Don Sanford had a problem. He liked Lake Mendota, and he liked to take friends out on the water. So what was the problem?
“We’d leave the Union and head down that way,” he says, sitting on the Memorial Union Terrace and pointing east. “And invariably we would get a mile down the lakeshore, and somebody who lived in Madison all their life would say, ‘Where the hell are we? I don’t know where we are.’”
John Lohr III
The Diana prepares to leave the Park Street pier in 1964.
It’s a sad fact that many of us know little about the lakes next door. To correct that situation, 11 years ago Sanford began to research On Fourth Lake: A Social History of Lake Mendota. The book, more than 350 full-color pages, will be released soon. Its title comes from white settlers’ first name for the largest lake in the area chain.
The book is full of geographic facts, bizarre happenings, adventure, tragedy, trivia, maps and photos. And you can’t spin lake yarns without including fish tales. Here, though, they’re all true. “I’ve heard enough stories in my time, being on the water,” says Sanford. “Everything that’s in there has verification.”
WHS Image ID-54215
One of Lake Mendota’s greatest fishermen, Billy Dunn, shown here with his catch, circa late 1800s.
A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Sanford came to Madison in 1976 to work for Wisconsin Public Television, serving 30 years in such positions as lighting designer, production manager and volunteer manager. A sailor and ice-boater from way back, he was enchanted by the capital city’s waters.
“I met a lot of ‘elders,’ I guess is the word, who have lived here all their lives on Lake Mendota or Lake Monona, but mostly Lake Mendota,” he recalls. They shared their stories, and his wife, Barb, a freelance writer, encouraged him to collect them as a book.
“I’m not a historian by profession, but I’ve always had kind of a passing interest in local history,” says Sanford. He decided to start researching the Mendota stories. Fortunately, a major research center was just a block away from his office at Wisconsin Public Television.
Emil Thomas
The Madison Police Department’s new boat takes to the water in July 1953.
“A couple times a week I would take a long lunch hour and go over to the [Wisconsin] Historical Society and start rooting around,” he says. Especially helpful was the research of Frank Custer, the late Madison journalist and amateur historian.
“It dawned on me that this lake was in many respects very much like Madison,” says Sanford. “Yeah, there are some rich and famous people here, but there’s also a lot of ordinary Joes and people trying to make a living in some job. I began thinking of this as telling the story of the lakeshore, telling the stories of these people.”
He also wanted On Fourth Lake to be a useful, portable guide, listing “places you can go and just put the anchor out and stay overnight, have a nice time; or where you wouldn’t want to go because it’s too shallow, if you’re in a big boat. Or where you can go to get a drink.”
Nancy Zucker, of Zucker Design, put all the book’s elements together, and its organization was suggested by David Mollenhoff, author of Madison: A History of the Formative Years.
“He said to think of it like a walking tour of a neighborhood,” says Sanford. “It’s in chapters that you could cover in a canoe in about an hour.”
Sanford is self-publishing On Fourth Lake. He estimates that he spent $35,000 even before sending it to the printer. To help cover costs, he launched donor campaigns among friends and on Kickstarter.
“It’s been very, very gratifying,” he says. “I can easily count about 200 people who put money on the table in some amount between $15 and $2,000.”
Copies may be reserved online via lakemendotahistory.com. Sanford expects it to be available by the holiday season. The price is still being determined, but he expects it will be “under $40.”
