Heading Home

Last night we had a fantastic meal at The Heritage Tavern, which is right around the corner from the capital building. It’s a restaurant that raises its own pigs, so Doug had to try the snitzle. He wasn’t disappointed! Travis had White Fish, which was also very good. We’ve been pretty impressed with the restaurants this week. Eating out seems cheaper than Houston and we’ve had some excellent food.

This morning, we head back to Houston. We’ve got to drive back to Milwaukee, but our flight isn’t until 3:00PM!so it should be a leisurely day.

One thing we noticed at the airport is that they have a sign at security once you’ve gone through the scanners labeling it the “Recombobulation Area”!

The House on the Rock

After lunch at the Wright visitor center, (they now have a culinary school) we headed just down to The House on the Rock.

This is a a site created by Alex Jordan, a Madison resident, who started building a house on a rock out in the country. Over the years, he kept adding and adding and adding to it. Over time, he added various buildings, built the worlds largest carousel, and kept building places to display the large quantity of things he’d collected over the years.

The house is just a very weird creation. The layout is crazy and it seems like he just kept adding rooms at will. Many of them have less than 6ft tall ceilings (covered in carpet to help with head knocks). In 1985 he added the “Infinity Room” which is a 140ft cantilevered room sticking out of the side of the house.

We just did Section 1, as doing all three section appeared to take up to 5 hours. We’re both glad we stopped when we did.

Its definitely not boring, but it’s clear we probably don’t ever need to see it again.

There are walkways like this between all the buildings

A living room in the house

Travis at entrance to the Infinity Room

A picture showing how far the Infinity Room extends

Doug in another living room, this one with lots of eagles

This is one of several nice gardens on site

Much of the house has had the windows covered in blue plexiglass to make it possible to see all the Tiffany style lamps

Taliesin East

Today was part two of Frank Lloyd Wright activities for the week. We are doing a four hour Estate Tour of Taliesin East, Wright’s studio and summer home. His family owned land in the area his whole life and he built Taliesin among his Aunts and Uncles. The estate includes a school he built for his Aunts, who ran the highly rated school for years. It’s now home for an accredited architecture school. The tour also went through a home he built for his sister. Finally, we toured Taliesin, which included farm buildings, office space, and Wright’s personal home. The school and Taliesin underwent many changes over the years (121 changes to Taliesin alone).

The tour include a 1.5 mile hike across a number of hills, which Travis described as a death march. Doug suggested that people who had been in actual death marches might balk at this description. That said, it was pretty warm and humid and everyone was glad to get to the top of the last hill and have a break on the patio at Taliesin.

Pour guide, Cyndi, did a great job of describing everything we saw. Apparently, she’s a dairy farmer who knew nothing about Wright when she applied for the job. She’s clearly learned a lot over the years.

There have been a number of fires at both the school and Taliesin over the years. Each of these drove significant changes to buildings on the estate. One of these happened when one of Wright’s employees set fire to the living quarters and then killed 7 people as they escaped the building (including Wright’s mistress and her two children).

There was quite a bit of discussion of Wright’s personal life. He was married three time. He was married to his first wife for 20 years and they had six children. He left her for one of his client’s wife’s, which caused quite a scandal in the early 1900s. They were together for 10+ years before the murder, although never married because Wright’s first wife refused to give him a divorce. After the murder tragedy, he married a 2nd wife, but that marriage lasted less than a year. He was married to his third wife from 1928 until his death in 1959. She continued to be heavily involved in the business after that.

One interesting thing we learned is that while Wright insisted his clients not use furniture he didn’t design, he had a lot of furniture he’d bought at Marshall Fields in his own house.

The main building of the school run by his Aunts

The dining room at the school, which is still used by the architecture school

Fireplace in the gathering room in the school

The Wright family mark

Theater at the school

Wright felt that windmills were ugly. When his Aunts needed one for the school, he proposed this design. His uncles felt it was crazy to spend almost three times on this when it was almost certainly going be blown over in storms. Apparently, after every storm, the would check to see if it had fallen. After the last uncle died, Wright supposedly claimed that the tower was still standing while it’s critics were lying on flat on their backs. The tower stood for over 100 years before being renovated.

This was originally a tool shed

A milking barn. Wright designed the spire to resemble a guernsey teat. The balls on it are toilet float balls from houses he’d bought in the area.

Doug in front of one of the family homes

Travis during “The Death March”

Taliesin from a distance

Doug at the barn

Our break on one of the patios

Travis, hoping we get inside to the AC soon

The Taliesin living quarters

The cantilevered “bird walk”

Travis on the front patio with the bird walk behind him

Marshall Fields furniture

View out to yard

Dining Room/table

Can You Say Mustard?

Once we get to Middleton, where our hotel is located, we head to the National Mustard Museum. Yes, there is one, and if you have any mustard related questions, this the place to go.

It’s basically a mustard store on the ground floor with a museum in the basement. The store sells more types of mustard than we knew existed. The museum contains over six thousand different bottles/tins of mustard from all over the world. They also have a number of displays telling more about mustard than most people would want to know. It’s all done in a lighthearted way. There are lots of jokes, games, and a theater called Mustard Piece Theater, where they show various mustard documentaries (again fairly lighthearted).

There is also the worlds first and only mustard vending machine. The world is a magical place!

Our head full of mustard knowledge, we head upstairs to do some tasting. They have 10-20 samples out that you can eat with pretzels, but they assured us we could taste any mustard they had for sale. We stuck with the ones they already had opened. They did have some really interesting mustards, but we left without purchasing.

It was definitely worth the free entry, and was pretty amusing. Certainly worth the hour we spent there.

Who knew that Canada was so big in the mustard world?

Next to a mustard based art piece by Barry Levenson

Just one wall of mustard in the museum

Mr. Mustard head?

The Old Fashioned

Lunch is at the Old Fashioned across from the Capital building in Madison. It’s supposed to have excellent Cheese Curds.

They were definitely the best cheese curds we’ve ever eaten, but neither of us had ever eaten them before. It’s a good thing we’ve not found them before in Houston as they’re very tasty and must be incredibly unhealthy. We also had burgers, which were also quite good.

Fried deliciousness

The capital across the street

The Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear

We’re starting the 4th with a visit to the Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear.

“The Chudnow Museum of Yesteryear, a non-profit organization, operates as a Milwaukee history museum in a historic building displaying the late Avrum Chudnow’s (1913-2005) extensive and eclectic collection of early 20th Century Americana. The museum contains various shops and exhibits from his collection, from between the World Wars, chiefly the 1920’s and 1930’s era. Not only will local Milwaukeeans and visitors enjoy the unique and intimate nature of the collection, but local schools will be able to offer their students a curriculum-based and rewarding experience.”

— Chudnow Website

The museum is in and old house that was Abe Chudnow’s law office downstairs and Dr. Eisenberg’s medical practice upstairs. The son of a peddler, Abe loved collecting memorabilia of the 1910-1930s era, especially related to the jobs done by his family members. At first he kept everything in his home basement, then expanded to his office, before finally adding a warehouse. The museum has about 5% of his collection on display at any given time. Most of the house is set up with vignettes of ships or other scenes of the time. As an example, his father-in-law was a grocer. When he retired, Abe took all the fixtures out of the store and has created a mini version of the store in one room of the museum. There is also a soda shop, rail depot, pharmacy, women’s clothing store, doctors office, telephone operators office, and speakeasy.

Milwaukee was obviously a huge beer town and really struggled during prohibition. Apparently many barbershops had speakeasies in their back rooms for customers they knew they could trust. The museum has a speakeasy hidden behind a bookcase. Locals would have secret phrases for how to find alcohol, such as “where can I get my shoelaces ironed”. Another odd fact about barbershops is that men often kept their personal shaving cream mugs and brushes at the shops for sanitary reasons.

The tour guide also mentioned that Milwaukee did quite well during The Great Depression because prohibition had recently ended and the breweries were hiring a ton of people to supply bear all over the country.

This ended up being a nice little museum and definitely worth the $6 entry fee.

Soda Shop

Automatic fire extinguishers. These would hang over an oven and had lead at the bottom that would melt in the event of fire. The melting lead would release a spring loaded pin that would break the bulb and douse the fire with the red fluid inside. The liquid was toxic so you’d need to leave the house immediately.

Bed bug spray, which apparently didn’t kill them, but did get them to leave the bed.

Grocery store display. The box in the case is for mailing eggs!

Unopened Spices

The Pharmacy

Advertisement for “non-addictive” Heroin

Dr. Eisenberg’s Office. He looks a little stiff.

Working Victrola, which the tour guide played for us

We’d never seen Lincoln Bricks! They apparently used mortar to stick them together, which had to be chipped off to rebuild something else. They didn’t sell well.

Toy iron that actually heated so you could get your daughter burning herself while still young

Hat pins. The guide pointed out that at the time, women could also buy sturdier, sharper hat pins, that could be used as a weapon if attaches! This case was in a dress shop display. The museum has Design students at Marquette University design this particular room each semester.

Some of the personal shaving mugs

Fake door to speakeasy directing you to barber (not a real artifact)

Dinner at Birch + Butcher

Tonight we had dinner at Birch + Butcher, which is another small plate restaurant. We had a charcuterie plate, a vegetable plate of carrot based pasta in a miso butter sauce, and grilled pork tenderloin in black garlic sauce with polenta and bacon jam. It was all yummy!

SC Johnson Administration Building

After a quick Thai lunch in downtown Racine and a foggy photo in front of Lake Michigan, we head to the S.C. Johnson office complex. We have two activities scheduled there this afternoon.

The first is a film created by Sam Johnson (the son discussed in the Wingspread post) who decided in 1998 to recreate a flight his father, Herbert, hade made in the mid 1930s. Herbert had flown an amphibious Sikorsky plane from Racine down to Brazil to find a sustainable supply for Carnaúba Palms, which provided the primary ingredient for most of their products and was considered a differentiator. He described the trip as life changing and wrote in a note to Sam that he hoped Sam would take the same trip some day.

Sam didn’t find this note until the 1990s and decided to do it. The plane had crashed years ago so he had a replica built. He and his two sons then recreated the flight, visiting most of the same locations in Brazil. Sam had the whole experience captured in a film and they offer it for viewing. They also have the plane used for Sam’s flight onsite. The 55 minute film is quite good, and is a bit more personal than one would expect, in that Sam openly discusses his challenges with alcohol, his failures at S.C. Johnson, and the doubts he had about his father’s feelings for him.

After that, we went on a tour of the S.C. Johnson Administration building and the Research tower, both of which were designed by Wright. The admin building was built first, back in the late 30s, and was a huge expense for the company, especially coming at the end of The Great Depression (they ended up spending about two years profits). That said, it was a huge success and brought them lots of publicity. The buildings is considered one of the top 25 buildings of the 20th century.

In addition to the building, Wright also designed the office furniture. While the desks seem reasonable, the chairs were pretty weak from a daily use perspective. There were people in the building still using the desks, but they all had new chairs. They also tended to have multiple desks in use today, but that’s probably because we have a lot more equipment than they did in 1939.

After the Administration Building, we went to the Research Tower. It was built in 1950 and apparently is the tallest building based on cantilevered technology. The ground floor is 13 feet wide, but all the floors above are 40 ft wide. The foundation goes down 50 something feet. It’s the location where the company developed Raid and Pledge among other things. The tower was only used for 32 years because at some point OSHA came in and pointed out all the significant safety issues. There is only one extremely narrow set of stairs out in case of an emergency. There were also no women’s bathrooms, despite the fact they already had women researchers working there.

Lastly, we also went to a new building on the campus, which has the plane used in 1998 to fly to Brazil.

Lake Michigan??

The Administration Building main floor

These Pyrex glass tubes make up all the windows. Wright didn’t like that the site was so urban so he made the windows so they only allow light in, without providing a view. The tubes in the Administration Building would be 43 miles long if laid end to end.

Fountains outside Administration Building. The columns give you an idea of what the columns inside the building look like (although the inside ones are obviously much taller)

Some of the Pyrex tubes used for windows

Inside the research tower

Another old picture from inside the tower. Johnson tried to get Wright to make the one elevator bigger to handle larger lab equipment, but he refused.

The tower. You can kind of see that the windows aren’t really see-thru.

The research tower during construction

Doug in one of the Wright desk chairs

The plane used to fly to Brazil

Wingspread

Today is the first of two Frank Lloyd Wright days this week. FLW was from Wisconsin and had one of his two studios here near Madison (we’ll visit it on Friday). This morning we’re visiting the home of Herbert Fisk Johnson, the 3rd leader of the family owned SC Johnson company. Later this afternoon, we’ll see the SC Johnson headquarters. Both of these were designed by FLW in the late 1930s.

The house, Wingspread, is located just north of Racine. It’s the last, and one of the largest prairie school style homes (14,000 sq ft) that FLW designed.

Since 1858, The house is used as a conference center by the Johnson Foundation. It’s the location where a number of organizations were created at meetings, including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Public Radio (NPR), and the International Court (housed inThe Hague).

As such, it ends up being quite different than most other FKW property tours we’ve been on. Our tour guide was Cathy, who we assume works primarily with the conference center. They only do house tours on days they don’t have conferences. Cathy does an introduction about Johnson, his relationship to FLW, and construction of the house. She shows us around the main living space, then shows us a video about the house which includes interviews with San and Karen Johnson (Herberts kids, who lived in the house as children). After that, we’re on our own to explore, with instructions not to open doors or sit on any furniture outside the living room.

Ut’s a nice house, and seems to be one of the most livable of the FLW houses we’ve toured.

The interviews with the kids (who were probably in their late 60s for the video) was nice in that they told several amusing anecdotes about living in the house:

• As many Wright houses do, the roof leaked. At one dinner party with the Governor and a State Senator, the roof starting dripping on Herbert’s head. He’s furious and calls Wright from the dinner table to tell him that while he loves the house, he can’t have water dripping on his head during dinner. Wright suggested that Herbert should move his chair.

• The fireplace on the second floor den was designed to use tall Aspen logs (8 ft or so) arranges vertically (there is a picture below). The first time they lit that fireplace, it worked fine for a while. Eventually, the bottom of the logs burned away and one of them fell into the room. The family had to drag it out and throw it off the balcony. That fireplace has never been lit again.

• Wright designed the dining table with mostly hidden wheels so that when a course was done, Herbert could push a button and the wall would open and the table would roll into the butlers pantry to be set with the next course. One dinner, one woman guest had removed her shoes under the table and Herbert’s mom (who didn’t know what was happening) was leaning over to reach her moving plate as the table disappeared. They didn’t use the rolling table option after that.

We didn’t get to see the kitchen, but based on photos and the floor plan, it was much larger than any other Wright home we’ve toured.

Some odd features:

• The daughter’s room is only reachable through the mom’s bedroom. The boy’s have their own wing!

• There is a built in stereo that holds a ton of 78 RPM records and can be programmed to play in whatever order you like.

• The windows in the living room are 16 ft tall and can be opened either as windows or doors.

• Wright also did the landscape plan for the house.

• There is a glassed-in crows nest that is reachable from a spiral stair from 2nd floor den. Sam and his friends used to love leading war games from up there. Sam would also talk to his dad via walkie talkie, as his dad flew over the house.

• Wright designed and installed a pool so that Sam would be happier about moving out of Racine, where all his friends lived.

All-in-all, it was a great tour and a really nice Wright home. It’s a shame that it’s been modified a bit for use as a conference center, but still very much worth seeing.

From the parking lot

Front door on the left. On the right are “slots” (now windows) that used to be carports, but have been turned into additional rooms.

Floor plan from 1939

Light switch by front door

Fireplace in Dining Room - Travis suggested this is where they prepared there kettle Potato chips

The stereo

Sample of a paper bathing suit they offered guests who had come without one

The once used fireplace and staircase to crows nest

Outside patio

Doug in front of kitchen wing. Notice the crows nest above the roof.

A lego model of Wingspread built by a kid in Kenosha. He has info about the 2.5 year build on his website.

He even built a lego QR code to take you to the website!

Aerial view of Wingspread

Fauntleroy

Dinner was at Fauntleroy, a “new” French restaurant in the Third Ward. While parking was horrendous due to Summerfest, the rest of the experience was excellent.

We started with Gruyer filled Gougères. OMG, they were fantastic. Basically they’re small cheese filled puffs. Luckily they only bring four or we would have kept eating those all night. Travis had a bowl of French Onion soup followed by Arctic Char for dinner. Doug had Steak Frites, which came with incredibly good fries.

We finished up with a small banana mouse dish that was also great.

All in all a good meal!

Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!

We end the afternoon with a trip to Sprecher’s brewery for a tour and some tasting. It’s a small brewery that was started in 1985, the first new brewery in Milwaukee since the 1930s. They do 15-20 beers and 8-10 sodas (they now sell more root beer than anything else).

The tour was pretty basic, but interesting enough. It was a bit warm in the building (it was after production ended for the day).

The beers, ciders! And “hard” beverages were all tasty and we had a good time.

Pete, our tour guide, who gets to wear lederhosen to work!

This one room was quite cold - we didn’t want to leave!

The bottling line. Unfortunately it wasn’t running so we couldn’t do a Lavern and Shirley.

HOG Wild

After lunch we head to the Harley-Davidson Museum. While neither of care much about motorcycles, the museum gets great reviews so we thought we’d check it out. We didn’t have a ton of time, but both really enjoyed it. They have tons of bikes and memorabilia and do a good job of explaining the history in an approachable way.

Harley and Davidson started out motorizing bicycles, but relatively quickly moved to building the whole things. They continued to do well through WW2 (they built tons of bikes for the war) and on up until they got bought by AMF. Things took a big downturn at that point until the families managed to buy the company back in the early 1980s.

At some point, H-D started allowing a lot of customization, and obviously people did a lot of after market “enhancements” (see pictures below).

Entrance

Serial Number 1

Need an engine or 20?

A replica of Evel Kenievel’s bike, complete with bent frames and dents

Lots of gas tanks!

Chrome anyone?

Another custom bike

I don’t even know what to say?

Styling took a bad turn after getting bought by AMF

Evel Foster!

Ready to buy

Doug picks something a bit racier!

Travis had to have a picture of this 1913 Transformer from an early factory

Comet Cafe

After the museum, we headed to Comet Cafe for lunch. We both had Mac and cheese with meatloaf, which was good, but way too much. We should have just shared one as neither of us ate half of ours.

Yes MAM (Milwaukee Art Museum)!

We started the day at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is down on the waterfront. The architecture of the building is pretty spectacular. It’s roof is covered with the Burke Brise Soleil installation. This is a set of “wings” that opens when the museum opens. At noon, the wings close, then open again. Finally, they close for the day when the museum closes. They’re also designed to close automatically if the wind gets above 23 MPH.

The museum itself focuses primarily on contemporary art, although there are also European, Folk, and more classical American sections. We mostly stayed with the contemporary sections.

They had a special exhibit of work by James Nares, a British artist who lives and works in New York. He works in various different mediums, including film. We had purchased the audio tour for the museum and we’re both glad we did, as it really helped explain what he was doing and thinking with his art. We both felt we’d have been totally lost without it, but both really quite positive about his work by the end of the exhibit.

The museum was larger than we both wanted to traverse (we were “arted out” after a couple of hours), and we decided to go find some lunch after we finished the contemporary gallery.

Nares does a lot of paintings that are a single continuous movement such as this one. They’re on linen and end up looking almost photographic.

Another in that series

Another series contains movies where he is using a lightbulb in a dark room and filming as he moves the bulb

This is a snapshot of another movie where he’s sandwiched a glass globe between glass in front of the camera lense and it ends up reflecting everything as he walks around.

Most of his paintings require special brushes that he makes himself

This is a tracing of the pattern of a New York sidewalk covered in gold leaf (almost like a brass rubbing from an English church)

The photo gallery below shoes the “wings” in different locations as they close.

The ceiling of the museum with the “wings” above the glass

Milwaukee Fun Facts

We’ve noticed a couple of things while driving around Milwaukee. The first is that there are a lot of smokestacks. We don’t really have those in Houston so they really stand out. The second is that there are steeples everywhere. Literally one every couple of blocks. There were so many that we looked up how many churches there are in Milwaukee and found there are over 1000. I guess a high percentage are old and have pretty traditional design, including bell towers and steeples. All of this is probably more visible because there aren’t a lot of tall buildings in the city.

Other fun facts:

• The QWERTY typewriter was invented in Milwaukee.

• The Socialist party defined Milwaukee from 1910 through 1960.

• Milwaukee has had only 4 mayors since 1960, one of whom only served 3 months.

• Milwaukee is often called “Cream City” due to the cream colored bricks used by builders throughout the middle and late 19th century. The come from local clay deposits with high amounts of dolomite (a type of limestone).

• The Harley-Davidson was invented here in 1901.

• The worlds largest dinosaur head is located at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

• Both Les Paul and Liberace are from Milwaukee.

• Milwaukee has the country’s oldest bowling alley. It’s a two lane alley which still uses human pin setters.

What An Odd Duck

Dinner tonight was at a place called Odd Duck. One of the things we’ve noticed about Milwaukee is the large number of Small Plate restaurants. These are sort of like Tapas restaurants, but without Spanish food. Odd Duck seems to do a lot of farm to table small plates. The food was excellent.

We ended up with the following plates:

• Summer sausage with Wisconsin Cheddar and Cheddar Blue (which is a Cheddar with Blue Cheese mixed in.

• Serrano Ham & Spring Pea salad with Burrata cheese

• Szechuan Tofu Dumplings

• Crispy Fishcakes with Sansho Peppercorn Mayo

• Cheddar-Jalapeño Bratwurst Corndog

The place also had really nice cocktails. It was a really good dinner.

Mitchell Park Conservatory

After lunch, we head to Mitchell Park Conservatory. It’s a set of three glass domes, each holding plants from a different climates. The domes are decent sized (140 ft diameter and 80 ft high) and are the worlds first conoidal domes (i.e. not geodesic). They are not in great shape, but have tons of plants in them. Unfortunately, not everything is labeled so if you found something you liked, you couldn’t always figure out what it was.

The first dome (opened in 1964) was called the show dome and apparently hosts four seasonal shows as well as a holiday show.

The second dome (opened in 1967) was the Arid dome and was full of cacti and euphoria (which are African and seem to look just like cactus). It also had four or so doves wandering around.

The third dome (built in 1966) was tropical. It felt like we were back in Houston. They had some really nice orchids and lots of tropical plants, but we didn’t stay long in this one as the whole point of Milwaukee was to get away from heat and humidity.

A recent review of the domes has recommended demolition, at a cost of $300 million. Doug’s willing to do it for far less than that.

The Show Dome

No idea what this is, we call it the brain plant

The very rare pool noodle plant!

Dogs Tail cactus

Something we have at the lake but didn’t know the name of

Damascus Gate

Hungry after handling all that “cheese”, we head to lunch atDamascus Gate. It’s a restaurant run by Syrian refugees. It wasn’t very busy (it was 2: 30), but was quite good. Oddly, there was a guy working in the back wearing a T-shirt from Lufkin, TX (Lufkin Pirates Football).

Travis has a Kefta sandwich, while Doug has Chicken. Travis’ comes with something spicy that looks like salsa so it almost ends up looking like a burrito.

After lunch, we considered buying some mattresses next door as the deals seemed too good to pass up.

They come in plastic, how could they be a bad deal?

Who Wants to Make a Cheesehead?

After some culture at the Pabst Museum, we drove directly to Foamation, Inc., where we went on a cheesehead factory tour.

Other than expecting it would be a pretty cheesy tour, we didn’t know what to expect. It ended up being a lot of fun. Before the tour, you decide what cheese item you want to make during the tour. Travis selected a cheesehead cowboy hat (figuring he lives in Texas and all) and Doug selected a Christmas Tree topper (Doug planned for packing).

As the tour starts, you don an apron and a cheesehead visor. Our “Commander in Cheese”, Chris swears us in (we promise to be safe and at least pretend to laugh at all the cheese puns). She then starts telling us the history of the building, as well as how the original cheesehead was invented by the Big Cheese, Ralph Bruno. Apparently, it started when Ralph was reupholstering his mom’s sofa. He started cutting the foam padding and inspiration took hold. Before long, he was burning holes in the wedge and painting it yellow. He wore it to a baseball game that night and was a big hit with all the women, who wanted to buy one.

Ralph was able to get trademark protections (or patents - it wasn’t clear) because the head was shaped like Gouda, had holes like Swiss, and was the color of Cheddar. Before long, he’d quit his job, and the rest is cheesehead history. While it started as mostly a baseball thing, when Green Bay went to the Super Bowl in the early nineties, he took a load of them to the game to sell and that’s when things really blew up.

After a tour of the facility, we’re suddenly making our own treasures. The photos below outlines the process.

We have our safety gear on and are ready for the tour

Our Commander In Cheese, Chris

The safe in the building holds the original handmade cheesehead

The Original - AKA part of Mom’s sofa

Travis preparing to make his cowboy hat 🤠

The computer automatically pours the correct quantities for the hat

Travis’ assistant mixes it using what looks like a malt mixer

Once mixed, the “cheese” immediately starts to expand and Travis must get it int the mold pretty quickly

Now with the top of the mold on and under pressure, Travis waits for the cheese to set up

It’s a hat! Travis must now squeeze love into it (he’s actually squeezing air out of the thing)

Last step is the trimming room. They call it the smelliest room on the tour because everyone is cutting the cheese.

Pabst Mansion

Monday morning we headed to the Pabst Mansion for a tour. Captain Pabst (he was a sea captain before getting married to a woman who’s family was in the beer business) and his wife Maria decided to retire in a nice home along Wisconsin Avenue, where apparently most of the Milwaukee rich we’re living. At one point there were 64 mansions along this street (there are now four left).

The house took two years to build, and is 20,000 sq ft set on 2.5 acres. 8000 sq ft of the house is for family, while the remained is for staff, Kitchens, etc. After the Captain and his wife died, the family sold the house to the Archdiocese old Milwaukee who used it to house 5 Archbishops until 1975. During that time, they didn’t do much to maintain it. While all woodwork was in good shape! The Archdiocese painted most walls and ceiling (including murals) white.

Wisconsin Heritages bought the place and started restoration. Today, a good portion is restored. The house is furnished with most of the original furniture, which was built specifically for the house by the same company that did all the woodwork. Most of the art work is from the Pabst family or from the family of Maria’s sister, who lived nearby.

The Pabst’s built a mansion for each of their adult children. Guess that’s not too difficult when you’re worth billion in today’s dollars.

Their oldest daughter died six months after giving birth to her daughter Elsbeth. The Captain and Maria took custody of their granddaughter and paid her father $10,000 to disappear. They were convinced he had something to do with the death, which was blamed on appendicitis.

The wall covering is a patterned linen that is soaked in something and then put on the wall. One it’s dry, the pattern is raised and is hand painted.

Maria’s parlor

A music nook just off the foyer which was used by musicians to play for guests during parties. The boom box on the floor to the right is not original.

Family Parlor. The wall covering here is something like linoleum (made with linseed oil) which is also hand painted.

One of two matching hutches in the dining room

One of the walls in the Captains study. All the woodwork opens to reveal storage behind.

One of the ice boxes near the kitchen. Huge blocks of ice were cut out of the lakes during the winter stored for usage all year. The Pabst’s Had ice delivered every two weeks.

A view up the main stairs

The stairs have hops buds at each newel post

Skylight over the stairs

The study used by the two sons