If his previous work cataloging the history of Milwaukee didn't make South Side native John Gurda a hometown celebrity, then surely his sprawling and impressive "The Making of Milwaukee" and its accompanying TV series did.

Now, he is, without a doubt, recognized as the living memory of Milwaukee, especially now that the formidable Frank Zeidler has left us.

Gurda took some time away from his latest project -- a history of Jewish Milwaukee -- to answer our questions and we asked him about how he got into the history game and more in this edition of Milwaukee Talks.

OMC: Where does your love of history come from?

JG: I really did not get into history until after college. I had two brothers who couldn't care less, who were raised by the same parents in the same household in the same neighborhood with all the same influences. I'm not sure what it is.

OMC: What is your Milwaukee background? Where did you grow up?

JG: I was raised on South 34th Street near Jackson Park until I was 8, and then moved out to Hales Corners. Graduated from high school and then moved back into town after college. My dad's Polish, mom's Norwegian ... their backgrounds. My grandparents had a hardware store on 32nd and Lincoln for 50 years, from 1915-'65.

So that was kind of my world, you know? Even when we became suburbanites, we were still spending a lot of time on the old South Side. We'd go to the Folk Fair every year, there was Polish Festoons at Christmas, we'd go to my mom's farm in summers. So there was, if you wanted it, you could sort of relate to the traditions ... and, I did, and my brothers didn't, especially. It just struck some sort of a native cord.

OMC: When did the history come?

JG: When I really got into history was after college when I graduated as an English major from Boston College. I came back to Milwaukee and -- this is 1969 -- wanted to write and (was) interested in being a poet, but all of those jobs were taken. There wasn't much going on there.

I ended up working for three years at a youth center called Journey House, which is still there. It's been there for 40 years. Working with, at that time, largely Anglo -- some Latino population coming in. We were just a shoestring operation -- I think we had six full-time staff and the operating budget was $45,000 plus the building we were renting and supplies. We were just living on air. So we began to do some fundraising (for a project) to examine the neighborhood (which I did) just instinctively, both in terms of where it was and where it came from. I don't know if we tossed a coin or what, but I did the history portion. It was just ... the light bulb comes on, and you hear the chorus.

OMC: Did you go back then and study history formally?

JG: Not for a while. That led to a publication -- little ... very primitive (one) -- called "The Near South Side: A Delicate Balance," fearlessly titled. That led to a job doing research for United Way Project that was doing neighborhood-based needs assessments. When that was done, I was laid off.

Just because I was fascinated, I did a little pamphlet about South Side history which is was my family -- my roots. I'd come across things. I'd be going through the County Historical Society archives and my great uncle, who was a real hero to my dad and therefore to me was the first Polish captain of the second precinct. I'd find references to him. I found correspondence in the Polish ethnic file on my dad, being the secretary of a Slavonic Society at UW-Madison back in the 1920s, so it was sort of personal.

OMC: Is that how you found the early projects you worked on? Did the sort of come to you in that sense -- out of personal relationships?

JG: The "Separate Settlement" project came because I wrote it absolutely on my own with no expectation of being published -- no one funding it, no one sponsoring it, and the United Way published it. They read it and said, "Whoa, that's kind of interesting." Nobody was doing neighborhood stuff back then. That came out in 1973 or so ...'72-'73. So yeah, it was kind of the blend of this is a really interesting history in its own right, but I'm part of it. It's my story as well as the city's story. And that led to a project in Waukesha County, again for United Way. It was what they called the "informal survey," which was going around and talking to people. And it was ...

OMC: Was it written as oral history in a sense?

JG: No, it was more journalistic, and it was just -- if I read it now -- the publication was another great title, "Understanding Waukesha County." There are 16 townships in Waukesha County and each one -- obviously Menomonee Falls is out by itself, but then out in Merton you've got a couple of villages as well as a township, and I think I had three weeks to do each township, and that meant historical research, interviewing people, doing some numbers and then writing a sketch of it.

I put probably a couple thousand miles on the car, and one of the guys in the project, an old friend, gave me a memo pad that read "From the Dashboard of John Gurda." It was indefensible research -- it was just crap. On the fly. Pretty basic stuff.

OMC: How did you parlay this then into a career? Was that a choice you made consciously?

JG: I was following my nose, and I had no real plan and honestly no real faith in how this could last. I'd been doing it pretty much full time or writing during layoffs. There's not much money involved here. About 1976 I realized that this could be work; this could be something as I do as a career. I had a serious lack of skills; a serious lack of background, so I knew I had to go to grad school.

UWM was the obvious choice, financially, and in terms of convenience. I talked about history, sociology, urban affairs and geography, and ended up going to geography. They had a really strong geography department and what I was doing was -- you could do MA or MS -- I did MA on the cultural side, and what I was doing was historical geography. What I was doing was neighborhoods, so I ended up getting a Masters in cultural geography and my thesis was on Jones Island, which was just fascinating stuff.

OMC: At UWM at the time, was there an understanding of the importance of the focus of some hyper-local history at that point?

JG: It was beginning, I think. It was long before the Milwaukee idea and those sorts of locally-applied things, but there was a strong urban geography staff there, and what better place to study the urban area than the urban area you're in. So there was a lot of Milwaukee stuff going on. People were doing topics -- thesis and dissertations -- on Milwaukee topics. So, no, it wasn't especially cutting edge, but it was still relatively early for doing that locally based stuff.

OMC: Do you have a moment you can look back on and say, this is when it started for you, a sort of official, legitimate, respectable career?

JG: Sure. Where it began to be more real, more sustainable - I graduated from the geography program in 1978 and a whole lot of my career has been circumstance and luck. Just good fortune. There was a program starting at UWM called the Milwaukee Humanities Program, and it was funded by The National Endowment for the Humanities and basically -- they had 400 grand to look at the city from the point of view of the humanities: literature, religion, history ... and it was pretty free-form. And I got hired as associate director or something. We were able to pick our own topics, and I said, ooh, neighborhoods. We were thinking in terms of an encyclopedia of Milwaukee neighborhoods and we knew -- we had two years of funding -- we knew this could be a sort of a prototype, something that would last on its own, but we wouldn't finish it. There was a senior component; there was a TV show, there was a film; there were books on women -- so it was really kind of somewhat motley.

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6 comments about this article. Post a comment / write a review.

Recent Talkbacks ...

Posted by Nuclear_Art on June 24, 2009 at 9:19 a.m. (report)

There was a village known as Deer Creek Village on the bluff around Superior and Russell. This was listed in an article and accompanying map in the Milwaukee Journal of December 13, 1925. Of course by the 1890s that area was built up with factories and houses so the village was long gone by that time. I have a transcription of the article and map shown here: http://oldmilwaukee.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=166

Posted by kinnickinnic on June 24, 2009 at 2:43 a.m. (report)

As my screen name indicates, I have an interest in Bay View, and Kinnickinnic Ave. I would really love to know more about the Native American history of Bay View. When I was a little boy in the early 1950's, my Grandfather told me "indians" still walked the path and picked wild herbs to smoke. This was when he was a boy in the 1890's. He showed me a spot where indians had a camp on Russell Street. And, he had an arrowhead collection, all of which were gathered in Bay View. Does anybody know more??

Posted by nfholton on June 23, 2009 at 4:57 p.m. (report)

Nice interview! I'm actually reading The Making of Milwaukee now and the book is absolutely terrific! I'm sure a lot of readers have been there and done that, but if not, I would encourage everyone to check it out. We can't understand where we are and where we need to go without first understanding how we got here.

Posted by julesj0812 on June 23, 2009 at 11:36 a.m. (report)

When I'm asked who my top 3 people (living or dead) would be to have lunch with, John is always the top pick. John Gurda is someone more Milwaukee citizens should be aware of! I wish he had a more wide-spread notoriety. As a young person, I'm usually teased for my rabid curiosity in Milwaukee history. I wish more people (especially my generation) had an appreciation and an interest for how far Milwaukee has come - and for how different a city it really is. John, you keep writing, I'll keep reading!

Posted by barbhaig1 on June 23, 2009 at 11:31 a.m. (report)

Terrific interview! John has done such a tremendous job helping define and describe our city's neighborhoods - it's great to hear about his academic and social justice background.