Memories of MATC Downtown Campus

As I read the page one article in this morning’s<i> Wisconsin State Journal</i>, “After 98 years, it’s farewell,” pertaining to the closing of the downtown MATC campus, I was reminded of a line from the Joan Baez song Diamonds and Rust, “yes we both know what memories can bring, they bring diamonds and rust.” And how true that line in the song has played out over half a century.
It was 54 years ago this month that a bunch of fresh out of high school rural Wisconsin boys made the first big decision of their lives...enrolling for the fall term at MATC. We came from Platteville, Stitzer, Mineral Point, Fennimore, Highland, Kendall, Hillsboro, Montfort, Dodgeville and New Glarus. All of us small-town kids, turned loose in the big city for our first chance at freedom from our small, rural Wisconsin towns.
Little did any of us realize what a journey our lives were about to embark on, and where those journeys would lead us. Looking back on what the past 54 years have meant, we now realize just how much that one or two years at MATC would mean to us, and did for us.
We’re all retired now, have grandchildren. Damn the snow and cold of Wisconsin winters! Load up the SUV and head to warmer climes like Florida, Georgia and Arizona, where we put on our best elastic waistband geezer pants and slip on tennis shoes, spending our days sitting in lounge chairs with other Wisconsin snowbirds talking about the good old days.
How the memories reappear of that warm, late-May 1965 Thursday night in Madison. We got the gang together for one last time, Tucker, Wolfgram, Genz-O-Matic, Susie, June, Lila, Kathy and myself. We piled into the ‘59 Ford convertible, the guys from MATC’s automotive school and the girls from the Madison Beauty Culture School.
It was the perfect night for a one last fling of comradeship - never dating each other, just the common denominator, small-town Wisconsin kids who enjoyed each other’s common company. Meeting up, as we always did on Thursday nights at Chesty’s, the 18-year-old beer bar on State Street.
Once each month we’d head out to Middleton to the Bunny Hop, where we could dance, tell really lousy jokes and talk about the small towns we came from. The girls telling us about Markesan, Baraboo, Livingston and Cobb. And, as always, Genz-O-Matic was our chauffeur. Only one year older than the rest of us, he seemed much older in his wonderful ways.
As we traveled back into Madison late on that May Thursday evening, we knew that 12 hours later we all would be leaving Madison to start our young lives. Most often back in our hometowns that just nine months earlier sent us off the school, and the opportunity to stand for ourselves.
Some went back to their hometowns to jobs promised upon completion of our schooling. On that last warm night as we dropped off the girls near the apartment building they all lived in, we promised that we would get together again. As these promises often go, for the most part, it never happened. But we weren’t the first to make this promise, and won’t be the last.
One was married and widowed young, losing her husband to cancer.
Genz-O-Matic fulfilled his dream job, flying helicopters. A Huey assault pilot in some far-off country we only knew as Vietnam. His Army flying gig ended abruptly with an AK-47 round through his knee. Always the resourceful one, Genz-O-Matic found a new job with better pay flying for Air America, flying the of the last missions off the US Embassy roof in Saigon, as the North Vietnamese army closed in on Saigon on April 30, 1975. Bringing to an end America’s greatest foreign policy disaster that cost our baby boomer generation 58,000 young lives. Genz-O-Matic, like so many of our generation who served in Vietnam, survived the war but not the peace. He died in a motorcycle accident while at home on a vacation.
Through all of this first year out of our hometown high schools, our common threads ran deep and wide. We all sought and gained the knowledge needed for careers that would allow us to stand on our own for the rest of our long lives. The glue that held us all together were the opportunities that MATC and the Madison Beauty Culture School gave each of us as we started on this 54-year adventure called life.
A mid-life change of careers took me back to MATC in 1985. And again, in one year of two hours, two days a week, led me to a career I still have 34 years later.
No doubt many of us who attended the downtown MATC campus will shed a few tears for the end of a darn good run. While we mourn the loss of our downtown MATC, our grandchildren will be among the first to attend the South Madison MATC.
MATC, thanks for the great education and memories.