City’s Christmases past
Christmas in Milwaukee has been a time of lights, giving and getting, and celebrating the true meaning of the season.
In the pages of Milwaukee’s newspapers, it also has been a reflection of the times.
Here are a few ghosts of Milwaukee’s Christmases past, as reported in The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel.
1954: Trimming and building the tree
Sometimes, it takes a village of trees to light up Christmas.
For Milwaukee’s municipal Christmas tree in 1954, city workers nailed and wired 650 individual trees to a wooden pyramid frame, creating a Yuletide symbol that stood 70 feet high and 42 feet wide.
The giant man-made “tree,” boasting 500 colored lights, was a city tradition. In 1954, it was set up in MacArthur Square, immediately east of the County Courthouse.
Walter M. Schroeder, a park supervisor in the city’s forestry department, told The Journal that the tree-building took 51⁄2 days. The official tree-lighting was held Dec. 19, 1954, and the “tree” would stay up until Jan. 10, 1955, “if the kids don’t steal all the lights before then,” Schroeder said in The Journal’s Dec. 20, 1954, story on the tree-lighting.
Schroeder, who had been in charge of the city’s Christmas tree-building project since 1940, told The Journal that his wife was in charge of setting the tree at home: “When I try to tell her how to put up the lights, she says, ‘You just get out of here and let me work, Walter.’ She does a pretty good job of it, though.”
1968: One throne, two Santas
During the 1968 holiday season, Santa Claus met Santa Claus at Gimbels-Schuster’s.
In a demonstration designed to dramatize complaints by welfare recipients, about 50 children, 20 adults and an African-American Santa Claus marched on Dec. 6 from the St. Francis Social Center at 1916 N. 4th St. to the Gimbels Schuster’s department store three blocks away. At the store, the African-American Santa “took a seat beside a white Santa Claus and began listening to the Christmas wishes of children,” The Journal reported on Dec. 7, 1968.
A group of Milwaukee welfare recipients had been seeking a special $25 emergency grant for each member of families on welfare, to help families make it through the holidays. At a demonstration the day before the Santa march, 14 people had been arrested.
“The demonstrators spent less than an hour in the department store Friday night, then returned to the St. Francis Center with a supply of balloons given them by the white Santa Claus,” The Journal reported.
The special Christmas grants did not come through, however.
1973: Christmas blackout
With the nation in the grip of an oil shortage, President Richard Nixon on Nov. 26, 1973, called on Americans to cut back on unnecessary use of power — including display lights.
“Had it not been for a small sign outside Gimbels proclaiming ‘Open Tonight,’ passers-by might have thought the department store at 101 W. Wisconsin Ave. was closed Monday night,” Sentinel reporter Dean Jensen wrote in a Nov. 27, 1973, story. “Not one of many bulbs were burning on the resplendent, seven-story Christmas tree that has been seen outside the store during the holiday period for years.”
Not every downtown business was complying with the voluntary brown-out, Jensen reported: “The Voom Voom Lounge, 502 W. Wisconsin Ave., was lit up like a … well, Christmas tree, with winking, blinking orange, red and purple lights advertising the performing go-go dancers.”