Story originally printed in the Vernon Broadcaster or online at www.vernonbroadcaster.com
Published - Monday, May 12, 2008
Coming home to Vernon County: Young professionals return to hometown roots
 Trudy (Fortun) Lohr pushes her daughter, Grace, on a swing at Eckhart Park in Viroqua, on a sunny June day. Lohr and her husband, Dennis, bought a house in Viroqua so they could raise Grace in a small town, where Trudy has family. (Matt Johnson photo) |
Being an emergency room doctor at an inner-city Chicago hospital was an exciting ride for Tony Macasaet.
A 1987 graduate of Viroqua High School, he went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison for his pre-med and medical school degrees. Then he did his residency at the University of Chicago, and thought he found his niche at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago.
He saw the struggles of an inner-city hospital as it tried to fund operations to serve poor patients, many without health insurance. And then there were the violent injuries.
"It was the knife and gun club," Macasaet said, sipping a glass of tea. "In the emergency room, though, you see everything -- The candor, pain, suffering and hope. There's the camaraderie of the underdogs. There's no other place like it."
But while Macasaet, then 33, had everything a young professional could hope for -- the exciting job, a slot as a professor at a teaching hospital and also a directorship overseeing emergency ultrasound at the hospital -- Chicago started to seem distant. Not just as a place, but with the people, and with himself.
"I began to see Chicago as less and less genuine," he said, thoughtfully reflecting. "I thought, 'There's got to be another way.'"
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Macasaet is one of a number of Vernon County natives who grew up here, left, but returned.
Most have returned for a better quality of life. They want to raise their children in a small town. They want to be a part of a small community. They want to make a difference.
One recurring factor in this return to hometown roots deals with communities within communities. Vernon County isn't just a collection of municipalities, farms and homes connected by roads. It's a place with a synergy thriving on contrast with fringe connections.
"The landscape itself is unique in its scale," said Jacob Hundt, an instructor at Youth Initiative High School, who grew up in rural Coon Valley, and wrote an award-winning master's degree thesis at the University of Chicago on alternative education in Vernon County.
"Other places the topography is 'big,'" Hundt said. "Here there's no single shape of the land that overwhelms any other. The culture here is really formed by the landscape. You can be separate on your own ridge. People can live close to one another, but be separate. Why are there five different high schools in Viroqua? It's the idea that you can be separate, but together."
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Vernon County is indeed a special place.
It is in the heart of southwest Wisconsin's Driftless Region, which was unaffected by the glaciers of the last ice age. Its topography is a physical geographer's dream. Coulees, valleys, bluffs and sedimentary rock outcroppings carved by wind and water.
Viroqua, population 4,350, is the county seat. Westby, the second-largest municipality in Vernon County, has a population of about 2,000. The entire county population is a little more than 28,000. The nearest large city, La Crosse, 33 miles to the northwest of Viroqua, has a population of about 55,000.
Vernon County is home to more certified organic farms than any other county in Wisconsin. It is also home to Organic Valley, the largest organic farming cooperative in North America. The county was a pioneer in watershed protection, with the nation's first federal watershed project being established at Coon Creek near Coon Valley in 1933. The county is also home to an 8,000-plus acre nature area, the Kickapoo Reserve. The reserve was formed out of farms and woods that had been acquired by the federal government to create a lake in the late 1960s, but that idea was scrapped in the 1970s due to ecological concerns. The acreage bought by the federal government was later entrusted to the state and is now overseen by a state board.
Running through Vernon County, from Readstown to Ontario, is the Kickapoo River, which has many tributaries that are classified as Class I naturally-reproducing trout streams. Vernon County has more miles of pristine trout streams than any other county in Wisconsin. It's widely regarded as one of the Midwest's top trout fishing destinations.
Then there's the cultural mix of the county. While there is a solid population of conventional farmers they interact with the organic farmers and a growing Amish population.
Also, spider webbed throughout the county, is a loose community of counterculture pioneers, who settled here in the 1960s and 1970s. It was those pioneers who brought Viroqua a Waldorf school in 1980, one of just a handful of rural Waldorf schools among the 900 in existence worldwide.
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At age 27, Hundt exudes a soft-spoken thoughtfulness well beyond his years.
Part of that is his upbringing. He's part of an extended family on his father's side that includes more than a score of aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins. One of his uncles was the parish priest in Middle Ridge where the family went to church.
"Living on a small farm where we milked cows and then had steers was an important part of growing up," Hundt said. "We had family all around, always close by. I was really rooted in the family and the farm."
He went to grade school in Coon Valley and after third grade went to Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School in Viroqua. He spent eighth through 10th grade studying at Aquinas High School in La Crosse. That's when a unique opportunity, that would shape the rest of his life, occurred.
As an offshoot of the Pleasant Ridge experience, Youth Initiative High School was formed in Viroqua. Hundt was one of its first students. But not just a student, he also had a role in shaping how the school would provide education.
"I was really excited about it," Hundt recalls. "It was something I wanted to be a part of because I could contribute."
Hundt would add to his growing list of distinct educational experiences after graduating from Youth Initiative in 1998. He did two years of undergraduate work at Deep Springs College in California -- college with just 26 male students who divide their time between rigorous academics, self-governance and hard work -- operating a cattle ranch that sustains the college.
Not only did Hundt finish his two years, but stayed on to cowboy for two summers. He then finished his undergraduate degree at the American University in Bulgaria. That's where he met his wife, Sofya, a native of Azerbaijan.
After receiving his bachelor's degree in history, Hundt suddenly had a world of opportunity open to him. But he felt the pull of Vernon County.
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Being close to home has its advantages, Trudy (Fortun) Lohr, said.
Lohr, 38, a 1987 graduate of Viroqua High School, moved back to Viroqua late last summer. It was a homecoming from the Milwaukee area. Lohr wasn't wearing ruby slippers, but talking to her on a sunny day at Eckhart Park in Viroqua, you get the feeling she's of the opinion, "There's no place like home."
Lohr and her husband, Dennis, had a comfortable life in Milwaukee. In 2004, she finished her master's degree in education at Concordia University and was teaching part time at Marquette University. Dennis had an engineering job. They were watching their daughter Grace, who was born in 2001, grow up.
Grace took a special pre-kindergarten class offered for three year olds through the Milwaukee Public Schools. While Lohr said it was an impressive program, it produced a most profound impression.
"One of Grace's classmates was expelled for violence -- a three-year-old," Lohr said, as if she still couldn't believe it. "I don't want that to come across as indicative of the entire public school system in Milwaukee, but being a small town girl I was very sensitive to that. When it comes to the violence in a big city, you start to realize that you're never too far from it."
Soon Lohr and her husband started seriously talking about how they could make a change in their lives. They began to make more frequent trips to Viroqua. Eventually, they decided to make the city home for Grace. They bought a house and Lohr picked up a job teaching English and communication at Western Technical College in Viroqua.
The move, however, hasn't been easy, because Dennis has kept his engineering job in Milwaukee. He frequently is commuting to the area to be with his family.
"That part of it's very tough, but to see Grace go to school here and be close to my dad and step-mom (Larry and Lynn Fortun), that makes it worth it. Last year Grace's step-grandparents, Doc and Dee Piper, babysat her. I have so many relatives and friends that I could call 20 people between Westby and (Viroqua) and they'd be here in a heartbeat. It's not that we didn't have that in Milwaukee, it's that it's not the same."
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As for Macasaet, he saw that things in Chicago would also never be the same as they were in Vernon County.
In 2002, he began working with his family on a special project, New American Boulevard, a company through which they could develop properties in Viroqua.
"Obviously we'd have to have properties that could make a profit to sustain themselves, but profit wasn't the goal," Macasaet said. "We also wanted them to have a positive effect on the community."
Macasaet said the idea came out of a special breed of architecture that surmised that bigger is not better. Popularized by theories in the book "The Not So Big House" by the architect Susanka, Macasaet said his family developed New American Boulevard with the idea that quality of space was more important than quantity of space. While the family thought of what it might do in its first investment adventure, an unusual property was open on Main Street in Viroqua -- the 10,000 square-foot plus former Viroqua Motors dealership. It is a large brick building with a foyer, business spaces on the left and right, a large open atrium in the middle, and other nooks for small shops and businesses.
"When we first started discussing this, I never thought we'd do a public market, but it's always becoming more than that," he said.
Next to the market, which the Macasaets named Main Street Station, is a small cottage where Macasaet lives. Adjacent to that is a larger multi-unit residence, which New American Boulevard also owns. While it rents out two of the units, it also has plans for the space -- Hotel Viroqua, a place for people to stay who want to do business at Main Street Station.
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Macasaet, now 37, considers himself an entrepreneur. For him, it's an important distinction.
He still is a medical doctor and is on staff at Vernon Memorial Healthcare in Viroqua. He's the only doctor on staff whose residency is in emergency room medicine. He's working with hospital directors to bring a state-of-the-art emergency ultrasound machine to the hospital, where it will be used in the E.R. and he can teach others to use it.
But more than a being a doctor, he's developing ideas for New American Boulevard and also working on a film, which has a working title of "Viroqua -- The Movie."
Macasaet sees "Viroqua -- The Movie" as an important documentary. It will chronicle how Viroqua exists now, before the city goes through what he believes will be a great period of change.
"People have been saying for 10 years that change is coming, and more people, who want to be part of this place are coming," Macasaet said. "I think it's going to happen. We have to decide how can we accept this change and balance it with outside forces that will have no interest in the soul of Viroqua. A town is more than a collection of buildings and people. It's got to be more than that.
"Opportunity and profit and the want thereof have ruined countless towns, because nobody was paying enough attention to ensure responsibility," Macasaet continued. "As an entrepreneur I can affect change as much as a politician. What is the next step for Viroqua and how can we affect that? It's a question we really have to answer for ourselves if we want to preserve this sense of community and interconnected communities."
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Entrepreneurship on the part of people responsible to maintaining Vernon County's uniqueness may be what saves it for the future.
Macasaet, Hundt and Lohr, all have formal educations and the earning power that brings. The average Vernon County citizen, however, is among the poorest in Wisconsin, earning just over $22,000 per year. The county's residents rank 71st out of 72 counties for gross income according to statistics from the Wisconsin Taxpayer's Alliance. While there is a quality of life in Vernon County, there needs to be more enterprise.
One way to bring rural residents back to their roots is through opportunities to create and grow businesses.
In 2003, Georgeanne Artz, then an Iowa State University Extension Professor, wrote an article on rural brain drain that noted how many small communities end up losing their best and brightest young people to larger cities due to career opportunities. Artz, now an Assistant Profession at the Harry S. Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri, said this brain drain is being countered.
"That's why there's a real push for rural entrepreneurship," Artz said from her home in Columbia, Mo. "Then if you are someone, who grew up in a small town and want to return to one, you can start your own business and not only support yourself, but improve the economic base of the community."
Artz said the idea of people wanting to move back to their small hometowns once they've been out in the world is not uncommon, but it is difficult to achieve.
"Once you've left and have received an education and training, then one of the biggest issues is finding a job match," Artz said. "A person who wants to move 'home' may not be able to find a job that matches with the skills they know. Many have to become entrepreneurs to make that happen."
While some yearning for a return to their roots might not find it in their hometown, they might find it in a similar-sized small town located elsewhere.
"I grew up in Maine and would have loved to have been a college professor there, but that option wasn't available to me," Artz said.
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Hundt's options, while seemingly limitless, after he graduated from the American University in Bulgaria, were narrowed by what he dreamed to do.
He wanted to be around his extended family. He wanted to continue to see Youth Initiative High School grow.
"Everything that made me who I was growing up here, that was really rich and complete," Hundt said. "It made me want to come back here."
So, he went to a special master's degree program at the University of Chicago and focused on alternative education. Then he and Sofya returned to Vernon County. He teaches at Youth Initiative High School, while the couple has a budding 10-acre farmette just southwest of Viroqua where they have a vineyard, livestock and a few agricultural projects in the works for YIHS students. They're also raising a daughter, Josie, 17 months.
Never too far from new educational undertakings, Hundt is a member of the board of directors of the Driftless Folk School. The idea of the folk school is to teach people folk arts and skills including blacksmithing, collecting wild herbs, sausage making, timber farming, homebrewing, spinning and other skills.
Sofya is the school's registrar. She also teaches classes in bread baking, pickling, jam making and chicken butchering.
The school's mission is to support healthy sustainable communities and personal development by providing educational opportunities and lifelong learning.
With so many irons in the fire, Hundt is not yet content to keep his dreams simple. He envisions the Driftless Folk School evolving its homesteading roots and taking on a more complete academic direction. He envisions Vernon County being home to its own college.
"An undergraduate college with a practical farming experience and rigorous academic programs," Hundt said. "It will be tied into things happening in this area."
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Lohr is already personally evolving since finding her way back to Vernon County.
Next year she will move from teaching at WTC to joining the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. While she certainly has her hands full parenting Grace and keeping her relationship with Dennis healthy, she also sees the potential for more personal growth down the road, perhaps taking on a doctoral program.
As Macasaet talked about genuineness of people in Vernon County, Lohr echoed that thread.
"One of the things you get from living in a place like this is that people have a sense of accountability," Lohr said. "People know each other and know their kids. I had been gone almost 20 years, but when I came back I still knew people on the street.
"That's a sense of community that's hard to get in a big city, but I have that here," she continued.
Lohr said that having a greater quality of life is more important than the things people surround themselves with in suburbia.
"There might be a lot of nice homes in some places, but nobody knows their neighbors," she said. "And you don't know what's going on down the street. Here you have a better sense that you do. It's not perfect, but after living in both places, I know which one is better."
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While manning his shift in the emergency room at Vernon Memorial Healthcare a couple of weeks ago, Macasaet saw a patient come in with a critical health issue that required the opening of the airway.
Macasaet said there are many very talented doctors on staff at Vernon Memorial and many take shifts in the emergency room. However, he said he felt lucky to be in the emergency room on that day.
"One of the greatest skills taught to a physician specializing in emergency room care is the airway -- getting a tube in the throat," Macasaet said. "In this case I'm glad I was there. I had the experience to do it and it was a difficult case. Right there I had an interesting example of how coming back has made a difference."
He talks more about being back in Vernon County.
"The richness of the human experience here is unlike any other place in the world," he says.
The profound words hang heavy.
When asked if he were raised in a larger city, like La Crosse, Eau Claire or Madison, if he would have considered moving back once he was established in Chicago, he says it wouldn't have been the same thing.
Here he's an emergency room doctor and an entrepreneur. His sister Laurie recently joined him, moving back home from Madison. His brother, David, is moving his family from Montana to Madison, to be closer to the family business, which they all have a stake in.
Macasaet, meanwhile, is focused on another project, working with Suzanne Huber to install the Sibby's Organic Zone Ice Cream Parlor in Main Street Station. He believes it will be the first-ever organic soft-serve ice cream parlor in the world.
It's the type of entrepreneurial spirit that Artz said is rural America's best chance at preserving itself.
All stories copyright 2006 Vernon Broadcaster and other attributed sources.