Some of the greatest characters in our Happy Days version were my own family members, starting with my three stubborn uncles. After both Willie and Henry got out of the Army, having traveled to many distant shores, the two returned to Louisiana long enough to join with Uncle Archie as each came to the simultaneous decision to get as far away from southern bigotry as he possibly could.
Their plan was to go to Canada, but when their car broke down in Milwaukee, so the story goes, they laid anchor and went no farther. The hardworking Gardner brothers didn’t have too much trouble making Milwaukee home. To them, the fertile, versatile city that had been plunked down at the meeting place of the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan—
which provided rich soil for farming and ample waterways for trade and industry—was their land of milk and honey, of golden opportunity. To put up with the extremes in the seasons, the brutal winters and scorching summers, you had to have an innate toughness and the kind of deeply practical, hustling ability that my relatives and many of the other minorities and immigrants brought with them to Wisconsin from other places. Those traits must have existed as well as in the descendents of the true Milwaukeeans—members of tribes like the Winnebago and Potawatomi. There was another local personality trait not exclusive to the new arrivals of blacks, Jews, Italians, and eastern Europeans or the families of the first wave of settlers from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, or the area’s Native Americans, and that was an almost crazy optimism.All that ambitious, pragmatic dreaming sometimes resulted in overachievement. It wasn’t enough to just have one brand of beer, Milwaukee had to have several. The region couldn’t just be famous for its dairies, it had to have the best cheese in the world. There wasn’t just one major industry but several—from the brickyards, tanneries, breweries, shipyards, and meatpacking businesses to the dominating steel factories like Inland Steel and A. O. Smith and the automotive giant American Motors (deceased as of the late 1980s).
It was mainly the steel mills and foundries and carmakers that brought so many blacks from states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and all points south of the Mason-Dixon north to Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland. These blue-collar jobs were far and away preferable to a life sharecropping in the sweltering heat way down south in Dixie, in places where less than a century earlier many of our people had been enslaved. Seemed like almost everyone had family members that brought with them their country ways and who tended to stick together. Sam Salter— Ophelia’s father—ended up with his family in Milwaukee, as well as other friends from Louisiana. The Tripletts, some of the nicest, kindest folks you could meet—with the exception of Freddie, the bad seed—had come from Mississippi.
