Two men from Caledonia took their skill far from home and represented their hometown well during the 1940s. Each, in his own way, helped preserve democracy. One appeared in the company of some of the nation’s most prominent personalities. One contributed to one of the nation’s most impressive wartime achievements.
Ed Lee
“There must’ve been 30 of us from this area that went up there to work,” Ed Lee told a reporter in 1992. “I went up there to work on July 25 in 1942.” He worked until September of that year and then during the same months in 1943. “That was about as long as you could stay up there,” but he added some did stay there with the equipment throughout the winter.
The 1,600-mile Alaska Highway was known by some as the Alcan Highway; those working on it called it “The Road.” Built in only eight months, it wound through some of the wildest but most beautiful expanse in North America. During World War II, it was a military highway built by civilians for the defense of the western hemisphere. Previously, supplies could travel from the 48 states to the U. S. territory of Alaska by air or sea. But the Alcan Highway provided travel by ground through Canada.
Don Menzies, in his 1943 book, wrote “Some say the road is without parallel in the history of friendship between nations.” He called it, “A tribute to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, American civilian workers and a few Canadians.” Built and financed by the United States, it was turned over to Canada following the war.
At age 85, Ed and wife Millie were interviewed before their trip to the highway in Alaska, a half century after Ed first went north to Alaska. On this 1992 venture, the couple planned to visit 31-year-old grandson Todd Bauer and 22-year-old granddaughter Peggy, who lived in Alaska where they worked mining gold.
Edmund Lee, born in 1906 in Brownsville, worked in Caledonia in the county treasurer’s office, at the county highway department and later abandoned retirement as a groundskeeper at MaCalGrove Country Club until age 83. He died at age 91 in 1998.
Stan Muenkel
Stan Muenkel (born July 16, 1924) grew up in Caledonia, the son of a blacksmith, a profession which Stan joined before the interruption of World War II. He enlisted and played in the U.S. Navy Band.
“I had played the cornet in the high school band,” noted Muenkel. “During World War II, I was shipped off to the Admiralty Islands and also New Guinea. There the shore-based band provided backup music for some famous entertainers, including Bob Hope, Frances Langford and Jerry Colona. I played lead trumpet with the concert band and dance band when we boarded battleships and aircraft carriers to entertain the men.”
As the official bugler for Navy funerals, Stan played “Taps” at graveside burials on the island.
After the War, he returned to Caledonia and to blacksmithing at his father’s shop. But music took this blacksmith from Houston County to New York City’s Madison Square Garden. He further provided for his growing family by playing with several musical groups, including dance bands. Muenkel was playing for the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra when guest conductor Merle Evans asked him to join his band. Evans, for more than six decades, led bands at carnivals, medicine shows, showboats and theatrical productions. For 50 years, he was with Ringling Bros., “during which he accompanied every conceivable circus act from the four corners of the earth.”
Evans and his band were known for heroically playing long and loudly while a circus tent was destroyed by a fire that took 168 lives at Hartford, Conn. in 1944.
At first, Stan turned down the offer to play for Evans due to family commitments. Later, when the famous conductor came back to La Crosse, the time was right for Muenkel to accept the prestigious invitation. That musical decision took him to Madison Square. Every day for weeks, he was part of a show, featuring the nation’s most glamorous Hollywood movie star in the nation’s most prestigious venue. Stan was playing a trumpet, and Marilyn Monroe was riding a pink elephant.
“No nightmare,” Muenkel told a newspaper reporter in April of 1987. “She actually was riding a pink elephant. She rode at the head of a parade of about 50 elephants.” She was aboard the big beast every afternoon and night for the nation’s premier circus, a combined presentation by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Meanwhile, Muenkel and the other musicians were perched high above both the audience and the three-ring entertainment. The musicians played every minute during every one of many circus acts.
When asked if he met Marilyn Monroe, Stan replied, “We were too busy playing practically every minute of each show to try for her autograph. After each appearance, she disappeared into her dressing room. She wasn’t about to talk with every Tom, Dick and Harry gawking at her.”
Madison Square Garden was air conditioned, but there was excessive heat during the summer in the big tent when they were on the road in other cities. “So, to keep us from becoming dehydrated, the management splashed the water on our heads and legs about every five or 10 minutes.”
The circus season lasted a little more than eight months, from mid-March to late November. Circus musicians performed seven hours a day, seven days a week, enduring every sort of weather from excessive heat to bitter cold.
Stan said being a real trouper required liking people, enjoying travel and accepting what inconveniences and difficulties might come.
Muenkel played with the famous circus for eight months before the glamour waned. Stan missed his wife, the former Norma Thronson of Houston, and his children. So, he returned to Caledonia.
Muenkel later moved from Caledonia to Mazeppa in 1965 when becoming a machinist employed by IBM. Stan retired in 1983 and died in 1990 of a heart attack at age 65.
Sources: “The kid from Caledonia met stars in the circus,” by Harold Severson, Post Bulletin, 14 April, 1987. “North to Alaska,” by Pat Moore, La Crosse Tribune, 1992.
Leave a Reply