The unusual life of Bill Woishke
Man, 91, was an islander, pilot, entrepreneur
By Bill Vossler
Bill Woishke grew up in an unusual place, in an unusual town, and in an unusual way. And his life story... it’s anything but usual.
The curiosities began for the St. Cloud man with his birth in 1935 on an unusually-small island in Lake Erie, South Bass Island, 3.7 miles long and 1.5 miles wide—to parents who met in an unusual way.
“During the Great Depression, my dad worked in vineyards and a winery on South Bass Island, and bought an old house on 10 acres with 305 feet of lake shore on the east side of the island,” he said. “The little bit of shallow soil contained lime, perfect for growing grapes, so five wineries operated on the island those years.”
Bill’s mother came to babysit on the island. “She pushed a baby buggy down a road near dad’s house. That’s how they met. He was 38, she 20. They married on April 28, 1934. Exactly nine months to the day later I was born. By then, dad raised grapes, and we had milk cows, and lots of food to eat.”
They lived in a town with the unusual name of Put-In Bay. “People ask about the unusual name. It came from a ship battle in the War of 1812, against the British. Oliver Hazard Perry of the U.S. saw the British warships in two long rows. Perry sailed between the rows, and with cannons on both sides of his ship, shot both directions. The British couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting their own ships. After that victory he said ‘Put the ships in the bay,’ where our town is now, and since then it has been called Put-In Bay, Ohio.”
At age 14, Bill learned to fly an airplane. But not the usual kind. “Our house was next to the airport, and at about 13, I hung around with the childless owners (the Herschbergers). I kind of became their unofficial son, and spent 10 or 12 hours every day with them. I enjoyed that because it was good for me, and I learned all kinds of things from the Herschbergers, like how to make long distance calls—any mainland call was long distance. I learned how to wash airplane windows, clean up barf, and other things. So I grew up pretty fast.”
One thing he learned was how to fly a Trimotor airplane. “Milton Herschberger showed me how to fly that 14-passenger airplane. To take off from Rattlesnake Island, you used a 1500 foot long runway that curved, so the tail was over Lake Erie while the wheels were still on the island. I loved flying. I wanted to solo, but wasn’t strong enough to get the airplane off the ground, or land because the rudder and elevator took some beef to move them. I just wasn’t strong enough.”
During the summer the airplane made a dozen trips a day to Port Clinton, Ohio, five miles away. “We hauled groceries, beer, and mail, and I took care of passengers, luggage, and fares. One winter we hauled 29 ice fishermen to the shanties anchored on the ice. Many people fished on Saturday afternoon and went back home in the evening.”
But someone got upset about how much time Bill spent at Herschberger’s and reported him. “So I was cut to five shorter days a week. Plus Milton expected a lot out of me, but I couldn’t live up to his expectations. So eventually, after three year,s we parted ways.”
Learning to fly the Trimotor helped Bill later in life. “Later I bought my own personal plane, an unusual Cessna 177, with no wing struts so it was easy to get in and out of it. I ended up with instrument and commercial ratings, so I could have commercially flown other passengers.”
He did fly using instrument ratings. “That means flying when you can’t see much of anything. I did that several times, and it didn’t bother me because I had been trained to do it.”
Big Resort
“Before I was born, and the 18 years I lived there, the island was a well-known resort, and a huge draw for tourists,” Bill said. “Every summer day big ships dumped thousands of people on the island. One ship brought 3,000 people every time. A private train from the main dock delivered tourists to Hotel Victory.”
During those years, Bill said, “Tourists attended the theater, restaurants and bar, danced with the band at the Victory Hotel, or visited the monument to the 1812 war before returning to Detroit. In 1913 they hauled in beautiful stone and erected that monument in Put-In Bay that commemorates the battles and the war.”
Times Change
“The influx of tourists all changed when the auto became popular,” Bill said. “The car could take people to the little town of Catawba, Ohio, where boats could run those five miles from the mainland to the island, so the big ships didn’t last long after that.”
He said the island didn’t have much. “A few groceries, shoes and underwear. We couldn’t afford to go on the mainland, so we lived out of the catalogs, Wards, Sears, Spiegel, ordering clothes and necessities, which took two weeks to come. Clothes that didn’t fit could be returned.”
Bill said they also had a telephone line. “It was a party line with ten people per line, so you could listen in,” he laughed.
“Surprisingly,” Bill said, “on a small island like that, most roads were black-topped, and one downtown to that big hotel was concrete.”
He said the island was pretty isolated in the winter. “No stores were open for the 300 permanent residents on the island. Another problem year-round was the lack of medical people. My younger sister had rheumatic fever, and the doctor on the island didn’t really practice. Her fever shot up to 106. That’s when she said she was seeing herself in the corners of the room. It hurt her kidneys very badly, and affected her the rest of her life.”
“The island had many nice homes with owners who didn’t come up much before Memorial Day, so at 15 I started mowing their lawns to make some money and do something different. All the yards had to be cut, raked and cleaned.”
For that work, Bill built a cart for his bike to pull. “I loaded my own mower on it and hauled it around the island to at least 50 houses, starting in early spring. I raked, cleaned, and trimmed trees if that was needed. If I used my mower, I charged $1.50 an hour, and if theirs, a dollar an hour, good money for that time. I was sincere, worked hard, did an excellent job, and I enjoyed it. The people were happy, and paid me when they came.”
Bill attended school all 12 years on the island. “One building worked for all 12 grades with 65 students, first and second in one room with one teacher, grades four through six in another room with another teacher, seven and eight in a room with yet another teacher, and three rooms for the high schoolers with several teachers for different classes. I liked arithmetic and math a little bit, and enjoyed that the classes were small.”
After graduating high school, Bill attended Ohio State in engineering. “That was a hard time for me. I was living in a basement office all alone, fixing my own meals, which I wasn’t prepared for, and some people would see the light on in the window and just knock on it. I just wasn’t prepared for all that. Then I couldn’t adapt to the huge classes, a hundred or more in each one. I was just lost. So I returned home after two quarters, worked and saved some money.”
That meant employment at the Castle Inn on the island. “I was a handyman. I did dishes, peeled potatoes with a machine, stocked the bar, swept up glass, and did anything that needed being done. And closed up at 4 a.m. That was a huge bar with a winery. Young kids would drink a bottle of wine and end up on the floor. So we carried them across the street to the cemetery and laid them down. That had to surprise them when they woke up,” he laughed. “There too I was exposed to so many things.”
He attempted Ohio State one more time, but it was still a no-go. “So I joined the Air Force. The Navy had a base for training submarines at upstate Lake Seneca. But when they gave it up, the Air Force took it, so I ended up being there in January, February, and March in 1955. Minus 30 below was not unusual, with snow up to your waist or more. They couldn’t heat the barracks because they had no insulation. When we went to bed we only took off our brogans, and the barracks guards would come around and put an overcoat on you for an additional blanket. Half of the troops in basic ended up in a hospital, which led to them closing the base.”
After basic training, Bill participated in a variety of jobs in different places—electronics, electronics instructor, building fly-fishing rods, hauling the Rocky Mountain newspaper, working for Control data helping sales people explain what computers could do, some data processing, building computers at UNIVAC, long before people had computers, then to Honeywell, installing a large computer system at Denver Federal Center Bureau of Mines and Reclamation, teaching how to program computers.
Unusual Entrepreneur
After retiring from electronics, Bill started buying undeveloped land in Central Minnesota. “I bought small parcels for many years, and ended up with 150 acres with lots of waterfront.”
He bought a small resort, and built it up, adding a mobile home park with 150 double-wide sites with slabs and a garage, an RV park with 200 sites, a restaurant seating 300 in a banquet area, 200 in the dining room, and 100 in the bar room, and a large storage building, large enough for 60 pontoons to be off the ground. “I sold it all to one person when I was 86.”
Three years ago was the last time Bill was on South Bass Island, he said. “I attended my 70th class reunion. Four of the seven are still alive at age 91. I enjoyed talking with them and they enjoyed talking with me, too. One has Alzheimer’s, but I stay in touch with her by talking to her daughter, calling several times a year. Staying in touch with all of them brings back the good times in those early years.”
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