Up north won’t be the same without larger-than-life Russ
Russ Wicker was many things I’m not.
The expert fisherman once took me out on Big Crooked Lake to prove I wasn’t a hopeless case. Using worms would have been too easy. He had us netting minnows to use for bait.
Russ could build anything, fix anything, jury-rig anything. His wife, Mary, called him MacGyver.
Once I made the mistake of asking Russ where I could buy some firewood. “You don’t buy firewood,” he sniffed. When I reminded him of that story recently, he said, “Well, you can, but why? A chainsaw isn’t very hard.”
Russ could have been a cowboy or a pirate or an explorer we read about in school. He was timeless and larger than life, yet sweet as they come.
It’s hard to believe he’s gone, toppled by cancer on May 31 at the age of 87. Camp Nawakwa will never be the same.
My family enjoys a week every summer at the YMCA camp near Minocqua, and that’s where we met Russ. We quickly learned he had been spending weeks and sometimes whole summers up there since 1933 when he was 4 years old. We’ve been going a mere 26 years, or as Russ calls us, newcomers.
“My mother’s uncle is the one who made it a family camp. He was connected with the Y, and he went up there and found the (boys) camp deserted and started sending out postcards to all the relatives and said, ‘come on up,’ ” Russ told me during a visit to his north side Milwaukee home in April. He spoke from a hospice bed in the living room.
Camp Nawakwa was his favorite place to be as a boy and later as a father of five. By the time we came along, he was a retiree from the City of Milwaukee engineering department where he worked staking out sewers, water lines, sidewalks and such for nearly 40 years.
In a tribute on the Nawakwa Facebook page, camp director Kirby Petersen said he remembers meeting Russ when he started in the job 23 years ago.
“I introduced myself, and in his deep-sounding, carefree tone Russ responded with his traditional greeting, ‘How dooo,’ ” Kirby wrote. “Because Russ was an old soul, he wished camp would stay the same as it was in 1949. I think Russ loved it best when Nawakwa had no electricity.”
Russ owned a contraption with a compressor and hoses that he used for scuba diving in the lake. He lathered up with dishwashing liquid to slide into his wetsuit. The floating device was meant for a depth of 25 feet, but he added another 25 feet of hose because he could. “When I was down that far I was breathing every bit of air that was pumped down there,” he said.
Russ and Mary loved music and never missed a sing-along. Over time, Russ developed a signature song he often was asked to lead at campfires, complete with all the hand gestures. We called it the Mary song, and it was about how she “went this way and that way” from infancy to the afterlife. It was sung, Russ would say, to the tune of “Ach du lieber Augustin.”
Russ met his own Mary in Milwaukee while square dancing. They married in 1949 and, no surprise, honeymooned at Camp Nawakwa. They taught us campers how to square dance, and then every summer would have to reteach us everything we forgot. Dressed in a western shirt and neckerchief, Russ did the calls, and he set up a turntable to play his old records. Mary kept us from colliding.
“I would always get dragged to square dancing as a young kid,” my
son, Jesse, told Russ during that final visit with him. “But every time I would go, by the end of it I was having so much fun that I would forget why I didn’t want to go.”
Adding to the mystique of Russ Wicker was the fact that he had one glass eye. He was born with a detached retina in his left eye and sometime in the 1950s had the diseased eye removed. When we tell Russ stories, we always talk about the time he freaked out our kids at camp by popping out the
glass eye into his hand.
Russ let out his infectious laugh when I brought this up. “It was family night, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll do the most disgusting thing you can do.’ ”
“He won,” said his daughter, Dawn, who often joined her parents at camp in recent years and helped at home when Russ got sick.
Dawn said he was the kind of dad who rescued his kids if their cars broke down. He had a big snowblower and would often clear out the whole block. He held the opinion that if the writer of a tune was known, it wasn’t really a folk song.
Russ learned in January that his colon cancer from 2012 had spread to his liver and was no longer treatable. “Tell Kirby I won’t make it back to camp this summer,” he told his daughter.
Camp Nawakwa was his idea of heaven. And soon his ashes will join those of his parents and other relatives under the smooth surface of Big Crooked Lake. A memorial will take place at Krause Funeral Home & Cremation Services, 7001 W. Brown Deer Road, in Milwaukee on Friday, June 16, from 4 to 7:15 p.m., with a service at 7:30 p.m. Contact Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or jstingl@jrn.com. Connect with my public page at Facebook.com/Journalist.Jim.Stingl