Uncle Bill Oesterlein was a stoic German engineer,
working for years at Allis Chalmers, having escaped the terror of the
Nazis. He married Elsa Frank, a cousin
of ours in Milwaukee. They lived near the city, but owned a gingerbread
cottage in the woods of Mequon. In fact their property has the tallest stand of
White Pine in Southeastern Wisconsin. Here the wind loudly whispers through the
pines perched on the tall bluff overlooking a stream that leads down ravines to
Lake Michigan.
On weekends our family would go to visit and I would explore
the forests, ravines, pebbled beaches and crashing waves along Lake Michigan
below the cottage. It was always an adventure in the beauty of creation. Fox
and pileated woodpeckers scooted and flew through the trees. The
typewriter-like tapping of sapsuckers filled the air.
I would watch Uncle Bill split logs for his wood stove on a
fall late morning as the sun flickered patterns on the fallen bright autumn
leaves on the forest floor. He piled them high along his yellow painted wood
shed between the sawhorses laden with fallen pine needles and cones.
Inside Elsa was stoking the fire and preparing cookies and
pretzels to go with the cold bottle of German wine that Uncle Bill would always
open for my Dad. They would talk of old
family stories about the war in the screened-in porch while the wind and the
sun moved around us. I usually had a
couple of “Girlie Cakes,” what Uncle Bill called the old style Girl Scout sugar
cookies. They were the best ever.
After our visit, we would head up Zedler lane back to Port
Road and the old Kuiper’s Cheese House on the corner of Highland. Here grilled cheese sandwiches never tasted
better and the juke box played whatever tunes the many patrons had selected,
like The Yellow Rose of Texas. The
restaurant in now the Highland House, but they sure don’t have any stinky aged
Brick cheese.
I know my father and his older brothers Art and Bob had made
the visit to Uncle Bill’s often. Below is a photo of my father in his Army
uniform after his return from WWII at the cottage. It must have been 1945
and sometime shortly after my father’s long rehabilitation from grave wounds
suffered at Monte Cassino, Italy in 1944. I’m not sure of Uncle Bill, but Aunt
Elsa died in 1987 at 103 in a sanitarium.
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