Pewaukee Village Voice is hosting a Candidate Forum on Thursday March 25th from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. It will be held in the Community room of the Pewaukee Public Library. Click here for a Candidate Forum flyer.

All candidates will be invited to the Candidate Forum. Citizens will be able to submit written questions to the candidates who attend.

The format of the Candidate Forum will be as follows:

The next election for Pewaukee Village Trustees will be held Tuesday, April 6th, 2010. Voting hours are from 7:00am to 8:00pm.
There are two voting locations in the Village.
Voters in wards 1-5 vote at Queen of Apostles School, 449 W. Wisconsin Avenue.
Voters in wards 6-10 vote at Village Hall, 235 Hickory Street.
Click here for a ward listing by address.

Pewaukee Village Voice is hosting a candidate forum on March 25, 2010. The event will be held at the Pewaukee Public Library from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Mark your calendars and plan to attend.
Click here for a Candidate Forum flyer.

The following 4 candidates will be competing for 3 open 2 year term seats. Pewaukee Village voice has submitted a Candidate Information Survey to each of the candidates running for the Trustee position. The candidate responses will be posted on the web site as soon as they become available.

Randy Demmitt (appointed inc.) Candidate response to survey request
388-F Park Hill Drive
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Steve R. Ebling candidate survey
388 Park Avenue
Pewaukee, WI 53072

John Laimon Candidate has not responded
129 Park Avenue
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Joseph Zompa (appointed inc.) candidate survey
736 Cheviot Drive
Pewaukee, WI 53072

If you would like to complete the question submission sheet in advance, you can download a copy here . The form is a fillable PDF document that can be printed when completed. If you have a scanner, it can also be emailed to Pewaukee Village Voice. Don't forget to let us know if you are a Village Citizen or a non Village citizen.

Village of Pewaukee president
Jeff Knutson…541
John Laimon…448

Village of Pewaukee trustee (three seats)
Paul Evert (inc.)…647
Cathy Baumann (inc.)…587
Tom Calder (inc.)…585
Peter Rohde…535

Pewaukee Schools (three seats)
James Huisman (inc.)…1,284
Ann Wells (inc.)…1,173
Chris Durski…1,111
Frank Goodwin (inc.)…1,015

Are you registered to vote in the village?

Stop at the Village Hall, 235 Hickory St. during regular office hours to take care of this before the elections on the first Tuesday in April. You will avoid a possible long line on election day, and it gives you a chance to see the new Village Hall.

Pewaukee Village Voice will be hosting a Candidate Forum on Wednesday March 25th from 6:30 to 8:30 P. M. It will be held in the Community room of the Pewaukee Public Library.

The Forum is an opportunity for citizens to ask the Candidates questions about Village issues. The questions will be submitted to the Candidates in writing on submission sheets provided at the Forum. All of the candidates have been invited to attend the Candidate Forum.

The format of the Candidate Forum will be:

The next election for Village of Pewaukee officials will be held April 7th 2009. The office of Village President and three Trustee seats will be voted on.
Voters in wards 1-5 vote at Queen of Apostles School, 449 W. Wisconsin Avenue.
Voters in wards 6-10 vote at Village Hall, 235 Hickory Street.

Pewaukee Village Voice is hosting a Candidate Forum on March 25, 2009. The event will be held in the Community Room at the Pewaukee Public Library from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Mark your calendars and plan to attend. We have submitted a Candidate Information Survey to each of the candidates running for office. The candidate responses will be posted on the web site as soon as they become available.

Candidates for Village President - 2 year term

Jeffrey Knutson (inc. Trustee) candidate survey
759 Glacier Road
Pewaukee, WI 53072

John Laimon candidate survey
129 Park Avenue
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Candidates for Village Trustee - 3 open 2 year term seats.

Cathy Baumann (inc.) candidate survey
228 Third Street
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Tom Calder (inc.) candidate survey
504 High Street
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Paul Evert (inc.) candidate survey
327 Lookout Drive
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Peter Rohde Candidate has not responded
356 E Wisconsin Ave
Pewaukee, WI 53072

Pewaukee Village Voice will be hosting a Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday September 24th from 6:30 to 8:30 P. M. It will be held in the Community room of the Pewaukee Public Library.

Our intent is to provide a forum where citizens have an opportunity to submit written questions to their elected officials and receive a response.

The format of the Town Hall meeting will be as follows:

When Asa Clark and his wife Naomi came from Vermont in 1836 to what is now the Village of Pewaukee, he built a dam to harness the lake’s power for his saw mill. His home was built on the corner of what is now Main Street and Prospect Avenue. That property is presently the location of the Joy Christian Fellowship Church. Naomi opened her parlor to students for the first school, in the winter of 1840-41.

The original school building was built in 1844 on the site of the present day Pewaukee Library. The first teacher was pail $12.00 per month, and got his room and board by living one week with each of his pupil’s families. I wonder if that would work today.

The year 1858 saw a larger building constructed of limestone from the quarries located at the northeast edge of the village. A brick school was next in 1884, and 1891 saw the first four year high school graduating class. In l898, after renovations and additions, the village took pride in having eight grades and the high school in one building.

In 1916 the Department of Public Instruction suggested that state aid would be denied if something was not done about the overcrowded school. The citizens promptly raised $25,000 for a new school. The old cream brick school was torn down and replaced with a new brick school in 1917.

By 1946, after WWII, the school district bought fifteen acres on William Steele’s hill at the end of Lake Street for $550.00 per acre, and constructed a ten room elementary school, which was at capacity almost as soon as it was finished. A new wing was necessary in 1955.

A fire with no traceable cause occurred at the high school building on Main and Prospect in the summer of 1953, forcing classes to be held in different locations in the village. With much cooperation from the community, students and faculty were able to return to the renovated school after Christmas.

Another remodeled and enlarged high school welcomed the growing school population in 1959-60. William Steele sold the school district sixty-three more acres adjacent to the elementary school in 1964 and on October 27, 1968 a two story high school was dedicated.

The school on Main and Prospect was closed in 1985, with the sixth grade moving to the elementary school, and the seventh and eighth grades going to the previously unfinished area of the high school. Fire was again responsible for the destruction of the school on Main and Prospect when it burned on November 11, 1992.

New subdivisions being built in the area warranted the construction of the Asa Clark Middle School in 1991. At this writing, the last building update was new wings at the high school in 2002-03. Currently about 2,200 students in K4 through 12 attend Pewaukee Schools on this one campus.

Information for this article was taken from the Joseph Ryan pamphlets, “Echo’s from Pioneer Trails” and “Asa Clark’s Return” and from “A History of the Settlement and Progress of Pewaukee, Wisconsin,” compiled and edited by Lorraine C. Redfield.

Secured with corner tabs in the black pages of an old album is a photo of a boy facing the camera with splotches of snow stuck to the front of his outdoor clothing. In 1930, before the days of water repellent snow suits, snow adhered well to flannel, wool and corduroy. “I must have been about four years old in that picture,” says well-known lifetime Pewaukee Village resident Al Hansen.

Hansen grew up in the village and never lived more than a block from school. His parents Alfred E. Hansen and Irene Simmons were married in 1924 and had 8 children in 10 years, 4 boys and 4 girls. Then, according to Al, “They figured out what was causing it.” The family first lived on Orchard St. and in 1935 moved to Prospect Ave.

In remembering Pewaukee in wintry days gone by, it seemed that the boundaries between traffic and non traffic areas became somewhat blurred, especially during times of heavy snowfall. One such example was the regular closing of Lake Street where it met Prospect Ave. Only delivery trucks were allowed through. This was done so that the village children, sometimes numbering 50 to 100, could gather to enjoy unimpeded and safe sledding down the entire road. On a good day you could get going on your Flexible Flyer or Red Arrow runner sled and make in all the way down to the river after turning right on Prospect and right again past the Clark House. On a really good day the old water tower might have overflowed, leaving an ice river on the right hand side for the extra daring. This practice continued on until about 1943. Most roads had at least several inches of hard packed snow during the season. No sand was used except at the intersections.

In about 1939 or ’40 Hansen also recalls ice skating with some buddies on old Hwy. 19 past the airport to Waukesha and back. “Just to see how far we could get,’ he says. An especially memorable winter for Hansen was in 1937. In February there were 20 days straight when it did not get up to 0°. At 10 years old he took a trip with his father in the 1930 Willys Knight to check on his Grandpa Hansen’s farm in Kenosha County. On Hwy. 45 the snow was piled up so high that only the very tops of the electric poles were showing. There was one-lane traffic with a wider area every quarter mile or so to allow two vehicles to pass through. On the return trip the last several miles were done with a team of horses. The cold temperatures and high winds combined to pack the fallen snow into a hard surface The snow was so hard that the horses could walk on top of it without breaking through. So extreme were the weather conditions that Ryan Road in the hollow north of Hwy. 16 where the Ryan farm was located was closed for three weeks. A bulldozer had to be used to clear it out. Of course the lake added another dimension to winter. There were memories of the ice harvest and the lake being full of people fishing. “People went fishing to eat in those days,” Hansen recalls. He himself never got into ice fishing but remembers going out on the ice in search of his father when he was six years old. “I stepped into an ice fishing hole and cried all the way home.”

There was ice skating on the Village Park pond and on the lakefront. The high school principal, Bill Raymond, taught math, science, coached sports and also took charge of winter sports on the lake. There would be a yearly county ice skating meet in front of Buroughs tavern where an oval track was cleared. It was pack racing and one of the competitors, Connie Stark, was to become an Olympic skater.

A less glorified skating memory for Hansen was at around age 12 when he was showing off for some girls. “I was skating backwards and fell and hit my head pretty hard and was kind of semi-conscious for the next 3 days. But I guess it didn’t rattle my brain too much.” In the 1930s and 40s there were many ice boats on the lake. Hansen rode in one only once but said it was quite a thrill. The boat belonged to a neighbor, Willard Bartlett. Ice boating has declined, in part because the ice does not freeze as solidly or for as long as in the past. Winter activities for teens included bobsled parties and hay rides at the homes of farm families. Basketball practice typically took place in a hay loft. Sports were very seasonal because there simply wasn’t the availability of indoor facilities and activities. Whatever you wanted to do you had to do for yourself on foot or bicycle. On the other hand, there was a lot of open space to roam and parents did not manage children’s time as in the present. In 1945 and ’46 Hansen was in Japan during the occupation after WWII. It seems even then he could not get away from snow. A couple of inches fell in Yokihama, much to the amazement of the children there who had never seen it before.

During the winter of 1947 Hansen was attending school in Milwaukee and had taken the Interurban train from there to Waukesha. A heavy snowfall prevented the train from continuing on so he stayed the night in the Waukesha Hotel in a room with nine other men. The next day he struck out for home on foot. “Every step of the way I’d go in about 2 feet, then lift that foot out and move it ahead. It was a tough walk but I was young, I could do it.”

Unable to return to school, he stayed and helped his dad on an oil delivery to Rocky Point Road at a home that was out of oil. Because of the deep snow, the truck only got in about 50’ and then he and his dad had to carry 50 gallons of oil by hand in 5-gallon buckets to the residence. “Bud Meyer, I think was out of oil, and it was cold. So we had to carry it. No extra charge,” he says with a smile and shrug.

Hansen Oil had a system of keeping “degree days” with a high/low thermometer and a magnet to determine how much oil a household had used and when a fill would be needed. The only time it didn’t predict closely was on Park Ave. when the wind was coming across the lake and those homes used a lot more fuel. No computers took over in those days, yet it was very accurate and came so close that fill trips were kept to a minimum.

Being in the oil business, the Hansen family probably had a little closer relationship with winter over the years. In 1951, Hansen remembers a temperature of -37°. The No. 2 fuel wouldn’t run out of the tank into the trucks. They had to wrap rags on wire, soak them in kerosene, light them and hold them under the pipes to get the oil to flow down. Another oil truck episode occurred in 1973 when Al was making an oil delivery in Brookfield and tried to barrel through a snow bank and the truck became stuck. The next day when he and his brother Don had it almost completely shoveled out they found that a 2’ square of snow was under the center of the truck and the wheels were an inch off the ground. In looking back, Hansen remembers working out in some pretty tough winters for 30 years. He enjoyed it but is presently glad to enjoy the great indoors during the cold months. He believes the average winter now, for whatever reason, is much milder. As for Global Warming, he simply says. “It’s there. Whether it’s man made or just natural, I don’t know.” The winter of 2007/ 2008 though, according to Hansen, “Was a good old fashioned winter.”