Years that made Milwaukee famous
In his new coming-of-age memoir, sportswriter Steve Rushin finds himself in a new city
Steve Rushin’s new book, Nights in White Castle, shares stories of his formative time at Marquette in the 1980s. Rushin joined Sports Illustrated as a reporter in 1988 right after graduating, and three years later he became the magazine’s youngest senior writer. In 2007, he returned to his alma matter to deliver the Commencement speech and receive an honorary degree from Marquette. In this excerpt from his book, Rushin arrives on campus with his parents and moves into McCormick Hall.
Mom, Dad, and I now arrive in Milwaukee by Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, to a scratch-and-sniff city of odors: west of campus, the Miller brewery smells like hops.
To the east of campus, the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory is a real-life Roald Dahl phantasmagoria, pumping out Wonka-like bars for the Charlie Buckets of Milwaukee and issuing a kind of visible aroma for the rest of us, like those vapor trails of pleasing smells — fresh-baked apple pie on a windowsill — that travel up the nostrils of hoboes in old Warner Bros. cartoons. The leather tanneries south of campus carry the scent of animal hides on the wind.
Many of Marquette’s myriad bars are Irish pubs, neighborhood joints, places called O’Donoghue’s, O’Paget’s, Glocca Morra, Murphy’s Law, Hegarty’s, the Ardmore, the Gym, and — most belovedly — the Avalanche, home of the Naked Beer Slide. This last, I’m told, involves divesting oneself of one’s clothing, lubricating the floor with pitchers of Red White & Blue, then Pete Rose–diving across its foamy surface — from the men’s room to the jukebox — on an alcoholic Slip ’n Slide.
Marquette houses some of its freshmen in a cylindrical high-rise dorm that resembles a 16-ounce tall boy of Old Milwaukee. McCormick Hall was completed in 1967 in a style that could best be described as Beer Can Brutalism. Its architect was Joseph Schlitz, or possibly Frederick Pabst.
The building is twelve stories tall, and my room is on the third floor, and because the students on the upper floors have discovered a glitch — hold down the lobby button and the elevator will take you directly to the lobby, an express train bypassing all other floors — I climb the stairs holding a milk crate filled with my every possession. A flexible desk lamp peers over the edge of the box like a pet goose.
The dining hall downstairs is catered by a food service called SAGA. Hans, my resident advisor, says, “SAGA stands for Soviets’ Attempt to Gag America.”
Just last week, Ronald Reagan announced during the sound check for his weekly radio address, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you that today I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This jocular threat of nuclear annihilation is hilarious and was the source of endless jokes in the past several days.
On the third floor, I pass what used to be a large lounge, now evidently a storage area for decrepit furniture. Each floor used to have two of these TV lounges, but now there is only empty cabinetry where the TVs used to be. We’re told — can it possibly be true? — that students threw the TVs out the windows on the night, in 1977, when the Marquette Warriors beat North Carolina in the national basketball championship game in Atlanta.
I try to imagine that joyous aftermath, the Zeniths — each one as heavy as a safe — falling from the windows, their seaweed-green screens shattering on the pavement below, all those MU freshmen defenestrating TVs like the rock stars of that era.
Just beyond the lounge and the express-train elevator is my room, number 304, a tiny pie wedge of this circular building with just enough room for bunk beds, a mini fridge, a desk facing either wall, a window, and a wall-mounted, rotary-dial telephone the color of Silly Putty.
My roommate gets up from his desk chair and extends his right hand. “Zeke,” he says. He’s dipping Skoal.
Zeke is in ROTC and has preceded me by several weeks. The room is already festooned with U.S. Navy recruiting posters. The tiny fridge is already filled with cans of Old Style. In a city that smells like beer, we’re living in a giant beer can, which is in turn filled with many smaller beer cans.
Zeke has already selected the bottom bunk. He’s spitting tobacco juice into a plastic cup, which is resting on the radiator, heating it like soup. I know from the profile card Marquette mailed to Bloomington a month ago that Zeke, my randomly assigned roomie, is from Cincinnati, and we discuss Hudepohl beer, Skyline chili, Graeter’s ice cream, the Big Red Machine, King Kwik convenience stores, and WLW radio for three full minutes, after which I’m relieved to meet Mom and Dad at the corner of 22nd and Wisconsin Avenue, in front of the M & I Bank, to open my first checking account.
I’m already becoming my own person. Mom and Dad don’t have TYME cards. Mom would no more use an automated teller than an automated doctor. Despite my fancy new TYME card, Mom suggests I use the checkbook whenever possible.
I don’t know it yet, but I will fill my check register with page after unbroken page of $7.04 withdrawals made out to Domino’s Pizza.
But for now, Mom and Dad are preparing to leave me, armed against the world with my empty checkbook. It’s getting late in the afternoon, and they have a long drive ahead of them.
“Call us,” Mom says.
“Every Sunday,” I promise, though I wish I could call them five minutes from now, when they’re westbound on I-94, just to hear their voices.
I’ve seen ads in the paper for “cellular car phones” that allow drivers to make and receive calls on the “analog cellular telephone network,” whose tentacles, apparently, have newly spread across the U.S. this year.
But I’ll have to wait until Sunday evening, after dinner, because that’s when Mom and Dad get their calls from Tom and Jim. Dad listens on the extension for three minutes and says, “I’ll let you talk to your mother.”
In the parking lot of the M & I Bank, Dad shakes my hand and Mom hugs me, resisting the urge to wet, with her own saliva, a wadded Kleenex fished from her purse. Never again will she wipe a smudge of something off my face.
And then they’re gone. I watch the Cutlass Supreme head west down Wisconsin Avenue, its turn signal blinking back a tear, before hanging a left toward I-94, the Minnesota license plate — 10,000 Lakes — disappearing from view.
Edited excerpt from NIGHTS IN WHITE CASTLE Copyright © 2019 by Steve Rushin. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved.
