On the Road with the Histocrats: Schlemiel Schlimazel Hasenpfeffer Incorporated --- Milwaukee, Part 1

For those of us of a certain age who did not live in the Midwest, we learned all that we knew about Milwaukee from the 1970s hit TV shows "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley." Shockingly, that wasn't much, and most of what we thought we knew was wrong, as my wife and I discovered on our recent trip to the city.

Of course, we know not to go to tv sitcoms for authenticity. After all the creator of both shows, Garry Marshall, and his sister Penny who played Laverne, were as quintessentially Bronx as you could get. They knew absolutely nothing about Milwaukee or Middle America. The famous chant from the Laverne and Shirley opening, "Schlemiel, ..." was a chant from Penny's childhood games and walking to school. Schlemiel and Schlimazel are Yiddish words for a foolish person and a bumbling person respectively, and Hasenpfeffer is a German rabbit stew (as you know if you are as big a Bugs Bunny fan as I am). The Cunninghams, Laverne and Shirley, and all their family and friends would stick out like sore thumbs in Milwaukee. Well into the 20th century, Milwaukee was up to 75% German in ethnicity, with Poles, Serbians, and other assorted Eastern Europeans thrown in. There are still a couple of schools in the city according to the internet which teach in both German and English and Serbian and English. The only two characters on both shows who represents the actual ethnic composition of the city are Lenny and Squiggy, Poles. Most of the shows' characters are English, Irish, or Italian in ancestry. Aside from one food vendor in a food hall, we saw no evidence over our four-day visit that an Italian has ever stepped foot in Milwaukee. (There is one exception. During the gangster era, Al Capone and a few other mobsters maintained residences and operations briefly in Milwaukee.)

Nevertheless, we found Milwaukee to be an awesome city. It's small, and we happened to be there for the first two beautiful days of the year according to locals, sunny and temperatures reaching a balmy 70 or so degrees. Milwaukeeans were out and about everywhere, in shirts and shirtless, waking, running, biking, walking dogs, playing tennis and just generally enjoying themselves. There is more to see that we just didn't get to.

One of our stops was the Milwaukee Art Museum ( https://mam.org/ ), located on the lakefront of Lake Michigan, one of the largest art museums in the United States. With a collection of about 25,000 pieces, it is smaller than the Detroit Institute of Art, but well worth a visit. The main structure of the museum is the Quadracci Pavilion, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and it contains a movable, wing-like or sail-like brise soleil that opens up for a wingspan of 217 feet (66 m) during the day, folding over the tall, arched structure at night or during inclement weather. There are sensors on the wings that monitor wind speeds, so if the wind speeds are over 23 mph for over 3 seconds, the wings close. As one approaches the museum, the impression is that of a sleek miniature cruise liner, or a large super yacht. The exterior is quite stunning, but the interior great hall is huge, barren, sterile, and starkly white. Windows on the lakeside offer great views, but the interior looks very dystopian to me, despite all of the sunlight. Overall, I think it doesn't live up to the ranks of great museum architecture. The galleries are laid out in one of the most confusing manners I've experienced in a museum, and there were employees stationed in multiple places whose job, it appears, is to check your tickets. I've never experienced that in a museum before. I've never been asked for a ticket once past the front desk. Weird.

Once inside, there are multiple decent collections, including mid-century design, modern, European, primitive, Haitian, and Georgia O'Keefe. Although few pieces blew me away, it was a nice way to spend a day.