Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller Odds and ends this week I WAS SITTING AT the Partridge Café on Monday with two friends, “Bruce” and “Sandy.” (When you see names in quotation marks, that means the names aren’t real, unless some wise-guy editor wants to fool you.) We were talking about kids, how strange they can be. Their son, “Andrew,” had announced on Sunday that he had to do a class project by Monday. One of the suggestions from the teacher was to make a replica of the Mayflower. “The May fl ower!” Bruce said in disbelief. How can a kid make a replica of the Mayflower? What fun is that? Andrew (and Bruce) had other ideas. They wanted to make a stock. You know the kind of things they used to have in public squares to punish thieves back when the Mayflower sailed here. Your hands go in these two slots and your head goes in a bigger slot in the bottom piece. A top piece is put on, it is fastened together, and everybody laughs at you and throws rotten tomatoes. Now that’s a project a kid can ...

David Heiller I haven’t quite unraveled the mystery of Spring Grove strawberry pop, and maybe that’s the way it should be. Some things you just have to believe in blindly. The new owner of Spring Grove Bottling Works, Dawn Hanson, let me watch her and Roger Morken and Jerry E ll ingson make some pop last Wednesday. It was a fun visit, sort of a step back in time, which seems only fitting in the beautiful city of Spring Grove. I sometimes think that time has stopped in Spring Grove, and I mean that as a compliment, although I know it’s not true and that the city has its foibles like the rest of the world. But watching pop get made at the bottling works really did feel like something fr om the 1950s. The old reliable machinery, a ll clicking and rotating and spinning in perfect order, was like something you’d see in a 1950s newsreel. The three workers steadily kept it all going, washing bottles, checking labels, loading boxes. I couldn’t help but admire it all, that here in...

David Heiller This story could fall into the what-are-the-odds category. Two eagles that were found dead in two different locations were banded on the same day On May 20, 1991. Brenda and Martin Pohlman, who live on a farm in section 26 of Crooked Creek township, found one on October 16. A banded eagle The other was found on November 8 by a trapper near Prairie Island. It is unusual to find a dead eagle to begin with, and more rare to find one that is banded. About 30.000 bald eagles have been handed over the past 50 years, and only about 15 percent of the bands have been recovered. So to find two eagles, 20 days apart, that were banded on the same day. I4 years earlier, well, Brenda and the trapper should have gone out and bought lottery tickets. The story, which I first read about in the La Crosse Tribune intrigued me. I called Brenda Pohlman, and she agreed, “It’s very odd.” She, Marty, and her parents, Maurice and Jenny Waege from Wilton, WI, were cutting fir...