CHAPTER 1 - MOVE TO THE FARM It was news when it happened, that move to the farm, in summer 1965. When Don Rashke, who was thirty-three that summer, moved his wife, Diana, and six children from the Milwaukee area to a farm in central Wisconsin near Amherst, the Milwaukee Journal Sunday magazine covered the move with an extensive spread of text and photographs. It was an interesting enough story - a city family choosing a more rough-hewn life on a farm - but it also wasn't hard to guess how the newspaper had learned of it. For the previous half dozen years, Don had worked at the Milwaukee Journal, as a printer in the press room. Most recently, he'd been assistant foreman, with responsibility for printing the large Sunday edition, with 300 people under his supervision. When the Journal wrote about his leaving the city - "Fresh Air Lures Printer to Life on the Farm," the October 3, 1965, headline read - they were writing about one of their own. Donald Norman Rashke was a city kid, born February 3, 1932, and raised in the shadow of the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee. He lived with his parents, Guy and Angeline (Luksich) Rashke, on South Third Street, adjacent to St. Luke's Hospital, where Don's brother, Richard, was born in 1937. "No matter where we were in the city," Richard Rashke said, recalling the giant, four-faced clock tower at the Allen-Bradley plant, "day or night, the clock was always up there. You could see it everywhere and it would guide us home." Still, it wasn't an easy childhood. Don suffered from rickets, a bone disease triggered by a lack of vitamin D. His mother was allergic to milk. His father was a drinker with an uneven temper. Among Don's early memories was having to eat meals under the kitchen sink after displeasing his father. "I think he had a harder time growing up than he ever let on," said Don's son Bruce Rashke, an attorney who worked for a time with his father at TASC. Richard Rashke, who eventually became a successful journalist and author, agreed with that assessment. "During the Depression, my dad did not have a steady job," Richard said. "In those years, this proud family was on welfare. Back then, there were no food stamps. You had the humiliation of having a county truck pull up in front of your house, and somebody would carry in a box of groceries - dry food, oatmeal and beans, canned food, potatoes, maybe some cheese. We were poor, until the Depression was over." Their father found work where he could, Richard said. "He did pick-up work. He was a construction worker, which was seasonal. He picked up whatever he could. He drove truck. He finally got a construction job in Alaska, under FDR's expansive program to keep America working." In 1940, the year Don turned eight, his father returned from weeks away - he'd been on the construction project in Alaska - and that night the marriage effectively ended. There was a fight. When Don tried to help his mother, he wound up flat on his back. Angie took Don and Richard - "Dickie," to his older brother - around the corner to her parents' house on South Fourth Street, where they stayed until Angie managed to rent an upstairs apartment in a house a block away on Washington Street. His mother didn't trust Don with a key, so after school, he got into the apartment by standing on a stair railing, climbing onto an overhang, and opening a window. Later, after their mother remarried, the boys lived in some rooms behind a tavern. "My stepfather and mother leased out a tavern," Richard recalled, "and opened it up as Andy's Tap." The tavern was on South Fifth Street. "An industrial neighborhood," Richard recalled, "with a lot of competition. There were at least four other taverns on our block alone. We lived behind the tavern. We had a kitchen and two bedrooms, and that was it. There were no doors. Just a curtain separated our bedroom from our parents' bedroom. "The worst thing was," Richard continued, "we didn't have a bathtub or a shower. At night, if you had to use the toilet, you had to go out into the tavern and use the toilet in the tavern. Once a week, we would go to my grandmother's house to take the traditional Saturday night bath. That's how we survived." It was an undisciplined life, hardly ideal for a boy entering his teens. When it was suggested Don might benefit by moving to a seminary to study for the priesthood, he didn't hesitate. "In 1946, I left home," Don wrote in a memoir he completed in 2011, the year before his death. "It was a relief for me." Don referenced the hardship of living behind the bar: "No bath or shower and not even a private toilet." He was fourteen when he enrolled as a missionary candidate at St. Mary's Seminary in Techny, Illinois, north of Chicago. Founded in 1909 by the Divine Word Missionaries, it was the first seminary in the United States to primarily train men for foreign missions. "It was probably the first time in his life he was assured he was going to get three meals a day," Bruce Rashke said. "He had a structured life, as opposed to an unstructured life." According to Richard, something that happened while they were living behind the tavern helped put the seminary in Techny on Don's radar. "What happened," Richard said, "was that he got expelled from the public school system." It was nothing terribly serious - a prank, undertaken on a dare, that backfired - but Don was caught and expelled. "The only place he could go," Richard said, "besides a home for boys, a detention center, was a Catholic school." There was one, Holy Trinity, just a block from where they were living at the tavern. "I can tell you that neither one of us was religious," Richard said. "But we ended up at Holy Trinity grade school, really by accident. It changed my life [Richard would become a priest], and it changed Don's as well. If he hadn't gone to Holy Trinity, he would never have thought of becoming a brother with the Divine Word missionaries [in Techny]." In his memoir, written more than six decades later, Don recalled his excitement upon landing at the seminary. "This was just amazing to me!" he wrote. "It had a print shop, 1,000-acre farm, swimming pool, softball and hardball diamonds, indoor basketball court (basketball during free hours and all Sunday afternoon), outdoor handball courts, music rooms, a garage for their 20 autos, a 'bee hive farm' serving honey at every meal, and showers with lockers in the basement." Note the first two things Don referenced: the print shop and the farm. His experience with each in Techny would pay dividends. "We had certain days during the week that we were given trade instructions," Don said later, "because we were missionaries, we were being trained to be missionaries. And my chosen field was printing, and so, therefore, they were teaching me how to be a compositor a couple of days a week, especially on Saturdays. "And then in the summer," Don continued, "because we were also training to be missionaries, we had to learn about farming, so they put us either to work in the vegetables or out on the dairy farm, where I baled hay, and milked cows.They had [purebred] registered Holsteins, Holstein-Friesians from Holland, so it was a pure registered herd, and a very good place to learn." In the end, though he spent four years in Techny, Don decided against the priesthood. "I had enough religion to last a lifetime and had accomplished some real skills," he wrote. He was eighteen and sought a job in a printshop, without success. The Korean War had begun and companies weren't anxious to hire young men who might soon be headed overseas. A labor union connection got Don a job driving Carl Thompson, the Democratic candidate for governor, around the state of Wisconsin for three months, putting 11,000 miles on an American Bantam Semi-Truck, to no avail, as Thompson lost to the Republican candidate, Walter Kohler. There were still no job prospects, but Don met a woman, Diana Wozniak - they were introduced through friends - who eventually became his fiancée. They were married in 1952. Don was in the Navy by then, having enlisted ahead of being drafted. His background earned him a posting at a government printing office in Norfolk, Virginia, where after just a week he was taken out of a sixteen-week introductory class and put to work as a compositor on a linotype machine. His talent had been honed in Techny. A ship assignment, in which he would work in the ship's printshop, was next, but first he'd been cleared for a leave, which for some reason was rescinded at the last minute. The leave had been planned in order for Don to fly back to Wisconsin and marry Diana. As Don relayed the story in his memoir, he had no choice but to go AWOL from the Navy. He was gone seven days. The wedding took place. Back in Norfolk, Don spent a couple of days in the brig - having turned himself...
