Here is the beginning of my father's biography:
Clarence John Stolt’s life began at 10:15 AM on Wednesday, September 20, 1916. He was born at home in the small, riverfront town of Prescott, Wisconsin, located in the western part of the state on the border with Minnesota. The town’s roots go back to the 1830s when a fur trapper and Indian translator by the name of Philander Prescott decided to build a trading post at the junction of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers. Riverboat pilots going up and down the two rivers began calling it “Prescott’s Landing,” and from there a town came to be. Those waterways, peaceful yet dangerous, were the lifeblood of the growing settlement, with logging, commerce and steamboat travel making it a convenient stopover for many a prospector and frontiersman. Life along the river in those times was not for the faint of heart.
Years later Francis and Fay Stolt came to live in Prescott where they raised three children. Francis was born in Sweden in 1877 and emigrated from that country to America in 1889. He served in the Armed Forces during the Spanish-American war. His wife, Fay Tyler, was born in Bay City, Wisconsin in 1886. Her family lineage could be traced back to John Tyler, the 10th President of the United States.
Their wedding portrait from 1905 shows them not with the hard and stern faces so often seen in people of that time period, but rather the grace and confidence of a distinctly handsome couple. Dressed in black suit and white bow tie, he stands tall and looks every bit the strong, sturdy immigrant type, but with a dash of new world sophistication. Seated in front of him, the bride shows the calm demeanor of a pretty and proper lady in white.
Official documents list Francis’ occupation as a Stationary Engineer, meaning he manned the railroad bridge that spanned the rivers and connected the line between Wisconsin and Minnesota. Fay’s occupation was that of housewife. They proudly had two daughters, Gwendolyn, born in 1906, and Eileen, born in 1908, before that early autumn morning in 1916 when Fay, at age 30, gave birth to a son and named him Clarence.
Just as one can see those strong, wide waters of the Mississippi forever rolling along in the summer sun, it is easy to imagine how safe and carefree it must have been growing up in a place like Prescott in those days. There was fishing and pheasant hunting with his father, hiking and exploring with his friends below the bluffs carved out by the river. In the winter there was skating, sledding and skiing. In spring and summer it was baseball, football and bike riding. Certainly for a young boy, life in Prescott must have seemed well insulated from the turmoil of the rest of the world. Even in the midst of the Great Depression life in Prescott went on.
By 1932 Clarence, or C.J., as he preferred to be called, was sixteen years old and a busy sophomore in high school. He played on the Prescott baseball and basketball teams, played saxophone in the school band. In 1934, in addition to those activities, he got up on stage to perform the title role of Rodney Rochester, vagabond turned star football player in the Senior Class Play, “The College Hobo.” The play, described in a program as a four-act comedy-drama, was published in 1930 but is today so obscure as to make it virtually impossible to find any plot synopsis or summary. Suffice it to say that C.J. and Rodney Rochester probably saved the day somehow.
In between all that school participation he did find time to have other fun: an occasional game of poker with his buddies, “messing around” with the girls, and now and then sneaking in a drink of wine or something a little harder with the guys. In other words, high school kids weren’t all that different back in those days.
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