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Thursday, May 23, 2019 • Vol. 137, No. 44 • Stoughton, WI • ConnectStoughton.com • $1.25

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Smiles for Syttende Mai Remembering veterans, one by one

The rain didn’t keep the Norwegians away this weekend. Despite sporadic rainy weather on all three days, the Syttende Mai festival went on, with plenty of indoor activities available for people, as they learned about and explored Norwegian heritage. At the Chorus Public House, attendees had the opportunity to watch lefse being made in realtime, watch wool get spun and hear the melodies of the Hardanger fiddle fill the air. Across and down the street, Livsreise featured the work of late Stoughton native Ethel Kvalheim, who rose to prominence as a rosemaler. Just to the south, the Sons of Norway Mandt Lodge served up traditional Norwegian cuisine to patrons who were both hungry and looking to get out from under questionable skies. The festival’s mainstays, including the canoe race, the Saturday morning runs and walk, the Norse Costume Style Show, the arts and crafts fair and the quilt show kept people busy throughout the festival. The skies, though unpredictable, held together for the Saturday youth parade, and gave way to sunshine on Sunday just as the parade was starting, a departure from weather models that predicted the heaviest rain starting at that time.

List is 5,571 and counting for memorial committee SCOTT DE LARUELLE Unified Newspaper Group

Inside More Syttende Mai photos Pages 7-9

Photo by Amber Levenhagen

Aubree Bading, 2, watches the Sunday parade. The Syttende Mai festival ran May 17-19.

Last week, the Stoughton Area Veterans Memorial Park committee had the names of 5,570 veterans with area ties. This week, it has 5,571, after one of the more “unusual” ways of updating the list for Roger Kleven and Basil Sadler. The two have led the monumental mission to find as many names of area veterans as they can to inscribe on the memorial. “Two days ago, we found a guy, a Vietnam veteran who we missed,” Kleven said. “He had moved to Arizona, and his brother came back here for his funeral and happened to stop by the park when I was there.” Unusual, perhaps, but for Kleven, it’s exactly the reason that so many people spent so much time and effort to build the Stoughton Area Veterans Memorial Park, which sits at the corner of County Hwy. B and Country Club Road in Pleasant Springs. Site work started in late 2015, and after a $1 million

Inside When and where Stoughton will honor Memorial Day Page 2 fundraising effort, the park was dedicated Oct. 14, 2017. The list dates back to the War of 1812, including 176 killed in action, and Kleven said the goal is to keep pushing for more. “You just keep getting the word out,” he told the Hub this week. “It’s going to be an ongoing process, and our goal is to leave no leaf unturned, so to speak.”

Breakfast chatter Kleven, a 1959 Stoughton High School graduate who served in the Army National Guard in the 1960s during the Berlin Crisis, is a longtime member of Stoughton’s American Legion Post 59. A few years ago, he was flipping pancakes and listening to a former classmate and National Guard member talk about getting a group together to “see if we can’t build a memorial

Turn to Veterans/Page 2

Criddle Park getting ‘adventure’ playground Wooden equipment could be test run for other parks ALEXANDER CRAMER Unified Newspaper Group

On a recent sunny Mond a y, a b o u t a h a l f - d o z en childrens’ bikes were parked at Criddle Park with no owners in sight.

The small, “pocket” park on Monroe Street just north of Main Street gets a lot of traffic from kids waiting for their school bus, parks and recreation director Dan Glynn told the Hub, and many stay to play a bit before and after school. So as the park’s equipment wore out, Glynn said his department undertook an “intensive” public input process to hear what the

park’s users wanted to see there. Glynn said his department got feedback over 18 months from about 100 kids and neighbors of the park during conversations at community events and neighborhood barbeques, and the overwhelming response was that they wanted a “tree house feature” with a natural feel

similar to what is already at the park. On May 14, the Common Council approved spending up to $45,000 for GRG Playscapes to design and install what’s called a “natural/adventure playground” at Criddle Park. Work will start once school lets out for the summer, Glynn wrote in Photo by Alexander Cramer an email, and is expected to Park users said they’d like to see a similar tree house feature when the park is updated, and the city agreed, with installaTurn to Criddle/Page 20 tion planned to be completed by late July.

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