Walking the Rails
My Childhood in Whitehall
by
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In the middle of the western side of the state, not far from the Mississippi, and after four hours on the road from Beloit, we approached the town going north on Highway 53.
My hometown of Whitehall is nestled in a coulee, a region of depressions and high mounds left over from the skimming and drop-pings of glaciers ten thousand years ago—or, as my dad would say, “many mounds and hills that dotted the landscape and erected in some manner by the glaciers that made their way over the land during prehistoric times.”
“There’s the Whitehall sign,” we all called. Population: 1,651. It had grown by 616 people since I grew up there. Decades ago, this had been my world.
We drove past old, handsome houses that I still knew and to the First Baptist Church, which I did not know any longer—a completely different building from my youth. But it stood on the same foundation of yesteryear’s picturesque, white-clapboard frame with a square belfry that I had known intimately as a kid. “How firm a foundation,” I thought, humming the hymn to myself. Those people had been like my second family.
We all got out and walked around. Then, a few blocks away, we looked at my old, used-to-be-yellow and now green stucco house. No one answered the door, so we climbed the evergreen trees, like I had done as a child, and we searched for the old lilac bushes.
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About the Book
For Ethel Erickson Radmer, a child of the 1930s, life in Wisconsin was an adventure filled with imagination, fun, and curiosity. Hers was a simple life, without computers and cell phones. It was a time when people in a small town dropped in on each other to visit and paid their bills in person. It was a time when folks honored courtesy and neighborly affection. If you knew someone was in the hospital, you brought them flowers—from your own garden.
Ethel grew up in a railroad town that bustled with supplies and troops for World War II. To a small girl from a small town, a Green Bay & Western Railroad passenger car represented nothing short of freedom. But Ethel found joy in the simple things—a playground for roller skating … a golf course made just for picnics and sled-ding (and swinging clubs) … nearby farmland and barns to explore … and a meandering river to quiet her heart.
It was a simpler time, but Ethel Erickson Radmer was no simple girl.
“Walking the Rails is everything a good memoir should be—generously detailed, disarmingly frank, and emotionally moving. With wit, irony, and generosity of spirit, Ethel Radmer has woven a heartwarming and lush tapestry of growing up in a loving American family during the difficult days of the Great Depression, World War II, and its aftermath.”
—Dave Wood, past vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle, former book review editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and memoirist
About the Author
Ethel Erickson Radmer is the author of My Odyssey with Two Uncommon Boys: A Trip to the Western States; Conversations with Carl: My Journey Through Grief; and The Cheshire Cat Syndrome: My Adventures with Arthritis. She currently lives in North Carolina.