Bringing history to life
By Peggy Nolan
At age 89, Jack Holzhueter is as busy as people half his age. His current project, an exhibition at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, won’t even open for another two or three years. The 2013 winner of the Madison Trust’s award for lifetime contributions to historic preservation, Jack’s career includes print and broadcast media, as well as extensive research into Wisconsin history, especially the work of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Jack Holzhueter
How did you get interested in historic preservation?
My interest in history began as a child. At about age six or seven, when we visited my grandparents in Green Bay, I would get dressed up and go by myself to the Neville Public Museum adjacent to the Kellogg Public Library. When I was 10 years old, I wrote a prize-winning essay on the history of Menomonie, Wis. (my hometown) for the town’s centennial celebration. Fifty years later, they republished it for their sesquicentennial!
I was a good writer, but I didn’t know what to major in as a freshman at UW-Madison. A woman connected with the business school arranged a scholarship for me to ensure I could afford to pay for school after my father died. I didn’t like the accounting classes in particular, but I did well in them. At the same time, I was working at the Daily Cardinal. I graduated with a degree in advertising, but I never did any advertising in my career.
I worked as a reporter for the Appleton newspaper after college, and then I spent a year at the City News Bureau in Chicago as a night radio editor. In the early 1960s, I came back to UW-Madison for a graduate degree in journalism with an emphasis in U.S. history. I worked at the Cap Times on the copy desk as wire editor and assistant managing editor.
I became interested in Frank Lloyd Wright when I started living in the Robert M. Lamp House, which Wright built in 1903. I lived there for 10 years. It was a mess when I moved in – paint on the woodwork, etc. I asked a friend to help me decorate it. Years later, I got involved in the 1988 “Frank Lloyd Wright and Madison” exhibition at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and my research straightened out a lot of mysteries.
What are you most proud of in your career?
I’m most proud of the work I did for the Wisconsin Historical Society. It was a varied career, and it involved an awful lot of outreach to the public as well as a lot of intense research and work on others’ manuscripts, getting them in shape for publication. I was sort of the answer man at the Historical Society for many years. The reference staff called on me regularly, almost daily. They sent me people who had questions because they thought I’d be able to help them. I did that routinely for about 30 years. I helped an awful lot of people get started on projects where they were swimming, and I got them to dry land.
The other thing I’m really proud of was my weekly broadcast on Wisconsin Public Radio, which I did for 15 years. For that, I really credit Ronnie Hess, who asked me to start doing it. She had worked with me at the Wisconsin Historical Society and knew that I was good at summarizing and could put together a 3-5 minute story. That really made my career. It gave me a name throughout Wisconsin, which has lasted until today. I’m still recognized by old-timers around the state.
What are some of the current threats to historic preservation in Madison, and what do you think can or should be done about them?
If we’re going to save buildings, we have to understand what’s happened to the buildings along the way, and unless you know what steps occurred, unless you know how and why they occurred, you can’t really figure out what to do about saving them, how to save them and who to get involved in saving them. The who is just as important as the what. You can’t separate the clients and the architects and the spaces and the places. They’re all tied up into bundles.
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For years I’ve been working on the problems with saving the Lamp House from development. That’s an ongoing problem. I was pretty good at dredging up the stories about places and things. I was probably one of the very first in Wisconsin to do that sort of work successfully, particularly with respect to Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and spaces.
The Lamp House issue has become involved with the national preservation organization devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright, so if it’s important enough to get the big guys in Chicago involved, it’s an important problem. The resolution seems to be elusive. Because of the house’s location, the threat of development is ongoing.
I think downtown Madison is particularly difficult because the isthmus is essentially developing strictly as a place for business and the university rather than a place for people to live. And if you live downtown, you think of apartment living only, yet downtown is also a place for some very important single-family houses made of native stone that are mansion-sized, and they’re gorgeous buildings. Yet not many of them are occupied by single families. They’re mostly apartments, and that’s unfortunate. There are some that have very successfully turned into single-family houses. That is the kind of development that needs more exploration and more encouragement on the part of the city.
Even outside Madison, where I live now, there’s development pressure from rising land values. In terms of a solution, the county and preservationists have to get together and talk about these problems. They haven’t done that.
Periodically in this space, we’ll feature local historic preservation heroes. We all have a role to play in keeping Madison’s history alive. What’s yours? Submit suggestions for others we should feature here.