Madison– the first week of January in the early 1960s.
The UW Badgers begin the decade suffering a whomping defeat on New Year’s Day 1960, losing the Rose Bowl to the Washington Huskies, 44–8. Two hundred loyal fans greet the returning team at Truax Field, but they don’t get much of a response from the subdued players.
Later that week, the Milwaukee Road discontinues train service from Madison to points in Iowa and South Dakota.
And a new group working to improve the downtown business climate, the State Street Association, has its organizational meeting at Troia’s Steak House, 661 State St. The group names Howard Stucky of Montgomery Ward, 311 State St. as the first president.
Names in the news this week 1961. A unique honor for parks superintendent James Marshall, who has worked for the department since 1927, been its head since 1937 and shows no signs of retiring. By vote of the Parks Commission, the new twenty- seven- acre park on Lake Mendota, partially located in the village of Middleton, is now named in his honor. And Walter A. Frautschi, president of the Democrat Printing Co., names two new company vice presidents – sons John Jones Frautschi and W. Jerome Frautschi, whom they call Jerry.
Early 1962 brings good news for the city’s Triangle urban renewal project as U.S. Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeier (D- Watertown) announces that the federal Urban Renewal Administration has approved almost eight million dollars in grants and loans. The Madison Redevelopment Authority will use the funds to buy and clear the fifty-two- acre site which is bordered by Regent, S. Park and West Washington, home until now to three generations of Italians, Sicilians, Albanians, Jews and Blacks.
The school board had never offered regular teaching contracts to a husband and wife; one could have a regular contract, but the spouse would have only an “emergency” contract under special circumstances. Until January 2 1962, that is, when the board votes unanimously to offer regular teaching contracts to both the husband and wife.
The next day, freedom of housing comes to the university of Wisconsin, as the powerful Student Life and Interests Committee votes to allow undergraduates over the age of twenty- one to live in the same apartment building as unmarried students of the opposite sex— something only graduate students were previously allowed to do. The new policy is effective immediately.
New Year’s Day 1963 brings Madison its first new Superintendent of Schools since 1939, as Robert Gilberts takes over from the retiring Phillip Falk. Gilberts received his master’s and Ph D at the University of Wisconsin and has been the superintendent of schools in Oconomowoc. He’s staying at the YMCA until a room opens up at the University Club. He plans to buy a house in the Hill Farms area for his wife and three children.
And a new age looms in Madison traffic, as the state Public Service Commission authorizes construction of the Causeway across Monona Bay, adjacent to the railroad tracks. It’s a big victory for Mayor Henry Reynolds, and five days after the PSC vote, he orders that a pile of urban renewal rubble, which he’s been storing for landfill in Law Park, be spread as a token start to the project. The Capital Times, which has fought the causeway for years because editor William T. Evjue thinks that making it easier to drive to Olin Park would harm efforts to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace at Law Park, condemns Reynolds for “trying to blitzkrieg Madison” into approving the upcoming bond issue the start the causeway’s construction.
A city ordinance bans the public showing of films which are “obscene” or “immoral.” But the law doesn’t state who makes and enforces that determination. No problem, says Police Inspector Herman Thomas. I can do both. In early January, Thomas gets a tip about a foreign film at the Majestic Theater— Phaedra, Jules Dassin’s retelling of the Greek tragedy of a second wife’s illicit love for her stepson, starring Dassin’s wife, the magnetic Melina Mercouri, and a young and sensitive Anthony Perkins. Thomas watches the movie and agrees that the soft- focus, blurred image love scene is “overtly immoral” and “sickening.” Thomas tells the Majestic’s assistant manager to cut the offending scene or close the theater. The police department’s number 2 man, Thomas later sends an officer back to the theater to make sure the cut was made. Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union president William Gorham Rice calls this action intolerable and a “perverse use of police power.” Police chief Wilbur Emery agrees that “no one man should sit in judgment” and proposes creation of a citizen’s censorship committee, though he wants nothing to do with it. A few days after Thomas truncates the film, an ad hoc panel of citizens chosen by Emery finds the film appropriate for adults and restores the cut footage. It is the panel’s only action— city attorney Edwin Conrad later advises that the city lacks legal authority to create a censorship board.
This week in 1964, the UW faculty unanimously approves allowing all seniors, regardless of age, to live in off- campus apartments. There are now about six thousand students who live in apartments, and about 750 seniors under the current minimum age of twenty- one who cannot. The new policy is likely a steppingstone to letting younger underclassmen also live off-campus.
When developers Gerald Bartell and Robert Brooks proposed Capitol Pavilion, a five-story, combination shopping mall and parking ramp on West Dayton Street between Wisconsin Ave and S. Carroll St., they said they needed to build a pedestrian bridge from the Pavilion to the Manchester department store. Specifically, a glass-enclosed skywalk, 16 feet wide and 22 feet above Wisconsin Avenue. When historic preservationists hollered about what the skywalk would do to the Capitol view, the city set up a special design team, — state architect James Galbraith, UW artist-in-residence Aaron Bohrod, and engineer Adolph Ackerman — to make a recommendation. On the sixth, the committee declares the view of the Capitol from the sixteen streets that converge on the Square to be “part of the public domain” that must be “preserved as an inspiration for future generations” as “the heritage of a great city.” Finding the skywalk to create “an unfortunate visual interference with the Capitol,” the committee unanimously rejects the plan. It’s now up to the Plan Commission and the Common Council.
And that’s this week’s Madison in the Sixties. For your award-winning, listener sponsored , Capitol-view-honoring WORT news team, I’m Stu Levitan.
Photomontage of the Manchester Skywalk Wisconsin State Journal May 12, 1964
