A week of newspaper humorists -- today Bill Stokes

[Jerry Peterson]

Bill Stokes launched this week’s series of posts. Marge and I were over visiting with friends, and there on their coffee table laid Stokes’ book, “Hi-Ho Silver, Anyway”.

Well, I picked it up and paged into it while we talked.

Jackie, taking note of my interest, said, “You can take that home and read it if you want. I just finished it.”

Said I, “Anyone who starts his book with a load of manure, that’s a I book I have to read.”

And here’s the preface to chapter 1: “Everybody in Wisconsin knows about such earthy things as manure. Some of us know more about it than others. It is fitting and proper that we share the benefit of our knowledge. There are obviously better ways to start off a book, but this one starts with a load of manure. Hop on and we’ll take a ride.”

“Hi-Ho Silver, Anyway” is a novel, kind of.

Stokes says the book’s short on plot. “Weave this into it: a Depression baby grows up, finds love and security, but thinks something is following him. He therefore looks back over his shoulder a lot which causes him to bump into things. In the end, perhaps, he will find that the only thing that is following him is Old Man Time and maybe a dog or two.”

Stokes’ humor is gentle. He was not a newspaper humor columnist. He was a roving reporter for the Milwaukee Journal in the 1970s and ’80s, and he also wrote the column “My Wisconsin” for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine

The kind of reporting and writing he did earned him the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award in 1973.

I did not know Stokes although I worked for Wisconsin Farm Bureau during a portion of the time he was writing for the Journal . . . and he was based in Madison as was I. So I missed him. A Google search finds a last mention of Stokes as being associated with the book “Wisconsin’s Rustic Roads”, published in 1995. Turns out he was one of six writers who contributed stories.

So I popped over to Amazon and found Stokes has seven books to his credit where he was the soul author: the first “Hi-Ho Silver, Anyway” (1970), the last “Trout Friends” (2000).

Said one reader in his review of “Trout Friends”, “Bill Stokes has written a collection of stories running from his childhood through adulthood centered around flyfishing in Wisconsin. He tells the stories with humor and affection for his friends and those he has fished with (his dog also fishes). It seems to me that Bill must have been the prototypical straight man to play against the ‘characters’ that he writes about. Stokes tells his humorous stories with fishing as the subject, and what comes out is the importance of sharing experiences with friends, and a hometown feeling for the land and Wisconsin.”

Stokes is 78. He now lives in Mazomanie.

Tomorrow: A week of newspaper humorists – me!