Photo courtesy of Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, celebrates with the keeper as he adds another photo to the collection from his newspaper days thanks to granddaughter Jessy, who was poking around on the net, and stumbled onto a courtroom scene of a1974 Ed Gein sanity hearing in Wautoma which the keeper covered for the Milwaukee Journal.
The photo focuses on Gein being advised by an unidentified man while the hearing was obviously in recess, and there is the keeper standing off to the side wearing a T-shirt and very “loud” plaid pants in the style of unorthodox reporter garb.
It is a fact of the keeper’s professional life that Gein helped get him his first newspaper job when the horror story of murdering and grave robbing broke in November 1957 and was a factor in a reporter job opening in Stevens Point just as the keeper was graduating from UW Journalism school and looking for a job.
At the sanity hearing, the keeper remembers asking Gein what he thought of a young court artist’s rendition of him to which Gein replied, “Maybe could have been a little more handsome.”
So, the keeper, absent Phyllis’s blessings, will pin Ed Gein’s photo up in his corner with the likes of Satchel Paige and Jimmy Carter and a few others, and he will answer Jessy’s question that he no longer has those loud plaid pants, but if they had still been in his closet he would have worn them to Jessy’s recent party.
Thanks, Jessy, and thanks Ed.
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