Ein Prosit!
1981-1982
Lake Michigan, the only one of the five Great Lakes that lies wholly within the United States, hangs down like a limp finger pointing toward the section of the Midwest where industry ends and agriculture begins. The U.S.-Canadian border splits through Lakes Superior, Huron, Ontario, and Erie, leaving Lake Michigan as a wholly-owned entity that touches Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and actually divides its namesake, the state of Michigan. At 321 miles long and 118 miles wide at its most distant points, this is not
some little pond where one can stand on the shore and throw a stone across the water. Lake Michigan is one big piece of water.
It also was a navigable waterway all the way back to when Native Americans—or as they were called then, Indians—paddled their canoes along its sometimes placid, sometimes stormy coastline. To match its awesome size, it helped create awesome cities along its shores, the two largest of which are Chicago, near the southernmost point, and Milwaukee, on its western flank. The clear, fresh water of the lake would play an important part in the commercial development of what would become Milwaukee’s most famous product.
From the start, Milwaukee was a meeting place. Even the earliest settlers, the Potawatomi Indians, referred to the site as the “Gathering Place by the Waters” and welcomed the first Europeans to trek the area, French explorers and traders coming down from the waterways of Canada in the 1630s. Some liked what they saw and established trading posts, bringing European-style commerce to the region, trading with the Indians for furs as the eighteenth century came to an end.
But French influence was destined to be relatively short, because within fifty years, the first wave of German immigrants flooded into the area, bringing with them their unique talent for brewing beer and cooking delicious food. The German dominance also would eventually fade, but its
imprint stayed and influences Milwaukee to this day. To proclaim the city’s friendliness, the residents of Milwaukee use the German term gemütlich, which as much reflects a style of life as an actual welcome.
The map of Wisconsin, a state with no mountains, is a checkerboard of towns and cities and villages called by foreign words, reflecting the comings and goings of throngs of different tribes, clans, nationalities, and races over the recent centuries. Indian names, such as Nekoosa and Black Hawk, French names like La Crosse and Eau Claire, and German ones like Berlin roll easily from the tongues of the Irish, Swedes, Hungarians, Serbs and Finns, African-Americans, Lao, and others who have found a home in Milwaukee. The city was a growth point located not too far east, not too far west, and painted in attractive colors for those envious and adventurous who wanted a slice of America in the early years, and a job with a paycheck in the more recent past. Oddly, while all of the other passersby have left a trail of names, the origin of the actual word “Milwaukee” has been lost in time. A passing religious man noted in his journal in 1679 that a tribe of Indians made their home at the mouth of the “Millioki River.” That may have to do until scholars someday decide to figure it out.
At any rate, the flat place on the shore of Lake Michigan where the Menominee, the Kinnickinnic, and the Milwaukee rivers converge became
a growing settlement, then officially a city in 1846, and eventually a modern metropolis that has a skyline of glittering office buildings, sophisticated dwellers, a beautiful waterfront and, as a German immigrant wrote, “streets as straight as a string.”
Ownership of what was to become Wisconsin began in 1671 when it was formally claimed by the French, since the Indians had made the tragic mistake of not having a courthouse in which to write out a deed of their own. Almost a century later, Paris turned title over to London as part payment for losing the French and Indian War. The American Revolution came along twenty years later, and when it was over, the British ceded the lovely expanse of Wisconsin over to the colonials. Congress created the Wisconsin Territory in 1836, a dozen years before some politicians meeting in the town of Ripon created the Republican Party in the same year, 1848, that Wisconsin became the thirtieth state to join the Union.
The fact that Jeff Dahmer, an eccentric white man, could live without drawing much notice in a neighborhood predominantly populated by minorities reflects one of the unique elements of the personality of today’s Milwaukee. The city has always prided itself on being a racial and cultural melting pot, a self-promoted image that residents believed until the Dahmer case showed it to be patently false.
But if that is not true, one thing that is absolutely
certain is that if rubber made Akron, beer certainly made Milwaukee. Ironically, it was the armies of the Confederacy and a couple of Welshmen who put the city firmly on track to becoming the beer capital of the United States. Milwaukee brews more beer than any other city, and its residents drink more beer per person than any other Americans.
Three immigrants from Wales put up the city’s first brewery, tapping into, as have the brewers who followed, the cool, fresh waters of Lake Michigan and the hops grown by the farmers of Wisconsin. The early brewers, however, produced more whiskey and brandy than beer. Enter General Robert E. Lee, leading his secessionist forces into battle. Immediately, the northern states needed to raise money to equip troops to fight the Rebels, and a new dollar-per-barrel tax was passed on all alcoholic products. It did not take too long for the saloonkeepers to figure out that the financial return on the thirty-one gallons of beer that would fit in a barrel was better than on thirty-one gallons of brandy because customers ordered more glasses of beer. Milwaukee began drinking beer in great quantities, pushing up a need for more production and luring in new and more talented brewers.
The Germans came, bearing their rare talents from the old country, and soon successful breweries were founded that grew to giant companies such as Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller. The big ones, as well as the small fry that fell by the
competitive wayside—brands such as Little Willy Old Lager, Perplies, and Point Special—began making beer and money by the barrel from a thirsty America. It was said that an explorer found a bottle of Pabst at the North Pole, just one of the many advertising gimmicks that came along with the merry competition. With the money came political power, and the Germans had their day, at one time even requiring that the German language be taught to every schoolchild, from kindergarten on up.
Bars lined the streets and even industrial companies would hire a bucket boy to run out with a tray of empty jugs to the nearest saloon and fetch beer for the workers. When the mugs and glasses were raised aloft and “Ein Prosit!” rang out, it was more than a mere salute. It was a declaration of solidarity between a city and its product. When some legislator in Madison dared in the 1940s to say in a debate that alcoholic beverages might be as much of a scourge as illegal drugs, Assemblyman Leland S. McParland leaped to his feet to protest. “Whiskey? Why, whiskey is a food!”
To this city, where the cooking aroma of corn grits, ground malt, Lake Michigan water, and Wisconsin-grown hops permeates the air over some sections of town, where beer advertisements are everywhere and where even some fast-food stands have a keg on tap, was coming in 1982 an alcoholic young man named Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer, who everyone said was a terrible, fighting-mad drunk and who had been kicked out of
the army for drinking, was coming home, back to the city of his birth, a German boy ready to drink his share of civic pride.
After being discharged from the army in South Carolina in March of 1981, Jeffrey slipped south into Florida, going all the way down to Miami and joining the legion of drifters soaking up the famous rays of the Sunshine State. After two years in Germany, it was good to be back in the United States, feeling the sunshine instead of the chill of central Europe, hearing the American voices on the street, checking out the tanned chicks in their bright swimsuits and chowing down on Cuban black beans and red rice. He found work slapping sandwiches together at a fast-food joint over the causeway in Miami Beach, and there was a brief chance that Dahmer might use the respite from his past to start anew in that golden summer. Once he found the bars, that hope perished in an alcoholic haze.
Shari and Lionel Dahmer kept track of him from their new place in Granger Township, Ohio, a nice townhouse in Medina County, right next door to Bath Township, but considerably more rural. They persuaded Jeffrey to come back to Ohio and he eventually agreed. But this was not an innocent boy any longer. He had killed a man with his bare hands, he had been through the army, he had walked the streets of K-Town in Germany, and he had drifted on the Gold Coast
of Florida. Granger Township, for all of its attractions, was just too small.
He fell back into the old habits that his father remembered so well, mainly going out and getting drunk, staying at bars until closing time, demanding more to drink even though he was unable to remember where he’d left the family car, and eventually getting into fights; he’d end up getting decked by someone and sobering up with a few new bruises and another ounce of hatred. On October 7, 1981, he carried his open bottle of vodka into the lounge of the Ramada Inn in Bath, arrogant and drunk. He refused to leave and tussled with the police when they came. They arrested him for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and carrying an open container of liquor. Sixty dollars, said the magistrate, who suspended an accompanying ten-day sentence in the slammer.
It was decided that the tranquil surroundings were not sufficiently beneficial and that perhaps living in the house in West Allis, Wisconsin, close to his grandmother, might make a difference.
South of Milwaukee, beside Interstate 94, is the sprawl of Mitchell Field, the city’s major airport. It was named to honor General William Mitchell, the aviation pioneer who proved that airplanes could sink battleships and forever changed the face of aerial warfare, although that did not save him from a court-martial. As a boy, Mitchell played on a huge expanse of lawn in the nearby
town of West Allis, where his family owned an immense estate called Meadowmere. That fact is noted on a plaque erected by the West Allis Rotary Club in a tiny triangle of grass where Hayes Avenue splits around a leafy island of trees at the end of the 2300 block of South Fifty-seventh Street in West Allis, a place where another Milwaukee native was about to make a name for himself.
The community has evolved over the years into a charmingly well-kept little village on the flank of Milwaukee. Lawns are mowed, sidewalks are swept, and cleanliness seems to be a dominant theme, proven by the condition of the paved alleyways behind the homes. It is what urban planners would call a nice place to live.
One of those immaculate little homes, a two-story doll house, white siding over tan block and with red shutters on the three top front windows, belongs to Catherine Dahmer, the paternal grandmother of Jeffrey and the person to whom he felt the closest. The home has a trellis of purple flowers growing beside a side door reached by a half-circle of a walkway, a private entrance that leads to a downstairs apartment. In the backyard, well-tended beds of flowers thrive in the crisp Wisconsin air, giving a summerlong burst of color to the neat neighborhood.
Jeffrey, exiled from the army and rootless after staying with his father and stepmother, readily agreed to return to the home of his grandmother. Catherine, although in her seventies, gave her
grandson a warm hug and a key to the door. It was thought that with some stability and a base in a friendly and familiar environment, Jeffrey might settle down, ease off on his drinking, and finally begin to mature. A comfortable bed in a place he knew well and the rust-colored, shingled roof over his head might provide the security that he sought.
Indeed, when Jeffrey was around his grandmother, he puttered with her in the garden, planting roses and keeping the lawn mowed to match all the other neat plots of grass on South Fifth-seventh Street. Using the medic’s skills he had learned in the army, he found work drawing blood at Milwaukee Blood Plasma, Inc., and for a time things were looking up. As usual, though, a black thundercloud of misfortune hovered just around the corner, waiting for him.
He was laid off of the blood bank job in 1982, and in August, when the Wisconsin State Fair rolled into town and farmers from around the state hauled in huge blocks of cheese for a grading competition, Jeffrey was arrested again. Police reported that he had exposed himself, charged him with indecent exposure, and slapped him with another fine.
It would not be long before his taste for blood would surface again.