Lawrence College, Appleton, Wisconsin

These postcards show where Carl spent much of his time at lawrence College from September of 1949 through the spring of 1950.  When he had finished his 18-month enlistment in December of 1948, he had a hard time finding a job.  His parents had moved from Kimberly (a few miles east of Appleton) to Antigo, Wisconsin, which was a small town in northern Wisconsin, and his only income was playing dance jobs.  He had saved enough to pay for a year of college so he started at the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence College in Appleton.  Lawrence had the reputation of being a rich-man’s school because so many of their students came from the wealthy suburbs of Milwaukee and Chicago, but Appleton students certainly gained from its being located there also.  Appleton had one of the best-rated school systems in the state because of the influence of Lawrence College, and Wisconsin was a very progressive state educationally, at that time anyway.  For example, when Joyce was working on her master’s degree in Kansas years later, one of her special education instructors was giving some rather dismal statistics of when special education first got it’s start.  I corrected him at that time saying that my hometown had a school for special ed kids when I was in grade school in the late ‘30s.  He smiled at me and said, “Then you must have been raised in Wisconsin.  They were the early leaders of special education.”  Carl and I met when we were both conservatory students at Lawrence in 1952, after he returned home from his second stretch in the military, which was not an enlistment, but a recall to Korea.  After school ended in 1950, however, he joined the Merchant Marines and spent the summer on the Great Lakes ore boats.  That would give him the finances he needed to continue his education.