Taking down controversial statues…they tried 17 years ago

In October of 2000, a special committee in La Crosse held a hearing on the future of the “Big Indian” statue in Riverside Park, nicknamed “Hiawatha.”  Some native American residents of the area thought the statue was stereotyped and offensive, and wanted it removed from the park.  The concrete man had been designed 40 years earlier by local artist and teacher Anthony Zimmerhakl.  The eventual decision that year was to keep the statue.

A future president appeared at the La Crosse Center that October.  George W. Bush campaigned La Crosse a few weeks before the election.  Bush would come to La Crosse three times during his administration…once at Logan High School, once at Loggers Stadium in Copeland Park, and once at Onalaska’s Omni Center.  The two main candidates for vice president, Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman, made separate stops in La Crosse during the last week of the campaign.

And that October, the La Crosse Community Theatre began a series of live radio dramas on WIZM, featuring local actors performing in front of an audience.  The first live show, airing the Saturday night before Halloween, was the H.G. Wells story “The Invisible Man.”  Later broadcasts included “Dracula,” “Frankenstein,” and “The War of the Worlds.”  The last of those live radio shows happened in 2008, but the first was in October 2000, yesterday in La Crosse.