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CRASH LANDING!
The Lake Geneva area is not new to the wild, sometimes brutal, behavior of alcohol- and drug-addled tourists, and a few locals thrown in. Back in the sixties, when the Geneva Hotel still stood across from what’s called the boat lagoon these days, the grounds of the Hotel and its outdoor bar called the Inn Ferno were the hub of summer wild times and drunken debauchery of all sorts.
The publisher of this newspaper was a manager there for one summer of his life and well remembers the people passed out on the lawns and among the shrubbery while the police were so limited in size that there was little they could do to stop such behavior.
Times changed. The hotel was razed and the rather tasteless tower of condominiums, whatever it is, replaced it, constructed well above allowed altitude limits, but nobody was really watching or paying attention to such things back then. The theme of the bar and restaurant was Polynesian, with double Mai Tais and other Hawaiian-themed drinks popular, as was the Snoopy disco that stayed open into all hours of the night. Blatz, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Schlitz beer were 30 cents for a bottle, and the Mai Tai drinks a dollar. Smaller, ‘nickel’ beers, holding about four ounces of beer, were exactly that, a nickel, although poured from unmarked taps at the bar.
The hub replacement for the Geneva Hotel is not in Lake Geneva at all. It’s on the eastern outskirts of Elkhorn, along the freeway heading into downtown Milwaukee. The evidence of its taking over from the Geneva Hotel was right there in front of everyone who might have been out and about late at night in downtown Lake Geneva around midnight last Saturday. The entertainment at the Alpine Valley Resort was all country, which reminded the GSR staff reporters a whole lot of Country Thunder and just how awful those ‘celebrations’ were before the sheriff’s department of McHenry took over down there and changed all that.
Drinks at the Alpine Valley Resort were $28 for the hard mixed stuff and $25 for a bottle of beer. Yes, that would be $150 for a six-pack! So, what happened on Saturday night, since most of those attending the show either could not or would not pay for that freight? They drank in the parking lot before and after the event or bootlegged some past the guards who were small in number and terribly overworked. And then, when the entertainment was over, the revelers, many of them, drove to Lake Geneva and into parked cars (two total on lower Broad Street, the drivers no doubt resupplying Fat Cats).
A motorcyclist was struck and badly injured near the cemetery soon after. His condition remains unknown as of this writing. Two pedestrians were struck at the very dangerous (we told you so) crosswalk that runs across Main right there near the museum and the Bottle Shop. This follows the pedestrian run-over not too many days back by a local school bus.
So, what’s going on? Nothing new, except for the prices. Twenty-five cents back in the sixties, given the years of inflation, is worth about $2.39 today, which is a long way from twenty-five bucks. What is going on is the end of summer and the return of most young people to their work lives, mostly down in Chicago. Times have changed a lot, but not everything has gone that way, as Saturday night proved. Yes, we got an ugly building in place of the Frank Lloyd Wright place, but we also got a larger and much better police department. The price of the drinks? That’s why they don’t have many police parking lots.
