December 7, 2024 – West Bend, Wi – One of the matriarchs of the community of West Bend, Wi, is celebrating her 94th birthday today.
Barbara Hafeman just completed another trip around the sun and is blessed to have a large family and her faith. Hafeman recalled growing up in Milwaukee but coming to her parents’ cottage on Silver Lake and spending the summers swimming. “We also would get in the water… and do you know how the boys across the lake would know to come over?”
Hafeman returned with her mother’s vintage mirror. “We’d flash signals with the mirror and the boys would either swim across the lake or come over in a rowboat.”
June, July, and August were the summer months Hafeman would spend on the lake. “We only had one car so if we wanted to go shopping, it had to be on Saturday,” she said. “My mother had to make a list of every single thing she needed for the whole entire week to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner, whatever. And if you ran out of something, your only alternative was to try to see if a neighbor had it.”
Hafeman recalled Jules Kuehn had a little grocery at his resort on Silver Lake. “They had a tiny grocery store in the front. The bar was in the back, but they only had, you know, basic things. They had bread and maybe butter and flour and stuff, or maybe some cake,” said Hafeman who also mentioned the fruit man.
“The fruit man came once a week with his little truck, and he’d come and yell down the road, ‘fruit man,’ and we all go running out there, and he lift the canvas on the back of his truck, and there would be all this wonderful fresh fruit,” said Hafeman. “My mother would always buy watermelon, and of course, I would just loved watermelon and it would be dripping all over, but we didn’t care, because the lake was our bathtub.
“You know, my body never touched hot water all summer. I mean, that’s fascinates me today, these kids go in the water. They’re swimming all day and night. Take a shower. Well, I never was in hot water all summer.”
We had a wonderful life which included seven children, treasured memories like walking the cows in the field off 18th Avenue and fantastic friends in the Orchard Street Gang.
“It was us, the Johnson’s, Carl Kircher’s family, Vic and Jen Albiero and their crew,” said Hafeman about raising a family on Orchard Street, across from St. Frances Cabrini Parish.
Please wish Barb Hafeman a happy 94th birthday and feel free to share a story or two.
