I was set to see cherished things from my childhood, farms, corn, silos, pigs, farmers in overalls, cheese and cows everywhere.
Well, I didn't see a single pair of overalls. My next disappointment was the absence of cows and the never ending cornfields. It was July, prime growing season for corn in Wisconsin.
And I don’t know where Wisconsin is hiding its cows. It is the Dairy State.
The state is so famous for its dairy industry that when I was a teen, Walt Disney packed up his Mouseketeers and brought them all the way from California to Wisconsin to film Adventures in Dairyland. What a show that was!
Those were the good old days. Milk and butter were sacred. I remember the family scandal when Mom started buying oleo, a predecessor of margarine. It was an underground movement in Wisconsin, especially since we lived in a farming community. The neighbors smuggled bags of oleo in from Illinois, and we kept it in the basement.
The white, gooey oleo came in a plastic bag that had a big blob of red in the middle. My job was to knead the bag until it magically turned to yellow as the dye from the blob in the middle permeated the white oleo.
It was quite an adventure. When it arrived, in a hushed voice Mom would lead me downstairs to the basement to knead the bags. No one was to know we had oleo in the house.
Suddenly, Mom was my hero. She seemed so entrepreneurial to buck the establishment so that she could economize for the family.
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Today, energy farms and windmills dot the Wisconsin landscape, but I was hoping to see the dairy farms and cows from my yesteryear's.
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