News: Neillsville “Dale Eunson Days” (Festivities - 1983)

Contact: Dolores (Mohr) Kenyon
E-mail: dolores@wiclarkcountyhistory.org 

Surnames: Eunson, Lulloff, Sherren, Hoesly, Sturdevant, Romaine

----Source: Clark County Press (Neillsville, Clark Co., WI) 6/9/1983

Neillsville “Dale Eunson Days” (Festivities – 11-13 June 1983)

Mayor Robert Lulloff has designated this week Friday, Saturday and Sunday as “Dale Eunson Days” in Neillsville, in honor of the nationally known author who will revisit his hometown on those days.

Highlights of the celebration are an open house at the Clark County Historical Society’s museum on Saturday from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.; and a “Welcome Home” dinner at 7:00 that evening. During the open house, Eunson will be available to autograph his books and to meet people of the area. Viola Sherren is in charge of arrangements for the open house.

The dinner will be held at Fannie’s Supper Club, four miles east of Neillsville on U.S. 10. A brief program has been arranged. A feature will include the presentation of the key to the City of Neillsville by Mayor Lulloff.

Harriette Hoesly has made plans for the visit and has acted as general chairperson for the Clark County Historical Society, which is sponsoring the celebration.

Eunson, now a resident of Santa Barbara, California, was born in Neillsville and lived during his early years in a house adjacent to the west of the former Rychnovsky Brothers garage. His next door neighbors were the Claude Sturdevants, a prominent family in the earlier days of Neillsville. His father served as Clark County Sheriff for two years (1908 – 1910). During that time, young Eunson made his home in the county jail, which now serves as the historical society’s museum.

Eunson and his wife Binks, who is an artist, plan to spend Friday renewing acquaintances with the area.

Eunson has fond memories. He recalled sliding during the winter, down the west Fifth Street hill from the jail house to Goose Creek. There wasn’t enough traffic at the Fifth and Hewett Streets intersection in those horse-and-buggy days to cause any safety problem, he said.

The Eunsons plan to return Sunday to Santa Barbara, where he is working on the final chapters of a new novel.

In addition to segments of some popular television series, Eunson also has written three nationally distributed books. “The Day They Gave Babies Away” was published originally as a magazine piece in “Cosmopolitan,” for which he then was feature editor. It told the story of his father, former Sheriff Bob Eunson, who found homes for his orphaned brothers and sisters on a dreary, tearful Christmas Eve. The locale was Oshkosh and the Fox River Valley.

Neillsville was prominently mentioned in his novel, “Up on the Rim.” It is a story of the hardships and experiences of a family which moved from Neillsville to homestead land “up on the Rim,” near Billings, Montana, in 1910.

Jess Romaine, a native of Loyal and one-time millinery store owner in Neillsville, was Eunson’s stepmother, whom he remembered and revered in his novel. He mother died shortly after Eunson’s birth; she is buried in a Merrillan cemetery, along with other members of her family.

A third Novel, also drawn from experiences in Montana, is entitled, “Homestead.”