INSTRUMENTOS CURRICULARES Planificación Docente

INTRODUCTION– FEEDING MILWAUKEE: THE CHANGING FACE OF GROCERIES

Before permanent European colonizers arrived, the entire region that would one day be known as Milwaukee was a kind of natural grocery store. Food historians Harva Hachten and Terese Allen describe the area as overflowing with wild edibles:

“Sprinkled liberally throughout, like candy shots on a cake, was a great array of edibles… The woods were chock-full of berries…. nuts carpeted the ground in their seasons. There were wild plums, crabapples, May apples, grapes. Wild rice choked lakes and rivers. The honey of wild bees filled hollow tree stumps, and the maples flowed with sweet sap each spring.

Feeding on these riches (and on one another) were more than a hundred species of mammals and fowl… Migrant ducks, Canada geese, and passenger pigeons literally darkened the skies in their travels, so great were their numbers. Cisco, lake chubs, whitefish, smelt, perch, suckers, muskellunge, pike, bass, trout, sturgeon, crappies, bluegills, catfish, and bullheads teemed in the waters.”396

In the present day, the food consumer does not need to fish or hunt or forage, though many people find food in the wild, both for recreational reasons and to relieve the strain of grocery bills. It is far simpler to walk into a shop and

396 _{Harva Hachten and Terese Allen, The Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal} History of Food and Eating In the Badger State, Revised and Expanded Edition (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2009), 1.

take a box or bag off of the shelf than to track a quarry or to scrutinize a plant to assure that it is not poisonous.

Since Milwaukee’s settlement, food consumption has evolved. In the early years of Milwaukee, residents’ options shifted from hunting and gathering, to farming, to purchasing from traveling peddlers. With the advent of general stores, the consumption paradigm shifted to buyers traveling to a shop and purchasing goods, as opposed to people hunting and gathering, or peddlers coming directly to people’s homes, though the peddling business dwindled throughout the early twentieth century. During the heyday of peddling, there were food carts such as the waffle wagon man, from whom one could purchase two large waffles with powdered sugar for a nickel.397 Some bakery carts toured neighborhoods on alternating days, changing their stock in order to offer

neighborhoods different kinds of breads and pastries. Ice cream vendors often came by, also selling other treats like frozen candy bars.398 Traveling vendors were not the only food sellers to travel through neighborhoods. Many

neighborhood grocery stores made home delivery within a limited radius upon request.399

By the early decades of the twentieth century, larger chain stores trickled into the city. By the middle of the century, the small, independently owned stores had largely but not entirely faded away, and the age of the supermarket had

397 _{Catherine Otten, The Corner Grocery Store (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: T/D} Publications, 1975), 24.

398 _{Valerie Weber and Beverly Crawford, Shopping in Grandma’s Day} (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 1999), 24.

begun. Though the total number of “mom-and-pop” stores dwindled, numerous shops of that description remained in residential neighborhoods, and alternative food buying options such as farmers’ markets were present seasonally. Ethnic food shops and specialty food stores were also sprinkled throughout Milwaukee’s landscape, and “convenience” stores providing a limited number of goods were plentiful.

Throughout this chapter, there will be particular emphasis on the ways and places consumers could buy food. Over time, many groceries and supermarkets remodeled and restructured in order to provide an atmosphere that was more comfortable for customers, easier for shoppers to navigate, and potentially more conducive to the store’s profitability. Additionally, academic research on

Milwaukee’s food consumers and shopping venues will be referenced in order to provide numerical and anecdotal evidence regarding the mindsets of

representative Milwaukeeans. This chapter will observe how Milwaukee’s grocery stores changed decade by decade. In 1920, most of Milwaukee’s consumers did most of their shopping at the small, independent neighborhood grocery store, local butcher, greengrocer, and fishmonger. By 1970, shoppers patronized stores further away from their homes, almost always including a large chain supermarket with a wide selection. The small grocery store has suffered a reduction in prominence, but it has not vanished from Milwaukee. Many little shops and bodegas still exist in residential neighborhoods, serving a small but loyal clientele of locals. Over the course of the century, food consumption

options widened considerably, thanks to new kinds of stores, new products, and the automobile making travel easier and quicker.

PRE-1920’s MILWAUKEE– FROM HUNTING AND GATHERING TO SHOPPING

The development of food shopping in Milwaukee has been briefly

referenced at the start of this chapter. The earliest settlers of European heritage in Milwaukee were initially compelled to live off the land, gathering naturally growing edibles, hunting game, and fishing. As these settlers built permanent residences, many people in the area began growing crops to supplement their diets. When communities began to form, peddlers traveled from house to house with edibles for sale. Once the local population was large enough to support a sustainable business, general stores were built, and consumers could travel to these stores, sometimes on foot, sometimes by horse, in order to buy needed foodstuffs. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the city of Milwaukee had grown considerably, and residential neighborhoods had small stores catering to their dietary needs. Most neighborhoods had grocery stores, bakeries, butcher shops, and other food stores located within walking distance of most people’s homes. These stores started to sell new products with the advent of processed food, which brought additional variety to Milwaukee’s consumers. Larger food sellers were located in Milwaukee’s business districts.

In 1900, many prominent and upscale businesses were located in the downtown area. A. Booth & Co., a fishmonger’s shop that described its wares as

the “Cheapest Food on the market,” and itself as “the Finest Fish Market in the city” was located downtown on 435 Milwaukee Street. John V. Alcott, a

greengrocer’s that specialized in high-quality produce for special occasions, was located on 1215 Wells St. and delivered throughout the city. H. Mahler & Sons, a butcher’s shop that professed that its meats were “CHEAPER at this market than any other,” was found at 136 Mason St. These and many other stores offering either great bargains on food or hard-to-find delicacies were mainly centered in the downtown area. The Milwaukee Journal advertised these stores in a regular food section titled “Where to Order the Sunday Dinner,” indicating that the downtown food stores could provide premium food for what might be the grandest meal of the week.400 Many of the city’s best-known food stores were based in the downtown area, since residents from the North, South, East, and West sides could all meet in the middle of Milwaukee.

Perhaps the most prominent food store in Milwaukee at this time was Steinmeyer’s, whose central building was located in the downtown area starting in the mid-1890’s. Steinmeyer’s on Third Street was one of the largest and most luxurious grocery stores in Milwaukee for decades. William Steinmeyer was a Civil War veteran who entered Milwaukee’s grocery business in 1865 when he became a partner in a grocery on Fourth and Chestnut (the latter street was later renamed Juneau Avenue).401 Eventually Steinmeyer enacted two major changes

400 _{“Where to Order the Sunday Dinner,” The Milwaukee Journal, 29 March} 1900, sec. A, 10. All capitalizations are as printed in the newspaper. All capitalizations are reproduced as published.

401 _{Erwin W. Kieckhefer, “Milwaukee Neighborhood Grocery Stores: A Memoir,”} Milwaukee History 16, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 40.

to his business practices. First, he stopped extending credit to his customers; an action that critics believed would destroy him, since most grocery stores

habitually extended credit to their reliable clients. This policy might have hurt him, if Steinmeyer had not instituted a second new policy– home delivery. He manned his establishment during the day, and once he closed his store for the night he traveled about the neighborhood distributing orders. This saved busy consumers a trip to the store and the inconvenience of carrying their goods home. The response was enthusiastic, and Steinmeyer obtained a partner and used his profits to expand and extend his delivery services (one store utilized fifty-five employees and fourteen horse-drawn delivery carts). The money rolled in, and the company opened its landmark Third Street store not long after Steinmeyer’s untimely death in 1892. He was fifty-one.402

Erwin W. Kieckhefer described the famous Steinmeyer’s store in his account of Milwaukee’s grocery shops, writing that:

“Some seem to think Steinmeyer’s was comparable to Harrod’s Food Halls in London, but it was not that kind of glitzy operation. Customers who came to the store simply sat in the customer service area at small tables of the sort used in soda fountains, and clerks would take their orders and see to the deliveries. The store itself was more like a warehouse, with merchandise stacked high and crowded onto the floors. So it was in a way much like the neighborhood stores with their counters where the customers stated their needs to the clerks. But

Steinmeyer’s did serve the entire community and would fill orders for delivery anywhere in the nation if called upon to do so. And its salesmen walked the neighborhoods every morning soliciting orders and then would hustle back to the store on foot at noon to spend the afternoon preparing the orders for delivery the next morning.”403

402 _{Ibid., 40.}

Though Steinmeyer’s might ship foodstuffs across the nation upon request, the vast majority of their business came from serving Milwaukee’s public. Chain store competition, coupled with a severe strain on business due to the Depression and World War II rationing, led to Steinmeyer’s downfall. The business shut its doors in 1945.404

Long before large chain stores posed a serious threat to the economic well- being of the small family-owned shops, the small shops competed against each other. Often there were multiple groceries in a neighborhood, and they might attempt to siphon business away from their competitors through lower prices, premiums, or offering other kinds of services to customers. Alternatively, small stores might fall victim to unscrupulous vendors or wholesalers who might provide tainted merchandise or impose inflated prices. Believing that there was strength in numbers, independent stores banded together to protect their combined interests throughout the city. In April of 1900, the Milwaukee Retail Grocers’ Association was formed. The Association’s first president, Patrick J. Savage, announced that:

“For a long time the retailers here have been pulling against each other and allowing all kinds of abuses to creep into the

business until of recent years they have been making nothing. So we thought that if an organization was formed they would have a chance to become better acquainted with each other and a more friendly feeling would prevail...

The association will take an active interest in all legislation that affects the retailers. For instance, there are a large number of street peddlers who actually pay no license fee, have practically no expenses and do not spend their money here, but send it back to Europe. They carry their goods from door to door and undersell

the regular dealers, who pay taxes year after year and do their share toward supporting the community.”405

The Milwaukee Retail Grocers’ Association was intended to improve business for independent grocers, although there was also a clear attempt to circumvent their competition. Peddlers, in all likelihood, resented any fees that might have cut into their profits, and grocers similarly resented the fact that peddlers were able to offer lower prices due to their lower overhead costs, such as not having to pay rent. There was a clear animus on the part of the grocers

against immigrant peddlers who sent their profits back home across the Atlantic, and Savage further defended his desire to impose a new licensing fee on peddlers because Illinois had recently imposed a substantial license fee, which meant that many Chicago peddlers might pack up and move north to Milwaukee, further saturating the market.406 _{The tension between peddlers and grocers may have} gone unobserved by the average consumer.

While different food sellers might have had strained relations with each other due to competition, purveyors of groceries were often compelled to be friendly with their customers. Rudeness or even coldness could drive potential customers elsewhere, assuming that another store was sufficiently close. Due to the number of food stores throughout the city and the possibility of home

delivery, few small shops held a monopoly on their area’s provisions. Neighborhood grocery stores often had close ties with their communities, for many shoppers patronized the store on a near-daily basis. This was due to the fact

405 _{“Retail Grocers’ Association Will Advocate Licenses for Peddlers,” The} Milwaukee Journal, 4 April 1900, 8.

that food spoiled quickly in warm weather, before the invention of artificial refrigeration. Once iceboxes and refrigerators were invented, consumers were able to modify the frequency of their food shopping.*

Perishable items could also be delivered to homes on a daily basis. Milk, a staple for many households, was often delivered to homes by cart. In the early years of the twentieth century, housewives would wait for the milkman’s wagon to reach their neighborhood, and bring containers out to the cart to be filled with milk.407 In later years, deliverymen would bring bottled milk and often other dairy products like butter and cottage cheese directly to consumer’s homes. The glass bottles would then be returned for reuse. During the 1930’s, approximately seventy percent of packaged milk purchased in Milwaukee was delivered to consumers’ residences, with thirty percent of the city’s milk being bought in shops. By 1972, more than eighty-one percent of the city’s milk was purchased in stores along with the other groceries, and home delivery for dairy products and most other foods died out soon afterward, save for a relative handful of businesses that included delivery service.408

Whether people traveled to food stores or had their purchases delivered to them, grocery stores had to buy their food from somewhere before they were able to sell it, which meant that food wholesalers were an essential first step in the

* _{For more details on new technology and food preservation, see Appendix A.} 407 _{Remember When… A Nostalgic Look at Old Milwaukee With a Series of} Photos Originally Published in the Milwaukee Journal (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Milwaukee Journal, 1973), 35.

408 _{Robert A. Cropp and Truman F. Graf, Milk Programs of Wisconsin Food} Chains (Madison, Wisconsin: Research Division, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1972), 3.

consumption process. Roundy’s, one of southeastern Wisconsin’s largest wholesalers and food suppliers for decades, has been a prominent figure in Milwaukee’s food consumption landscape since 1872. The company’s name has changed over the years, beginning as Smith, Roundy & Co. in 1872. In 1898 William A. Smith left the company after being elected as Wisconsin’s Governor, and William S. Peckham joined the business, which subsequently changed its name to Roundy, Peckham, and Co.409 The final name change would come in 1952, with the formation of a new corporation founded to strengthen the business interests of Wisconsin’s retail grocers.410 The 1902 death of Sidney Hauxhurst, a partner in the business from the beginning, led to Charles J. Dexter’s company presidency and another name change to Roundy, Peckham & Dexter.411 As the decades passed, the business grew steadily, and eventually entered the direct-to- the-consumer retail business themselves in 1975 with the introduction of the Pick’n Save chain of supermarkets. Pick’n Save cut overhead costs by requiring shoppers to bag their own groceries, thereby saving the business money on checkout baggers.412 This development was characteristic of the times. From 1920 to 1970, Milwaukee evolved from a city filled with tiny neighborhood stores to a city largely supplied by large supermarkets.

409 _{Lydia Engelman, The History of Roundy’s Inc. (Roundy’s Inc, 1987), Dexter-} Roundy Family Papers, Milwaukee Manuscript Collection 108 and Milwaukee Micro Collection 57, Folder 14- Miscellaneous,University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee Libraries/Wisconsin Historical Society, 1.

410 _{Ibid., 6.} 411 _{Ibid., 3.} 412 _{Ibid., 8.}

THE 1920’s–THE AGE OF THE SMALL STORES

The age of the small stores started in the late nineteenth century, when Milwaukee had been settled and permanent buildings had been constructed. Though peddlers would continue to tour neighborhoods, they only provided a small fraction of people’s food. In his research on mid-century grocery store employees in Milwaukee, Paul Gilmore notes that Milwaukee’s food shoppers primarily bought their supplies from small, independent food shops until the Great Depression, but these habits were changing fast.413 During this era chain stores began to open up in various locations around the United States. The growth of the chains was rapid, increasingly so by the 1920’s. Though chain stores sprung up most densely in the Northeast and Midwest, chain stores in Wisconsin were among the most sparsely situated in the aforementioned regions during the 1920’s.414

Catherine Otten’s memoir The Corner Grocery Store gives a detailed perspective of the day-to-day workings of a small, independently owned food shop in Milwaukee. Set during the early decades of the twentieth century, mainly the 1910’s and early 1920’s, The Corner Grocery Store describes what it meant to run such an establishment during this time. The title shop, like most small food stores, was a “mom-and-pop” business run and staffed by a single family. Otten’s parents lived right behind their store, on the southern edge of Milwaukee. Otten describes the South Side shop as the “center of all neighborhood activities… like

413 _{Paul Gilmore, “Grocery Clerks and Meat Cutters: Milwaukee’s Grocery Store} Unions, 1920-1984,” (M.A. diss., UW-Milwaukee, 1995), 15.

414 _{James M. Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an} Architectural Space (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1993), 85.

a town hall…” where her Papa and Mama served as “advisors, mediators, confessors and sometimes even referees to many of the customers.”415 By befriending their customers and providing personal service, the family gained an extremely loyal clientele. They performed favors for friends, such as allowing