In researching the beautiful and exciting memory of "Billie the Brownie from Schusters," I found an incredible short story written by Phil Pluta, who lived "by Schusters plus two blocks." I don't know who Phil is but he perfectly described "how it was" and it's great fun to read.
In Old Milwaukee, Schusters was the touchstone of direction. You'd used it's location as the center of your map and add instructions from that point. The street photo will be sentimental to any old timer resident of Milwaukee. But all of you can be whisked away to 12th and Vilet some 60 years ago by reading Phil Pluta's wonderful writing.
To the adults Schusters was just a department store. There were three of them in Milwaukee when I was growing up in the forties. My very own was between 12th and 13th on Vliet Street just a half block from where I lived.
Schusters was the big guy on the block. It towered over the busy Vliet street shopping strip that stretched from Samson's, Walgreens and The First Wisconsin National Bank on 12th Street to Fareway Meat Market, the A&P, Omar and Father and Son's shoe store on 14th Street. It was part of the neighborhood that embraced the Colonial Theater on 15th Street where lines of kids spilled over from the entrance on Vliet every Sunday afternoon each clutching his twelve cent admission that would treat him to a double feature, news reel, and cartoon not to mention the coming attractions and the nickel popcorn.
I could see the Schusters main parking lot from my front porch. At one time it was the only parking lot until after the war when they tore down an old brewery on 13th street and made room for more cars. From my porch I could hear the all seeing and all wise parking attendant high up in his tower calling out the make and model of each car that entered and guiding them to a parking spot. I sometimes would hang around outside the cyclone fence that separated the parking lot from the rest of the neighbor-hood fascinated with the man in the tower with his ability to know at a glance that the car entering was a 39 Buick that he advised to take isle three the third isle. Then he would guide a new 47 Studebaker to isle five--the fifth isle. At those moments I would wonder if I would ever be smart enough to learn to identify all of those cars and be able to sit up in that high tower surveying and guiding the people be-low.
Schusters was a landmark; a point of reference. Other places in the neighborhood were " by Schusters and yet two blocks." It was where Santa Clause kept his Reindeer after the Christmas Parade. It was were Santa, Billy the Brownie and Willie Wagtail hung their hat until Christmas and where Santa sat on a red and white throne flanked by helpers who handed out gifts after you had a chat with their boss. (I always approached those helpers with a jaundiced eye, suspicious that they might be the very Brownies assigned to peek into our windows and catch me being naughty and then reporting my behavior to the Big Guy. Whenever the magic story book did not open on the Billy the Brownie Show I knew it was because I was not completely honest when I faced the radio and said "I have been a good boy today."
Schusters was also a fantasy land and a playground for the neighborhood kids. It wasn't that we didn't have any thing else to do, or that there were not playground facilities and recreational equipment in our neighborhood. One block away from my house Siefert School, my grade school, covered one square city block and had not one, but two playgrounds. The larger playground was called the "boys' play ground , probably because it had three soft ball diamonds and in the fall was converted into a touch football field. In addition there was a fenced off basket ball court ,which served as a supervised snowball fight arena in the winter, a horse shoe court, monkey bars, parallel bars, a shack full of equipment and a row of swings where you stood in line and counted to 100 to earn your turn..
The girl's playground had a sand box and a wading pool with a shower pole in the middle, that was a haven on sultry summer afternoons.
Both playgrounds were covered with asphalt (except for the horseshoe court) , and in the winter time the larger playground was flooded for ice skating. The whole area was flooded with light in the winter allowing the skaters to enjoy themselves until closing time, and on summer evenings the lights shined down on the organized tavern league underhand fast pitch softball games that drew the whole neighborhood.
Besides this summer and winter activities out on the playground, Siefert had a top notch So-cial Center Program during the school year. We did everything from after school shirts and skins basket ball games, to working on an ad hoc newspaper that my friends and I put together and Tony, who we called the coach, ran off on a mimeograph machine. So we were not without things to do. If we needed a more exciting adventure we walked straight up Cherry Street to Washington Park. We would leave early in the morning with a packed lunch and either play hardball, explore the zoo, catch carp in the la-goon or rent a boat and row out to one of the islands pretending to be shipwrecked.
Then there was Schusters! There was of course the obvious attraction at Christmas time. Right after Thanksgiving Vilet Street would suddenly be transformed with Christmas decorations, and the Schusters windows would be bright with winter and Christmas displays. On Sunday morning as I waited with my Mother on the corner of 14th and Vliet (on dry asphalt that magically melted the falling snow) for the street car that would take us to church, I would stare with fascination at the mannequins fantasizing that they might come to life at night when no one was watching.
During the week or on Saturday's (in those days no store would dream of being opened on Sun-day), we explored the wonderland of the toy department the main feature of which was a huge model rail-road layout with cities and tunnels and bridges. Every accessory you could buy for your Lionel or American Flyer train set, was set up in working order. At specially planned times someone would come and run the trains. We would watch them for what seemed like hours. By the time Christmas was over we knew ever inch of that toy department. We knew we couldn't own all the toys we wanted, but being able to touch them and look at them seemed to help fulfill our fantasy.
It was not, however, just the Christmas magic that made Schusters our playground. There were the frozen malts!. For ten cents you could buy this cone full of frozen malt that swirled out of the ma-chine like custard at a Carvell stand, but tasted nothing like custard. Unfortunately ten cents was a lot of money for a ten year old, so we did not get that particular treat as often as we would have liked. Candy, on the other hand, could be free to an observant and enterprising buccaneer.
No, the Schusters employees didn't exactly hand out free candy because they thought we were such cute little fellows. Although that worked like a charm when I would walk my two kid sisters up the alley from our house to the back end of the Hires Root Beer bottle House and hang around the open over-head door until someone noticed those two cute curly tops and gave us all a free bottle of rootbeer At Schusters, however, careful reconnaissance uncovered the reality that when the clerk behind the counter would dig into the candy tray with her metal scoop and pour the contents into a bag for a customer, some pieces of the wrapped candy would fall over the sides of the bag and roll under the counter.
We unani-mously agreed that the candy under the counter was fair game, like sunken treasure, waiting for a sal-vage crew. We would wait for a moment when we would not be conspicuous and then drop to the floor with outstretched hands to scoop our treasure from beneath the counter to be stuffed into the hold of our pirate ship trousers
With the candy secure in our pockets we made our way past the new 10 inch television sets with the big magnifying glass in front of them .Our destination was the record department. We examined the selection of 78 rpm records until we found some that we thought we would like or we would take a whole album of one artist. (An Album was just that--an album with six pockets for six separate single disks.) We headed for one of the listening booths, closed the door, unwrapped our candy and enjoyed our concert until one of the clerks realized what we were up to and shoed us on our way.
As we got older, though, our relationship with Schusters began to change. When school let out a 3:30 the swarm of kids descending on the store became an irritant to the customers and thus a community problem. Schusters and the rest of the retail community turned to Siefert School to work out a solution. At this time our school under the direction of its Principal Mr. Peck, was experimenting with an active student government. We had elections for Mayor, council members, court officers including a judge, clerk of court, district attorney and jurors. On one occasion we put on a skit of a mock trial over WTMJ-TV--channel 3. Since our parents did not own television sets, Schusters played host to them in their television department.
The store cooperated with our school's innovative approach to teaching civic responsibility. Ar-rangements were made to have cadets posted at the doors for a half hour after school to turn back stu-dents that only wanted to roam the store. Only an official note from ones' parents certifying a legitimate shopping trip would get you in. A metamorphosis took place. We were no longer crawling on the floor like pirate caterpillars snatching treasured goodies. Like a proud Monarch fresh from his cocoon, we preened ourselves at our post, our yellow cadet badge announcing to the passing adults that we were worthy of respect.
The Schusters management gave us that respect. When our tour of duty was completed the store management arranged a banquet for us and our parents. The manager told us all that when we were old enough, and we needed employment Schusters would be proud to hire us. I never knew if anyone ever took the store up on that offer. Within a few years of graduating from sixth grade most of us had moved out of the old neighborhood as our parents became part of the coming suburban sprawl. It was the offer that counted though. It was a family thing and it made the prospect of growing up just a little less scary.
We needed that support. Though we didn't know it, rapid change was going to sweep over the remainder of our lives. The street cars would soon disappear, and the tracks that carried Santa Clause to his Christmas throne at Schusters would soon be ripped up. The wise voice in the parking lot tower went silent and neighborhood kids could no longer linger at the cyclone fence talking to Reindeer nestled in the warm hay.
Some of us would try not to let go. My parents moved to the far north side of town, but we still had the Fareway Market deliver our meat to us. For a while my parents made trips to the old neighborhood and bought our dress up cloths at Schneiderman's as they always had.
Eventually though new ways of living seduced us to the glitter of the new shopping centers, and supermarkets made shopping so much easier if less personal. One after another familiar friend closed shop. Of course the changes that came made us materially better off. I would not have wanted to raise four children in a one bedroom cold water flat as my parents did until they bought a home in 1949. Yet as my own life moved towards greater material prosperity Schusters, my old friend, was swallowed up by a bigger fish in the corporate pond, and my store, which once offered jobs to the neighborhood youth became the main headquarters for the County Welfare System.
Maybe in every mans life there is that "one brief shinning moment" that Camelot celebrated by Alan Jay Lerner's musical. It isn't a place or a time though. There was nothing mystically special about Schusters on 12th and Vliet or the "yet two blocks" and more that was its community. The people that lived there then were no better or no worse examples of the human race than those that live there now. What was different and what is implanted in my memory, is the feeling of community and the spirit of genuine neighborly concern that flowed from our homes our schools, and even the businesses that we patronized. The relationship of Schusters with its community, especially the young people, stand out in my memory as a symbol of the spirit that permeated the community in which I grew up.
I have carried that spirit with me and have been better for it.
by Phil Pluta
