Tales of Wisconsin Celebrities

Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, and Me is a fun collection of short essays about a wide range of legendary figures with often surprising connections to Wisconsin. Author Dean Robbins, a longtime editor and award-winning writer for the Madison alt weekly Isthmus, often puts a personal spin on these stories, based on interviews, intensive research and lifelong obsessions.

The subjects range from certified state icons such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Chris Farley and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to unexpected choices such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Harrison Ford and Joni Mitchell. An ailing Elvis Presley stops a late-night fight on the streets of Madison; Oprah Winfrey learns a life-changing lesson about empathy during her impoverished Milwaukee childhood; Jackie Robinson defies racial barriers to form a friendship with a white fan in Sheboygan; and twin-sister advice columnists Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren sharpen their listening skills during a momentous decade in Eau Claire.

Milwaukee Bucks legend Abdul-Jabbar calls the book “a passionate and poetic homage to one-hundred musicians, artists, thinkers, entertainers, and athletes—including me—whose presence, however brief or long, in his beloved Wisconsin impacted the state and him. It’s both insightful and entertaining.”

Robbins will read from his book in an appearance at Boswell Book Company at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 23. To give you a taste of the book, here is the essay about Milwaukee native and astronaut Jim Lovell.

“Houston, We’ve Had a Problem”

As a child, I loved superheroes and astronauts—and to me, those two American archetypes seemed equally fantastical. Superman could fly beyond Earth’s atmosphere; so could astronauts. Wonder Woman performed death-defying feats without flinching; so did astronauts. When I finally learned the difference—superheroes are made up and astronauts are real—I traded in my comic books for biographies of Jim Lovell. I wanted to be a real-life hero like him.

It would have been enough if Lovell had just set a record for the longest time in space during 1965’s Gemini 7 mission. But he also became the first person to orbit the moon during 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. And to cap off his career, this guardian of the galaxy improvised one of the most daring recoveries in the annals of avia­tion during 1970’s Apollo 13 disaster.

The mission was fifty-five hours into its journey to the moon when Commander Lovell radioed Mission Control with an incon­gruously low-key alarm: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” A tank had exploded, causing a sudden drop in oxygen and power. Almost 200,000 miles from Earth, Lovell and his crewmates, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, calmly got to work repurposing the lunar module as a sort of lifeboat.

Later in life, when I had a chance to interview Lovell, you can guess the first thing I asked: “How does a normal person turn into a real-life superhero?” It was more than a journalistic inquiry. I still had faint hopes of becoming heroic myself, and I wanted information.

I forgot that an essential part of Lovell’s valor involved humility. Of course he didn’t want to address the subject of his own greatness, preferring to explain the nuts and bolts of the Apollo 13 rescue. He also enjoyed talking about his flight-obsessed childhood in Milwau­kee, where he invented his own “powder rocket” from an old mailing tube. Since his family had little money, college seemed out of reach, but he discovered a scholarship program that sent him to the Univer­sity of Wisconsin and then the US Naval Academy to fulfill his dream of becoming a pilot. He showed a knack for flying experimental air­craft and completing dangerous missions with a shrug.

NASA saw a star in the making, accepting Lovell as an astronaut in 1962. In 1968, while orbiting the moon, he was awestruck by the sight of his own planet from such a distance. “Earth got very small, and I could put my thumb up and hide it completely,” he told me. “It gave me the thought that that was my home back there, and I hope I get back. Because it was really just a small dot in space.” Clearly, the superhero was human after all.

At the end of our talk, I tried a different version of my first ques­tion: How did an ordinary Wisconsin kid develop “the right stuff,” in Tom Wolfe’s memorable phrase? This time, Lovell hesitated, thought about it for a second, then—in what seemed to me a Citizen Kane–style “Rosebud” moment—turned back to his experience as an only child in Milwaukee.

“Well, my father died when I was young, so my mother raised me,” he said, departing from his comfortable talking points. “That was quite a time, because she worked, and I was alone. I think that gave me a lot of self-confidence to take care of myself.”

Lovell finished his reverie with the understatement of the cen­tury: “And I think that was well worthwhile.”

You can buy a copy of Wisconsin Idols at this page on Amazon or get a book autographed by the author at the April 23 reading at Boswell books.

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