SOMEWHERE IN MILWAUKEE a man dressed in cheap pajamas serves drinks behind a long, walnut-top bar. Frank Blunt is there, tipping back whiskeys and making time with the tired gaggle of Bucket of Blood working girls. A group of dandily attired mashers is there, too, tossing affections at a clutch of tittering domestics. They try their act on the overmade and underage girls at the end of the bar as well, but these wide-eyed beauties are not having it. They keep their attention focused on the door, grimacing as they take their drinks and wait for a strapping man in uniform to buy their next round. In the corner of the dusty hall, a sharp in a tailored suit takes numbers for Boss Dalzell and waits for the latest round of winning combinations from Covington. Next to his chair is a locked door. Professor Moebius, violin case in hand and ten bucks burning a hole in his pocket, raps three times on the door and is admitted. In the center of the room, telling bawdy jokes and buying rounds of beer for all his pals, matchstick man Brad Bradley takes mental notes, preparing to swear out a warrant against the place just as soon as he can.
At the police station a few blocks away, as Chief Ellsworth plots a raid of his own, the holding cell is filled to capacity. Barney Farrell tells tall tales of his quixotic conquests to Harry Christiansen and Jiggs Perry. Christiansen’s dark glasses conceal the fact that he could not care less while Perry waits impatiently to tell of his own fabricated romances. A pair known only as Daddy and Jack sit together in a corner, each looking guilty as hell but neither saying a word. Herman Hilden sits calmly on a wooden bench near the overwrought Alice Dornblaser. She is begging him to call out some bingo numbers. In another corner of the cell, a man tranquilly shaves himself with a gleaming silver razor while a group of hard-luck Chicagoans listen with envy to the music, laughter, and sinful groans coming from down the hall. Josephine Willner, specks of blood still drying on her long, black frock, ignores the goings-on of the cell as she tiptoes to peek through a barred window. She glares as Mary Ann Wheeler passes the building in a fine, horse-drawn carriage. Miss Wheeler is smiling for the first time in months.
Miss Wheeler leaves the jailhouse in her dust and parades past burning barns, theaters, and hotels. As black smoke plumes toward the heavens and bodies fall from the sky, Henry Falk swears he is not entirely to blame. She passes the rail yards, with doomed and dooming steamers lacing along metal ribbons. She crosses the river, with tiny bodies floating prone and ill-fated vessels heading toward an angry lake. The waters churn and thrash, wicked waves grabbing at anything that crosses them. And yet Captain McKay presses on. As Miss Wheeler passes through downtown, she sees whorehouses, gambling dens, password saloons, and after-hours clubhouses. On a River Street corner, Alice Jordan and Susan Fuller trade dirty looks and foul words. Just blocks south of that tense scene, the dome of City Hall roars aflame, licking the sky from the highest point in town. And inside the building’s ornate marble halls, behind brass-knobbed mahogany doors set with heavy etchedglass windows, Rosina Georg sits in the mayor’s office, her feet up on his desk and her eyes trained out the window, watching Milwaukee in all its splendid mayhem.
These apparitions are invisible to most. The doomed players of these stories, and a thousand more that will never be told, go about their routines as does the city that lives here today. These stories may be the orphans of history, but they are closer to us than we think. And no true history of Milwaukee is complete without them. We cannot fully understand this place without knowing what lives in its underbelly. Even if these men and women were fringe characters of their times, and exist similarly as historical relics today, their tales helped to make this city. As much as did anyone else, these people called it home. And they call it home still.