Transcript

Location: 600 Sumner St.

Raymond Bice: This was a sawmill town, as you perhaps have heard. And that is very real to me because I can still remember the sawmills on Black River. There were several of them, uh, right along the shores of Black River, right here at the foot of the North La Crosse streets and also South La Crosse.

Now, my father and my grandfather were both, uh, workers at the sawmills. And at one time or another they were both foreman. Now the foremen received a dollar and a quarter a day and the regular workers received a dollar a day. And their hours were ten to eleven hours a day. And I used to go over there and, uh, get my father and walk home with him at night, at six o’clock. They all had a big whistle and when that whistle blew, that meant the men were going to come home and we only lived two blocks from the sawmill so we’d go over and walk home with my father. 

Uh, these sawmills were really nothing but wooden shacks, buildings. They were large, rambling affairs, and they always had big steam, uh, engine, uh, special, big building for that. And they had—uh, this whistle had a long wire hanging down with a wooden knob on it that a tall man could reach and right on the hour that whistle would blow and everybody in the whole area would hear it and so one day, uh, my father asked the engineer who ran the big engine that ran the entire plant if I could blow the whistle and so he held me up and I pulled the, uh, cord and blew that enormous whistle and let the men out and I got a big thrill out of that. I was about eight years old.

So the next day I went over to get my dad and I went into this engine room and the engineer wasn’t there and I thought it would be nice to blow the whistle again and I watched the clock. I got a table or a stool or something and pushed it over there and I got up on there and I couldn’t wait till it got to be twelve and I pulled the whistle and let all the men out five minutes early.