One of my interests is the immigrant history of the early 20th century, so I was naturally attracted to the newly published book by my OnMilwaukee.comrade, Bobby Tanzilo, who has tackled an immigrant tale with echoes of the modern day.
Tanzilo's regular readers here at OnMilwaukee.com, know of his intimate knowledge of all things Italian. That insight helps him shift through the surprisingly complex layers of Milwaukee's Italian immigrant community in his "The Milwaukee Police Station Bomb of 1917."
Ostensibly, the book is the true story of a horrific tragedy that hit Milwaukee on Nov. 24, 1917, when a bomb detonated at the central police station, killing 9 policemen and a civilian.
As Tanzilo writes sparely, "At 7:30 p.m., the station went dark and an eerie silence pervaded the area."
Up until Sept. 11, 2001, it was the highest toll of American police officers in a single incident.
But that dramatic blast is only the exclamation point in a story of the competing forces that battled for the hearts, minds and souls of Milwaukee's Italian community in the Third Ward and Bay View: anarchism, Protestant missionaries and, of course, traditional Roman Catholicism.
While Tanzilo focuses on the Italians, his well-researched story is a template for the history of other European ethnicities that settled here. Coming from homelands where both tradition and oppressive political systems prevented much individual expression, the immigrants came to much freer society with various temptations.
And while the story is more than 90 years old, it has a contemporary feel in its account an immigrant community with a small segment involved in terrorism against the government. It's simplistic to say history repeats itself, but Tanzilo's book demonstrates that history's echoes can provide modern insights.
"The Milwaukee Police Station Bomb of 1917" is available at area bookstores for $19.99. Tanzilo will read from the book at 7 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 7 at Mequon's Next Chapter Bookshop.
You may need a DVR for tonight's Christmas viewing: Two of the big-three traditional Christmas specials air tonight at 7. The stop-action "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" airs on Channel 58 and the animated "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is on Channel 12.
Here's a link to a master-list of holiday TV specials.
And here's a snippet from "Rudolph":
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
