though, usually drove into Eau Claire, twelve miles to the west, or preferably made the trip down to La Crosse, which was about sixty miles away due south, on the Minnesota border. The trip to La Crosse, figuring on a top speed of about thirty miles an hour on a road like Route 12, took at least two hours, but it was worth it once you got there. La Crosse wasn’t Madison either, but it was a darn sight more interesting than Eau Fraiche.
    The main street of Eau Fraiche was called Chenemeke Avenue, and the name was supposed to have derived from an old Chippewa legend about an invisible bird messenger of the Great Spirit. I never did get the story straight, even though Nancy told it time and again, something about lightning flashing from the bird’s eyes, and retribution for deeds that were un-Christian — genuine Indian superstition sifted through her own Wisconsin background and temperament. In any event, Chenemeke (which we pronounced Chain-make; God knew how the Indians pronounced it) was a narrow street that cut a wandering path through the center of town. The railroad tracks were off to the east of Chenemeke, and beyond those and running parallel to them were the paper and pulp plants, the furniture factory, and the big rubber plant that covered two full city blocks and employed more than a thousand men at peak production. We had a state fish hatchery running along the base of the town’s southern bluffs, and off to the west there was a really good park named Juneau Park, with picnic grounds and tennis courts, baseball and football fields, and good swimming and boating off the peninsula. According to the 1910 census, there were 7000 people living in the town of Eau Fraiche, but I guessed that by now, in 1918, the figure was closer to 9000. Some of these people lived on the southern and eastern outskirts, but most of them preferred living right in town where, on a good day, you could see both the Eau Claire and the Chippewa Rivers from the upstairs bedroom of your house. Our own house, white clapboard and slate, was down near the peninsula overlooking Lake Juneau, which was a spring-fed body of water actually closer to Eau Claire than it was to Eau Fraiche, but nonetheless within the city limits.
    There were two hotels in town, The United being the best of them, and there were at least a dozen very bad restaurants. The only halfway decent restaurant, in fact, was French, and was called Coin de Lorraine, which meant Corner of Lorraine. It was run by a man named Claude Rabillon, who used to be a cook at one of the big lumber camps. That was in the good old days when timber was truly a crop, and when fortunes were being made in the wilderness. Today, most of the sawmills had already packed up their machinery and moved to the West Coast, and we were cutting trees almost exclusively for the production of paper. Eau Fraiche used to be a livelier town when the industry was at its peak. In fact, the census for 1900 showed the town to be twice the size it later became in 1910, and most of those people were lumberjacks or people otherwise connected with timber — brawny two-fisted men who worked hard all day long, and then caught the wagons into town to drink half the night away. (You were
still
permitted to drink in Wisconsin, which continued to amaze many of us in Eau Fraiche, considering the fact that three-quarters of the states had gone dry, including nearby Iowa and everything west of the Mississippi — with the exception of California, where booze and bimbos were to be expected.)
    The one movie theater in town was called The Chenemeke, and it was of course on Chenemeke Avenue. That week, it was playing Theda Bara in
Cleopatra,
which Nance and I had seen in La Crosse just before Christmas. There was another theater, called The Wisconsin, but it was strictly vaudeville. The Wisconsin was owned and managed by a Swede named Kurt