Eugene G. Schmoller

In 1892, fourteen-year-old George Cable ran away from home to join the circus. It worked out so well; maybe everybody should run away and join the circus.

Let me explain. There is a spot along Mid Lake Road in Oneida County where the road is only about 20 feet from the shore of Mid Lake. If you stop there and look to the north, you will see a point of land on the northeast shore of Mid Lake. There is a boathouse on the point and a lodge to the west of it. Further back in the woods there is a cabin and a garage. George and his wife Clara built these between 1924 and 1934 with the help of Otto Hulte from Woodruff, using the trees on the property for lumber.   

Schmoller

The Cables were from Waukesha. By the 1920s, George had two successful businesses. One was advertising for the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus to which he ran, and the other was billboard advertising. Through his business contacts, he heard about cheap, cutover land in northern Wisconsin. He visited the area and bought acreage on what was then named Nod-Away Point on the northeast shore of Mid Lake, which was then named Nawaii Lake. He and is wife began vacationing at the cottage in 1925, eventually staying through the summer into December.  

On October 29, 1928, a week before Herbert Hoover was elected President, a grandson was born to the Cables. His name was Eugene (Gene) Schmoller. His father Charlie was a saxophonist, headlining an orchestra in Waukesha. His mother Ruth, Clara’s daughter, was a switchboard operator for Ma Bell.  

His first birthday fell on Black Tuesday, the day the US stock market fell 11.73%, which was the day after Black Monday, when the market fell 12.82%. America and the rest of the world plunged into the Great Depression. The Schmollers lost their home, bounced around in rentals, and eventually moved in with the Cables. George’s advertising business held steady during the Depression and was enough to support both families, including their summertime vacations to Mid Lake. It was on those childhood vacations — catching frogs, fishing, swimming, and playing in the sand — that Gene developed an undying love for the Northwoods. “I would be so excited, I could hardly sleep the night before we would leave,” he wrote. “The first thing I did upon arrival was to run to the lake to see if it was there — and to look for frogs.”

And then, head to the boathouse. “The boathouse was a place of wonder for me,” he wrote. “It had a tackle room where the rods and reels, buckets, motors, anchors, oars, and clothes were kept. There were several sets of coveralls for the good fishermen and guests. Cane poles lined the walls, and two boats had their places with a wooden walk between. It was also where tall stories were told to gullible children. Some of the largest spiders I’ve ever seen lived there along with the bats that called it home.” He was hooked like a musky. “It was heaven for teenaged boys.”

After he graduated from Waukesha High School in 1946, Gene enrolled in the University of Wisconsin - Madison, but he dropped out after a semester and took a job at Waukesha Motor Works. After saving a substantial sum of money, he returned to UW-Madison in 1948 and, despite the persistent conflict between the demands of the university and those of the billiard hall, he graduated with a BS in bacteriology in 1952. 

But wait. Before he graduated, during his last semester, while walking on campus near Lake Mendota, he spotted another student walking in his direction. As she passed, he wheeled around and asked his buddy who she was. That was Anne Lozyk, a Ukrainian student from Montreal, Canada. She was taking her final semester of college at Madison. 

They were married that fall in Montreal. That was September 29, 1952.

The next year, Gene was drafted into the army. In August, shortly after the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, he reported to Fort Lewis, Washington for basic training. He served in the Army Medical Corps. Anne gave birth to his first son, Craig, in March 1954 in Waukesha. She and Craig moved out to Fort Lewis in June. Gene was discharged a year later. He pointed out that the western US was never attacked while he was stationed at Fort Lewis, which is a fact, but the relationship to his service remains largely obscure. 

College, military service, a growing family, a tight budget, Gene was stuck in the middle of a dry spell, a long period away from the Northwoods. So, when his grandparents decided to sell the property, Gene was in no position to buy it. The Cables sold the cabin, lodge, garage, boathouse, and hundreds of feet of lake frontage for about $14,000, to Gene’s lasting regret. 

After his discharge, Anne typed out about 60 job applications and sent them around the United States. About 50 companies responded. The best offer he received was as a food chemist with Swift and Company research and development center in Chicago, hog butcher for the world. His first office was in a laboratory next to the wildly aromatic Chicago Stock Yards. His second office was at the sparkly new laboratory in Oak Brook. Although it would be a luminous mistake to describe his employment benefits as charitable, he loved his work, acquiring two patents for food processing during his tenure, and developing good friendships at the office. Two more children came along, David in 1957 and Gail in 1959. They bought a house in the suburbs. Over the next 50 years, Gene patiently filled the yard with flower gardens. 

In 1962, he resumed vacationing in the Northwoods, spending all his rations of Swift and Company vacation time at resorts on Mid, Little Spider, Towanda, Verna, and Johnson Lakes. He was back in his element, fishing, swimming, sunning, catching the occasional frog, and eager to see his family fall under its spell. We vividly remember how excited he was on the drive from Chicago to Minocqua — a seven-hour celebration — and how grim he became on the drive from Minocqua to Chicago. No wonder, there. 

When his grandmother passed away in 1967, Gene got a small inheritance from her, funded, in part, by the sale of the property on Mid Lake some 15 years earlier. It was like a piece of his boyhood cottage. He saw an opportunity. He gathered his resources and took Anne on a search for lakefront property in the Lakeland area. They settled on frontage on Vandercook Lake in Vilas County, a small, clear lake with white-sand beaches and musky planted by the DNR in the early 1960s. They also bought frontage on East Twin Lake near Hazelhurst. Seven years later, he built a vacation home on Vandercook. He called the time working on their home “some of the happiest years of my life.”    

But he was still in servitude to Swift and Company. Vacation time was as rare as a virgin pine. His big break came in 1984 when Swift caught the downsizing fever and restructured the R&D, jettisoning a large part of the personnel, including Gene. He had been there 29 years. There was no gold watch. Showing a degree of malleability that surprised us all, he changed careers at the age of 55, becoming an insurance agent for Aid Association for Lutherans (AAL). But something more important had changed. Having time to reflect on his relationships, he formally apologized to each of us for mistakes he made in the past, his lack of involvement in our lives, and from that point, grew more engaged and sympathetic. This was the real surprise. 

Emancipated from Swift, he was able to work a shorter week with greater pay, enabling him to spend lavish amounts of time at Vandercook. At the same time, he was recruited to work as a food taster — yes, that’s right — a profitable endeavor that continued some 15 years beyond his retirement from AAL. One of his sons compared it to a job as a mattress tester. 

Anne had retired from teaching in 1993. As Gene shed Swift in 1984, then AAL in 1994, and his taste testing dwindled, they found themselves at a point where they could sell their house in Illinois and move to Vandercook full time. In 2010, that’s just what they did. This time, for the first time, Gene was a year-round resident in the Northwoods, not a vacationer. Immediately, he set out to fill the yard with flower gardens. 

The celebration would last only six years. In 2016, Anne’s health declined quickly, and it became too difficult, too dangerous to maintain a rural existence in a snowbound country, so they were obliged to move to an independent living facility near Minneapolis, near their oldest son. Only two weeks later, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Six weeks after they had arrived in Minneapolis, Gene was a widower. 

There he was, alone on the third floor of an apartment building in an urban environment, with a clear mind and strong constitution - into his 90s, he could walk up and down seven flights of stairs, he read an entire newspaper every day. He missed the Northwoods, his lakefront home, the lake, the sunsets reflected on the mirror surface, his friend of 60 years who also lived on Vandercook, the white pine fragrance, the loons calling at night, and the naps on the deck. He was a vacationer again, a guest, visiting occasionally during warmer weather when he could safely make the four-hour drive. He wished that somehow, he could have arranged things differently so that they could have stayed at the lake house, his dream house.

But as he sat alone in that apartment for six years, he wasn’t looking at walls lined with photos of his vacation homes. There were many photos of his flower gardens and a few of his parents, brother, and children. No house. But in strategic places on tables throughout his apartment — in his bedroom, in the living room by the houseplants, and near his recliner where he would read the newspaper and write limericks and play virtual Scrabble and text his children — were photos of Anne when she was young.  

Finally, a few weeks ago, Gene himself was diagnosed with an aggressive terminal cancer. On Friday, July 28, eight days before his death, the last time he was able to speak coherently, he said, “The sooner I die, the sooner I…if it’s in the books for me to meet my wife, the sooner I will meet my wife.”