Neenah with pride

The story of Neenah, Wisconsin.

With a shout out to Dan Donahue, who like me, is a Brooklyn resident who left his heart in the Neenah-Menasha metro area. And also his stomach, which loves beer brats.

By the way, it was my friend Mark's idea to write this in a bikeride narrative style, so if it's really cheesy, the blame goes to him.

We start out from my house, on Yorkshire Road. It's the solar house, though you can't tell from the front. My parents designed it themselves in 1979. That's why we almost froze in the winter of 1982. There was only a woodburning stove and some panel heaters to keep it warm through a Wisconsin winter. I remember huddling together in front of the wood burning stove, cooking hot dogs on it, and thinking we were all going to die. An emergency furnace was soon installed. But it's a beautiful house on the inside, ask anyone. That's my dad outside, pacing around and muttering into a tiny dictaphone. From even a short distance, it's really hard to tell what he's doing. Which is why, in junior high, the girl across the street told her friends that my dad talked to the grass.

From here, we're heading down Bayview road, my favorite road in the whole town. One way, it's a five minute walk to the lake (longer if you're carrying a canoe on your shoulders). The other way, it's bordered by a lot of really beautiful old trees, and a boggy marsh, full of cattails and frogs, and sometimes deer. We used to run around in there a lot when I was a kid. The cattails are so dense, you could hide just inches away from whoever was it in a game, and they wouldn't see you. On the right is the oldest house in Neenah. First it was a mill, then a brothel, then at some point, my seventh grade English teacher moved into it. The boat launch and city pool are next. Then around what's called The Point, where the lighthouse is, and where a lot of people catch fish, which I expect are mutant fish, because the lake is full of all kinds of fertilizer runoff. My friends and I spent hours here at night when we were in high school, sitting on the swinging benches and, for reasons I cannot remember, smashing cream puffs and other pastries in each other's faces. As you ride around the rest of the point, the road forks. If you go straight, you go past the Bergstrom museum, which has the largest collection of paperweights in the world. We're very proud of that. If you curve to the right, you go into Riverside Park, which was a part of every Neenah kid's childhood. The park was the source of many family stories, including The Time a Squirrel Ate Our Peach Pie and The Time Your Brother Got Stung By a Bee. There's a giant metal rocket on the playground (rockets are the town mascot), which is where most of us made out with someone for the first time. The ladder to get onto it was recently taken down and it's been condemned due to rust. Poor old rocket. Now we're heading downtown. There's the harbor on the right. A lot of people in town have a sailboat. Here's the public library. My mom will give you a tour, if you want one. She helped plan and raise money for the library (it's only a few years old) and she loves it.

Further down are the foundaries. I've told many of you, sometimes multiple times, and usually when I've been drinking, about how most of the manhole covers in the world are from Neenah. It's a story I tell like an old man; I'm bursting with pride when I tell it and I talk about it over and over. And over the years, many of you have called me, also while drinking, to announce that you are standing next to a Neenah manhole cover in Brooklyn, or L.A., or Stockholm. Another thing of which we are immensely proud is that Kleenex is also made in Neenah. Some residents are very picky about the word Kleenex only applying to actual Kleenex. Anything else is just a tissue, and must never be called a Kleenex. I wrote to them a few months ago, pleading for a handout, because my class last year had more allergies than is humanly possible. They kindly sent me a giant case of free Kleenex. You might have noticed that we've passed about ten bars already. There are more bars than churches here, that's what people say around here. Some of them say it scornfully. Most say it like this: "There are more bars than churches here! Wooohooo!" A lot of the bars around here have a very established clientele, and don't want some nerd in a stereolab shirt drinking their Old Style. One of the bartenders told my friends and me this winter, "I think you'd be happier at the bar across the street." I said, really tough, "No, we're happy here. We like THIS place." So that earned us a sort of grudging respect, at least for a few minutes. I like the way they freeze their beer mugs.

Ok, now we're circling back to Commercial Street. There's sometimes a very odd older couple that takes walks in their pajamas, but I haven't seen them in a few years. That tobacco discount store used to be the Mr. Donut. It was the only 24 hour place in town. It was really gross. But we loved going there at night. But then the owners tried to burn it down for insurance money. They didn't succeed completely though, because here's the tobacco store.

Further down a ways are the grocery stores. We spent a lot of time just walking and chasing each other around them in high school (there aren't a lot of nighttime activities in Neenah). I was here earlier today, buying the ingredients for quesadillas. Which the man in the dairy department called kay-sah-dillas. Speaking of pronunciations, my Wisconsin accent has come back a bit again. That happens every time I come home. By the time I leave, I'm saying "yah" exclusively, and my more refined mother is curtly reminding me to say "yes" instead. Now we're headed back home, past the drive through restaurant that has good brats and also deep fried cheese curds. There's my elementary school, Coolidge Elementary. All the elementary schools here are named after undistinguished former presidents. And now it's only a two minute ride back to Yorkshire.

And that ends our tour of Neenah, Wisconsin. Please put your bike away in the garage.

*This update typed while listening to NPR.