Word: appletons
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...Appleton, Wis., is a midsize city in the heart of Middle America, as homespun and unpretentious as bread pudding or apple pie. Like other such cities, it has collected some singular claims to fame. Appleton, residents like to note, is the home of Lawrence University. It nurtured Novelist Edna Ferber and Senator Joe McCarthy. It also boasts the first house in the nation to light up with hydroelectric power. But what an outsider finds chiefly remarkable about Appleton is the ordinariness that spreads over the place like the warm October sunshine...
...Appleton's leading citizens are the sort of folks one expects to bump into at a bridge party, a church service, a Rotary Club meeting. They are not the kind of people likely to show up for, say, a seance. Yet, on Oct. 31, the night souls of the dead are said to roam the earth, that is just where a visitor found the chairman of Lawrence University's psychology department, the president of a local construction company, the CEO of a large paper company, the executive director of the county's Outagamie Museum, the city's director of planning...
...black- draped table laden with miscellaneous memorabilia: a manila envelope containing a letter from Arthur Conan Doyle, two pairs of handcuffs, a selection of lockpicks, a yellowed photograph. Monroe's task: to contact, on the 60th anniversary of his death, the ghost of Harry Houdini, master escapologist, prestidigitator and Appleton's most celebrated son. While Monroe writhed and jerked, it must be noted, a block away the sign outside the Valley Bank effortlessly blinked out the message: WELCOME HOME HARRY HOUDINI HAPPY HALLOWEEN...
Bread pudding. That's about as exotic as Appleton, Wis. This lack of sophistication may be why some historians insist that the great Houdini was born in Budapest. Still Houdini always said he was born in Appleton, observes Outagamie Museum Curator Mary Mergy, and that's what she likes to believe. "It adds," she says, "a little zest to life...
Whether he was born in Appleton or not, Houdini did spend the first nine years of his life there. His real name was Ehrich Weiss, and he was the son of Appleton's first Reform rabbi, a Hungarian immigrant. Everyone in Appleton has heard about young Ehrich Weiss and how the night clerk at the Waverly Hotel taught him his first rope trick. Gus Zuehlke, today the chairman of Valley Bancorporation, remembers listening to his father spin tales about young Ehrich's daring escapes from the Fox River, which meanders its way right through the heart of town. "My father...