Passed away peacefully December 15, 2013, age 91. Beloved husband of the late Eunice. Brother-in-law of Dorothy Schultz. Also loved by other relatives and friends.
Visitation at the Funeral Home, 12401 West National Avenue, Friday, December 20, 5:00-6:00 PM. Funeral Service 6:00 PM. Private entombment Wisconsin Memorial Park.
He proudly served his country in the Army during WWII. In lieu of flowers, memorials appreciated to the Salvation Army.
I was three years old when my parents were divorced and later, when the lack of employment in Tomahawk, Wisconsin forced my mother to seek work in the city, I went to live with my aunt and uncle. I was five years old when I went to live with Wallie and Goldie Ostrander and remained with them until I had grown up and went out to make my own way. Though I was never adopted by them, I have always considered them as my family and consequently have chosen the Ostrander family for my paper.
It isn't known when the Ostranders came from the Netherlands, but Alva Ostrander was born in America and married Anna Turner in 1833 in Broadalbin, New York. A son, Clayton, was born to them in 1856 and in 1858 Alva Ostrander died. The widow Anna Ostrander married W.S. Knappen in 1859 and it proved to be an unfortunate event in the life of young Clayton. W.S. Knappen apparently didn't like children, or at least he despised Clayton, and used him for a release of all his anger and meanness. Clayton had no shoes and had to wrap his feet with gunny sacks to go to school. According to my uncle, his father (Clayton) would run from fence post to fence post, sitting on the post and warming his feet with his hands, then running to the next post. This type of cruelty caused him to freeze and lose the rim of one if his ears. When Clayton was twelve he went to live with his maternal grandmother Sallie Turner who also lived in Broadalbin. They lived until 1875 at which time they moved to Poynette, Wisconsin where Clayton worked in the feed mill of a distant relative. The feed mill was about the only industry in this vicinity and the people lived primarily an agrarian life with hunting and fishing making up a big part of their existence. No one had to go hungry, for fish could be caught at any time and game was quite plentiful. The people in this vicinity helped each other with the crops during harvest time, for there was practically no machinery. What little machinery there was what went from one farm to another, with all the men from the neighboring farms pitching in to do the tremendous amount of hand labor that was required to harvest the crops. The "bee" was a widely method of helping each other building houses or barns at this time also.
Two years after arriving in Poynette, in 1878 Clayton Ostrander met and married Martha Kershaw whose grandparents had homesteaded in Portage, Wisconsin in about 1863. The Federal government had inaugurated a new policy on January 1, 1863, according to Economic History of Wisconsin by Frederick Merk, under which they gave away 160-acre homesteads to actual settlers. By the end of the Civil War, the government had disposed of 351,833 acres in Wisconsin. The Kershaws had arrived in the United States in 1852 on one of two sailing vessels that left England together and which, during bad weather, had collided during the trip. Their boat put in at some island for repairs and the last they saw of the other boat, it was listing badly. The Kershaws' boat spent about three weeks on that island, of which no one remembers the name, and they never heard what happened to the other boat.
Martha Kershaw's uncle, John Kershaw, ran away from home in Portage and accepted payment to take another man's place in the Union Army. Mattie Ostrander, the youngest of Clayton and Martha's children said she thought he got about $100 and was in Sherman's march to the sea. When he returned home after the war, he found his brother and sister in the woodshed getting in the evening wood and told them to go in the house and tell his father he was back. When they came out they told John their father hadn't forgiven him and that he was no longer welcome in that house. Mattie said that according to the story told to her, John would not have had to go into the army at all, for he was not a citizen at that time and his father never forgave him for leaving when he was needed the so badly at home.
Clayton and Martha Ostrander had five children, of which William Wallace (Wallie) Ostrander was the second oldest, and from whom most of this history comes. Clayton began working as a carpenter shortly after his marriage and worked at his trade in Poynette until 1891. The name Poynette incidentally was a mistake. According to Wisconsin Lore by Cardand Sorden, J.D. Doty laid out the village called Paquette in honor of Peter Paquette, and Indian trader. The United States Post Office mistakenly called it Poynette and apparently it was easier to accept that name than to try to straighten out the mistake.
In 1891 Clayton went alone to Tomahawk, Wisconsin to work on the Mitchel Hotel. After about a year, he sent for his wife and four children and settled for good in Tomahawk where Mattie, their fifth child, was born. Clayton established his own carpenter business in Tomahawk and built a shop with additional living quarters above it. Those living quarters were rented out and brought in extra money to make up for the lack of carpenter work at the time. My uncle, Wally Ostrander, said that his was the time of Grover Cleveland's second administration and work was pretty slow. This was about the time when Coxey's Army marched on Washington, D.C. and Wallie remembered a song that was sung at that time by the dissatisfied people. He didn't know whether the song was a local one or nationwide, but it went like this:
Do Do my hucklyberry do,
Oh Grover you're a hoodoo.
Since your crowd in ninety-two,
We haven't had a thing to do.
Do Do my huckleberry do,
So put in your best licks,
For we won't do a thing for you,
In eighteen ninety-six.
Another twist was added to the Spanish American War slogan "Remember the Main." My uncle Wallie remembered it being "Remember the Main, to Hell with Spain."
At the turn of the century, the economic boom which was to last for the first decade of the twentieth century didn't get as far as Tomahawk. There was very little work from Fall until Spring except logging, so Wallie worked in the woods as the cookie (cooks helper), and worked for his father during the summer as a carpenter. He still has a few of the old crudo carpenter tools that were used in those days. He recalls having come out of the woods, after three months work with a total of $100 and making the last payment on his folks' home.
In 1912 Wallie became a railroad carpenter and worked with a crew that built depots and water towers. One of the water towers he worked on was burned to the ground when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the top of the tower in the middle 1920's. The crew, with which he worked, consisted of more than thirty men and their territory was between Babcock and Tomah.
In 1916 Wallie started work for the Post Office as an experimental mail carrier in Tomahawk. He was one of the two first mailmen in Tomahawk and made two deliveries daily of seven miles each and one delivery on Saturday. During the depression in the early 1930's most government workers were quite well off, but he recalls something few people were aware of. During this period of depression the Postal Department cut down the hours of the workers, thus cutting down on their income, but still requiring the same about of work completed. I remember that during these times I spent a large part of my Christmas vacation helping to deliver mail with a sled.
From the 1930's on until the present, I will rely on my own memory. Franklin D. Roosevelt's victory over Hoover was generally greeted with enthusiasm and hope by the people of Tomahawk, for conditions were really quite bad there. However, I remember some who weren't suffering too much being very critical of Roosevelt's every move. One of the effects of the Roosevelt administration that I best remember was the Civilian Conservation Corps. There were two of these camps close to Tomahawk and on their nights off they kept things pretty lively in town and built up quite a rivalry between the camps, which they exercised both on the basketball floor and in street fights outside the taverns.
Except for a few isolated cases, the kids I knew never received an allowance or had spending money given to them by their parents. Winter was a tough time to earn a little spending money, but in the Summer time we did quite well. A friend and I had a Summer job taking the neighbors cows out in the country in the morning and bringing them back at night for $2.00 a week. We also picked pine cones and sold them to the Conservation headquarters for seed. Once a week we caught about a half a gunny sack of fish and sold it to the porter of the Fishermans Special (a Thursday night train bringing vacationers) for fifty cents. These fish were caught close to where the sewage spilled out into the river and no one in town ever fished there because of the bad taste of the fish. We never got any complaints from the porter though. I guess what you don't know won't hurt you. The job of keeping the house supplied with wood for the stoves was probably the most distasteful. The wood came in four foot lengths and I had to saw in into three pieces and split part of it before piling it in the woodshed.
Then I graduated from high school, I came to Milwaukee to look for work and I got a job nights at Cutler-Hammer in the office, which paid $35.00 per week.
December 7, 1941 brought the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and on May 4, 1942 I enlisted in the Army. I left home on that date and never saw home again until January of 1945. I was discharged in October 1945 and was unable to find work, except for my old office job at the same wage as before the war. It seems there were more men being discharged than there were jobs for, so I decided to go to school. I made the unfortunate decision to to go the Layton School of Art, from which I received a diploma after four years but not degree — that's why I am back in school now. However, things went pretty well after Layton School of Art and I married in 1950. Jobs were not too difficult to find and I worked for an advertising company for several years and then took a job with a publishing company. I worked in their art department for about eight years before coming back to school.
Meanwhile, back in Tomahawk, my uncle retired from the Post Office after twenty-five years and supplemented his income by doing small carpenter jobs, a trade he kept brushed up on even while delivering mail. My aunt died about four years ago, but my uncle still keeps house at the age of eighty-five years. I go hunting and fishing with him and he still makes it rough for me to keep up with him in the woods. Only because of his still sharp mind and accurate memory have I been able to write this paper.
