07 | 25 | 2008

WisconsinNative.com Launches Portal

For authentic Badger State flavor, you can’t get more Wisconsin than Susan Lampert Smith. In kindergarten, she made the newspaper for the first time, in a picture from the St. Joseph Church Friday Night Fish Fry, in which she appears to be stabbing Father Zander with a piece of perch. You can’t get more Wisconsin than that. In college at Wisconsin, she met her future husband while grilling brats at the post-football game Badger Bash at Union South. You can’t get more Wisconsin than that.

Susan Lampert Smith has been to the state’s biggest fish fry, at Serb Hall in Milwaukee, and the state’s weirdest sporting event, the wood tick races held each year at a tavern on the Flambeau River deep in the northern forest. She’s regaled readers with the “blessing of the bock” beer in Milwaukee and the counting of the sandhill cranes in Jefferson County and the dropping of the carp on New Years in the Mississippi River town of Prairie du Chien.

You just can’t get more Wisconsin than that.

For nearly 25 years, Susan Lampert Smith has chronicled life in Wisconsin, including writing the award-winning “On Wisconsin” column for the Wisconsin State Journal. She won the state’s top column award twice from the Milwaukee Press Club and twice from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, where one judge compared her to the syndicated humor writer Dave Barry.

Among her award-winning efforts were such favorites as:

-- Her fond farewell to “Big Stinky,’’ the state’s largest open-hole outhouse. That story made it on the wires all the way to Japan, and helped sell hundreds of “Big Stinky” T-shirts for Wyalusing State Park.

-- Her short feature, “Ignorant Sport,” in which she detailed the tedium of waiting for a big sturgeon to wander by your hole while ice fishing on Lake Winnebago. One bored sturgeon warrior described his sport as being “like watching TV with nothing on.”

-- Her magazine feature, “The Bra Ladies,’’ detailing the inside knowledge of those little old ladies who work in Milwaukee lingerie stores and can size up a woman without even needing the tape measure.

Now, Susan will once again bring her unique style and Wisconsin-bred perspective to the people, places and things that make our state special.

Her column will appear in print in Wisconsin newspapers and here at WisconsinNative.com as part of an overall site devoted to sharing the love for America’s Dairyland.

Susan Lampert Smith is the quintessential Wisconsin Native. Enjoy her work and the other stories and photos on our site.

To contribute your own stories and photos, check out our Submit News section for more details.

Or you can use one of these online forms:
NewsTip
Submit photos

If you know fun people and places around Wisconsin, or have other suggestions, e-mail Susan Lampert Smith at susan@wisconsinnative.com.

--David Stoeffler