3-Starting Our Family in Spooner

On my first day in Spooner, Jack dashed out the door with excitement to get to his classroom. I stood there alone, looking around our apartment … the bare walls … unfamiliar views out the window … stacks of unpacked boxes. Suddenly, everything felt strange and I missed our cute bungalow in Eau Claire. Thinking…

In November, Babe gave birth to their son, who they named William Wallace Stewart III, but called Billy. Our first daughter, Cindy was born on Mother’s Day in May 1954. Her arrival four weeks before her due date caught us completely off guard. Not only didn’t we have necessities like diapers, but we weren’t even…

During the summers, Jack worked for the Highway Commission surveying the highway projects in northern Wisconsin. Stewart’s had a cabin on the Middle Eau Claire Lake, about an hour away from Spooner. They’d invite us to join them and we had so much fun. We hung out all day on the beach. Jack tossed the…

After a couple of years in Spooner, Jack received a scholarship from UW-Madison and leave-of-absence from Spooner High School to pursue his master’s degree in chemistry. Cindy was 3, Jean barely a year, and I was pregnant with Barb. We moved into a large graduate student housing complex of brick apartment buildings and started over…