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Travel book ‘Secret Wisconsin’ shines a spotlight on the state’s offbeat destinations

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Travel book ‘Secret Wisconsin’ shines a spotlight on the state’s offbeat destinations

Why do Stevens Point firefighters remove a statue of a boy with a leaking boot from the front of their station each school year? Did being long-winded save Theodore Roosevelt’s life? Why is the yo-yo capital of the world in a small Northwoods town?

Married travel writers Kristi Flick Manus and Tom Manus answer those questions (we will too) and many more in their new Wisconsin-based travel book, “Secret Wisconsin: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure.”

The Eau Claire couple have been married for nearly 30 years and for most of that time they’ve been searching for and finding quirky, fun and out-of-the-way places together. And for just about as long as they’ve been a couple, they have made their living as freelance travel writers, directing others to the places and people they find fascinating. Now, after living in states such as North Carolina, Colorado and Tennessee and traveling across the globe, they’ve moved back to Flick Manus’s home state of Wisconsin and are focusing their curiosity here.

“Our specialty, and what we really love, is finding things that don’t necessarily show up in the first several places of a Google search,” Manus said. “We love the experience of finding something new that we didn’t know about.”

It seems like it’s always been that way, Flick Manus said. “We’ve been traveling forever. It’s our passion,” she said. “We just love different cultures and different places.”

John F. Kennedy relieved himself here, a Titanic survival story and a department store frozen in time

“Secret Wisconsin” is a quick read, full of short, kicky essays about some of the authors’ favorite niche destinations across the state. Some of the places profiled will be familiar to Wisconsin die-hards. Think Paul Bunyon’s Cook Shanty in Wisconsin Dells, the historic Kenosha street cars or the Sputnik crash site in Manitowoc.

But even the most well-worn Wisconsin wanderers will find something new in “Secret Wisconsin.”

One example: Big Dick’s Buckhorn Inn in downtown Spooner. People from the Spooner area, or who are particularly devoted to the state’s political history, may know of the Buckhorn Inn. But it’s likely most Wisconsinites haven’t heard about its odd claim to fame.

During the Democratic presidential primary campaign in March 1960, John F. Kennedy gave a campaign speech on Walnut Street. After completing the speech, Kennedy went into the bar and used the restroom. “A clever proprietor capitalized on this and made a plaque memorializing the occurrence,” the Flick Manus and Manus wrote. “The plaque and urinal are still present, along with many other quirky bar decorations.”

One of Manus’s favorite spots is the Cozy Inn of Janesville, the oldest Chinese restaurant in Wisconsin and the second-oldest Chinese restaurant in America that has operated in the same location since it opened. The Cozy Inn opened in November of 1922 on the second floor of W. Milwaukee Street. Today it’s above an Irish pub and has developed cult status among people who love its eggrolls.

Manus likes all those details, but he’s particularly intrigued by a Cozy Inn backstory, one which might not be apparent to people who come for the food. The place is owned by Tom Wong, and it was purchased in 1974 by Wong’s mother, an acclaimed chef in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, Wong’s father was a sailor and was one of six Chinese survivors of the Titanic.

“His dad was a mariner, and was on the Titanic to get to another ship,” Manus said. “Look at all the things you discover when you are at places like the second oldest Chinese restaurant at the same location. … We love finding these stories, the details are just great.”

Flick Manus loves Dretzka’s Department Store, located on Packard Avenue in Cudahy. “The store is full of all-new items, albeit items from the past eight decades,” she wrote in “Secret Wisconsin.” “It’s a vintage lover’s paradise. I found old sewing nitons, rubber galoshes, white loafers, baggy underwear…”

Need a leisure suit? Go to Dretzka’s. “It’s like stepping back in time,” Flick Manus said. Her prize purchase? Elastic mitten clips for her jacket, so she doesn’t lose mittens or gloves.

The travel writers’ trick? Follow your curiosity, not an itinerary

How do you find places that are by definition secret?

“We do have a strategy,” Flick Manus said. “One of our favorite things to do is to go to a grocery store and start talking to locals.”

“No matter where you’re at, no one knows the location better than the locals. They just know these quirky little places,” Manus said.

The couple keeps planning to a minimum when they are out wandering. “We’re spontaneous travelers, road trippers,” Manus said. “We just see things by driving around on our road trips. …We’re always exploring to see what’s out there.”

They found out about the Stevens Point Fire Department’s statue through a social media contact, who told them that the statue was only on display in the summer. So they traveled to Stevens Point and asked firefighters about it. What they found was that the statue was originally a drinking fountain in the center of town in the early 1900s. The statue was then displayed by the Fire Department, but firefighters soon found than rambunctious college students from the the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point constantly vandalized the statue. So the firefighters put the statue in storage during the school year.

The Manuses traveled to Milwaukee to the site of an assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Roosevelt was running for president, and he was scheduled to give a speech and was standing in a car on the way there when a man stepped from a crowd and shot him in a chest. The bullet went through a 50-page copy of the speech and a glasses case before entering Roosevelt’s chest. It was a flesh wound, and Roosevelt went on to give the 90-minute speech.

The yo-yo capital is in Luck, the couple writes, because a yo-yo magnate named Don Duncan Sr. moved the toy’s manufacturing facilities from Chicago to the small northern Wisconsin town “because of the area’s rich supply of maple trees,” the Manuses write. “Nearly every adult living there was offered a job” at the new plant, which opened in the mid-1940s.

Buy “Secret Wisconsin”

“Secret Wisconsin: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure” is available at many independent and major retail and online bookstores. It can be ordered for $27 from the book’s publisher, Reedy Press, at reedypress.com.

Keith Uhlig has been writing about Wisconsin, its people and all it has to offer since 2000. Raised in Colby, he loves wandering around the state. He can be reached at kuhlig@gannett.com, and is on Facebook, X and Threads.

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