The Easter of 1929

Estella, her mother, Emma, and two brothers, Harold and Delbert Aldrich had been visiting Alma (Aldrich) Verhagen in Kimberly That Easter.  Albert Glassnap, who was Stella’s beau at the time, left Appleton in the early afternoon to pick them up at Alma’s house and take them back to De Pere, a distance of about twenty miles.  Albert had to get back that evening to work the eleven to seven shift so he wanted to get an early start.  They probably visited a bit and by the time they left it was snowing quite hard.  They soon caught up to a snowplow ahead of them.  The going was slow, mighty slow.  Soon the drifts from the plow were as high as the cars.  At eleven o’clock, when Al should have been at work, they had just reached the Brown County line and the snowplow refused to go any farther.  Albert’s was the fifth car back, and the men from the first ten or so cars tried to convince the drivers to go on to De Pere.  They refused to cross the county line.  As Albert said after he read this article, “I wouldn’t exactly say that we hijacked the plow.  We just told them we were going to borrow it for a little while.”  The Badger Inn was right by the line and they figured it would better be able to accommodate the plow crew than all of the stranded people in the hundred or so cars that were backed up behind the plow.  Sensing the temperament of the crowd, the crew relented and reluctantly went on to De Pere.  They got there by morning.  Needless to say, Albert missed work that night.