THE TIME MACHINE
From past files of The Star News
10 YEARS AGO
April 1, 2010
State legislators are debating a bill that would greatly expand Wisconsin’s groundwater protections and local residents are making sure their voices are heard.
Steve Suchomel joined a delegation from the Town of Little Black last week and this week to speak to the committees holding hearings on Senate Bill 620 and its companion Assembly Bill 844. The proposed legislation calls for the creation of groundwater management areas.
“We are a water poor area in a water rich state,” Steve Suchomel of Little Black told the legislators. “While Wisconsin is called water rich, my central part of the state, including the Town of Little Black, is a water poor area. Our crystalline rock aquifer does not have the sustainability to allow unlimited high capacity wells.”
25 YEARS AGO
April 5, 1995
With more room needed at both the fire hall and the police department, and with employees at City Hall almost literally being backed into a corner for lack of space, City officials are looking at ways to solve the space crunch — both for now, and in the future.
“We need more room at City Hall. We need a new or larger fire hall. We need better usage of the Electric Utility building. We need a new library. And the police department needs more room,” Mayor Dee Meyer told the Common Council’s Committee-of-the-Whole last week. She added that elections have become a “pain” because City Hall offices are the polling places, which results in her and other City Hall personnel having to vacate their offices for the day.
50 YEARS AGO
April 2, 1970
The board of education of the Gilman area school district will refer an $850,000 bond issue to electors of the district Tuesday, along with other spring elections. It will mark the fifth time that a proposal to upgrade school facilities in the district has been brought before the electorate.
A new approach, the school board initiated the action after being petitioned by the “Concerned Citizens Committee: of volunteers in the district. The committee was established last fall after the referendum was defeated September 30. Since that time, the committee has met monthly to study the problems faced in the district and an evaluation was made of physical needs.
75 YEARS AGO
March 29, 1945
A baby tornado hit a small spot in Taylor County Tuesday evening just after 8:30, ripping through two town of Holway farms, obliterating the Orville Thompson house on section 7 and flattening the Henry Koepke barn on section 18. They are a mile apart.
Thompson and his son Wayne, 5, miraculously escaped death when the house was blown away from them. Mrs. Thompson was away at the time, with her sister, Mrs. Louis Raasch, visiting at the home of their mother, Mrs. Leonard Nelson.
100 YEARS AGO
March 31, 1920
The State Highway Commission reports that unless exorbitant prices for labor and materials prevail, there will be expended in Taylor County this year for highway construction $75,892. This sum is made up $15,892 appropriated by the state and $60,000 appropriated by the federal government. The Highway Commission is sending out a request over the state, urging that so far as possible all automobile traffic be kept off dirt roads in general while they are drying after the frost goes out. More harm can be done to such roads, say the engineers if the commission, in a few hours than can be remedied in as many months.
125 YEARS AGO
March 30, 1895
Every housekeeper knows the white powder sold as borax, and that it is death to water bugs and roaches. Hardly a housekeeper knows that to mine that white powder is deadly dangerous to human beings. Borax comes from the most desolate section of the whole world. Not even the most arid part of the Desert of Sahara can compete with Death Valley, where are the great borax fields of this country. Death Valley is well named.
There is not one living thing in it save the men who mine the borax and the animals which draw it to the railroads.
