Forward Into The Past

How we got to Thanksgiving dinner in the historian's house was more than likely on the bus. My boyfriend Peter was a bit of a transit nut. As I later lived in that neighborhood I still remember the routes, either the A or the C that ran south down Mills and out Park Street, but at the time I knew Madison no further south than Regent Street. All the busses still ran down State Street then though, and from Gorham and State we probably took the A bus that went west on Regent to Speedway and out to West Towne. From Regent we walked up Adams Street, which made something of an impression on me, being my second dad’s name and all. The Haygood’s house was and is a Victorian gingerbready sort of house on a corner, with a bay window in the front parlor and a dining room through an archway behind that, large kitchen in back and stairs up the side to the upstairs, like so many others. The family was the kind that collected all their children’s friends and kept them more or less out of trouble. I had been taken up by the children of the comfortable middle class. And a good thing too. This was not the first or the last time I was to wish I had gone to West High School.

It was the first semester of my second year at the UW. I was taking Chemistry For Mankind, and a third semester of French lit, and living at Solveig House, the first co-op house I lived in. It had once been a fraternity, and has since become some kind of fraternity once again, a big Prairie School rooming house at 420 West Gorham. We lived in a large melon-orange colored room at the front of the second floor. Peter had been living way out on the west side, and bicycling in all summer to his job off of State Street on Gorham, so the location was much closer to his work.

My first room at the co-op had been a tiny sectioned-off room upstairs at the rear of the house, with views onto the parking lot and the co-op house next door. It was right next to the bathroom though, and sufficient for my needs. After being invited to dinner in the co-op dining room in the basement, I had moved in that summer, applied a coat of white paint to my walls, and made sunny yellow curtains out of an Indian bedspread, borrowing the use of some friend's sewing machine. Peter’s first room had been on the lower floor, and very little larger than the waterbed he installed in it. He was an early adopter of such technologies.

His work was at a company called Management Data Systems, and without any college training he had more or less taught himself forms design, when his brother-in-law’s company had found itself awash in paper and needed some systematic control. He took me in to his office and showed me his technical pens and drawing board, and the climate-controlled room through the glass where the mainframe computer was housed. This was back in punch-card dinosaur days. The building MDS had remodeled and moved into, he told me, had previously been a dance hall called The Factory, where he and some of his friends had worked, that went bust when Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona and the big concert was cancelled.