Attribution: Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports the keeper and Phyllis listening with interest to comments from the keeper’s granddaughter Sarah regarding some of her casual climbing around in her family tree.
The branches on her late mother Dora’s side— “Durst” show an illustrious history in the founding of New Glarus, now commemorated with a Durst statue in downtown New Glarus, and sharing the limelight with the astounding acceptance of Spotted Cow beer..
On her father Mike’s side of things there is the fragmentary record of the traveling “Harry Brown” tent show that went from town to town with comedy, drama and candy sales back before broadcast entertainment.
While Sarah’s high-tech investigations are producing fascinating facts which the keeper greatly appreciates, he admits to preferring the family history he heard from storytelling grandparents.
How else would he have learned about Uncle Earl the alcoholic steeplejack who painted flagpoles and water towers when he wasn’t sleeping it off between two haystacks out on the North Dakota prairie having flimflammed a Catholic priest out of money for gas that somehow turned into wine?
