Archive for August, 2022

August Lookaround – part 5

August 30, 2022

Phebe Jewell Nichols, who had studied the Menominee extensively and had authored novels on them, taught social science at Oshkosh High School. She was also the chairman of the Indian affairs committee for the Wisconsin League of Women Voters. That fall Gus organized a Keshena football team while she remained active with the League of Women Voters. In 1935 she gave a costumed recital to open the program of the 23rd Annual Convention of the International Lyceum Association in Lakeside on Lake Erie in Ohio. She also gave readings in several cities. The American Poetry Magazine devoted its first autumn issue entirely to her works.

The 1936 edition of Indians of Today included a biography of Angus Franklin Lookaround. It stated that Gus had toured with Ringling’s Circus Band, Sells-Floto Band, and the Royal Scotch Highlanders. A 1938 anthology, Poetry Out of Wisconsin, included two of Phebe’s works, “Indian Pipe” and “Menominee Lullaby.” A month later, she released a booklet titled “Tales from an Indian Lodge,” which contained background information on the tribe and essays on the philosophy and lives of its people. In March, Angus and Phebe provided the entertainment for a special meeting of the PTA. He told Indian stories “never told to the public before” and she presented her monodrama, Something of the Indian Heart. On December 1, she began writing a weekly column for The Green Bay Press-Gazette on Indian affairs. The Appleton Post-Crescent picked up her column the next month, followed by The Sheboygan Press in September. In her February talk to the AAUW in Green Bay, she stated that prejudice was the greatest obstacle in the way of satisfactory adjustment for American Indians.

In April 1939, Angus and three other men circulated a petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for L. W. Kemnitz be named manager of Menominee Indian Mills, a million-dollar enterprise. The Menominee believed they should be granted the right to hire their own manager. Both shifts of employees at the mill had already signed the petition. Phebe gave a talk titled “The Mother of Today” to several organizations that winter and spring. In December, The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern picked up a series of Phebe’s articles on American Indian Lore.

<end of part 5>

Gus Lookaround – part 4

August 28, 2022

In 1929 Gus organized and directed the Keshena Indian School band that was composed of twenty-one boys and one girl. The band won second place in the Wisconsin High School Band Tournament with grade school children after having been organized only four months. That August, he married Miss Alice Hampton (Cherokee) of Bradley, Oklahoma. She was the kindergarten teacher at the school. The following year he was selected to direct the Shawano City Band due to his success at Keshena. When his bride’s health failed in 1932, they relocated to Chickasaw, Oklahoma, to be near her family one assumes. She was buried in the Bradley Cemetery and Gus returned to his home in Wisconsin.

In 1933 he was a member of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. In 1934 Gus was selected for the Indian Achievement Medal to be awarded at the Century of Progress (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair).

Gus remarried in June 1934 to Mrs. Phebe Jewell Nichols, who was nine years his senior. They must have known each other for some time because she was a member of the committee that picked him for the medal. She was an attractive upper-middle-class novelist who had been widowed three years earlier. Gus, who had had no children of his own immediately became stepfather to three: Howard Gardner Nichols Jr. (19), Patricia Nichols (17), and Conover Nichols (12). Phebe’s late husband, a real estate investor and insurance agent a decade, had died after having a nervous breakdown over financial losses incurred during the Great Depression. They had married in 1913 when he was 38 and she 28. They likely became acquainted while she was teaching school in the Oshkosh area. Originally from Wabasha, Minnesota, Phebe had attended Oshkosh Normal School after graduating from Carlton College.

<end of part 4>

Gus Lookaround – part 3

August 25, 2022

Gus either enrolled in or worked at Tomah Indian School after getting out of the Navy because he played on their football team. During halftime in a game at Sparta, several Sparta boys ventured onto the thin ice on Perch Lake and broke through. Being the first to notice the boys’ plight, he raced from the football field and plunged into the icy water. He grabbed them and guided them to safety. He then played the second half as if nothing had happened but his overheated body collapsed unconscious as the game ended. He was revived with no apparent ill effects. Gus played at least one game for the Green Bay Packers that year.

August Lookaround disappeared from newspapers until 1922 when Angus Lookaround appeared. Since his Carlisle application was signed by him rather than a parent, it’s fair to say he was going by that name at the time. Why he shifted from August to Angus is unknown. Perhaps because August sounded German where Angus was Scottish caused him to make the change during WWI.

Angus first appeared in print when he signed to play for the Racine, Wisconsin American Legion football team. According to the article, he captained and played quarterback for the Atlantic fleet team during the war and afterward with eastern teams such as the New Haven Stars. The description of his time at Carlisle, while not completely accurate, convinces this writer that August and Angus Lookaround were the same person. A later article stated that Gus was living in Elkhorn, employed by the Holton Band Instrument Company, and that his Menominee name was Te Powis (Club Thrower).

In 1927 The Lake Geneva News announced that Chief Angus Lookaround would be in charge of a muskrat fur operation on the McDonald farm near Elkhorn. Later that year The Post-Crescent of Appleton, Wisconsin announced that Gus had joined the composite Wisconsin American Legion band as a sousaphone player and soloist. The group traveled to Paris, France. The next year he played bass viol in the Plaza Theater orchestra in Burlington, Wisconsin.

<end of part 3

Gus Lookaround – part 2

August 22, 2022

After commencement in the spring 0f 1914, Gus joined another football player, Fred Big Top (Piegan), in operating a horse rental business at Glacier National Park. At summers’ end, Lookaround returned to Carlisle but Joe Guyon didn’t. Just as the season started Gus wrote an article on the 60-piece Indian School band in which he played the helicon bass, a cousin of the sousaphone. In an attempt to shore up the backfield, Pop shifted Gus to fullback for the Lehigh game and quarterback against Dickinson College. A broken leg kept him out of several games but Warner put him in at center against Notre Dame.

Helicon Bass

After the season ended, Gus entered the Ford Motor Company intern program in Detroit, Michigan along with several teammates. They formed a basketball team in their free time. The fall of 1915 found Gus back at Carlisle playing football, making music with the band, and debating as a member of Invincible Debating Society. The Indian coaches, Victor “Choctaw” Kelley and Gus Welch, put him at left end this year. The dismal 3-6-2 season brought Gus’s football career at Carlisle to an end after having played every position except halfback at one time or another. With the spheroid left behind, he headed back to Detroit. He stayed on with Ford until September, 1916 when he returned to his home in Wisconsin.

It’s not clear what Gus did the next eleven months but the Carlisle school newspaper published on November 2, 1917 reported that he had enlisted in the army and was training at Camp Douglas, Wisconsin. Later that month he was reported as being “somewhere in France.” A month later he was on board the battleship U.S.S. New Hampshire. Wisconsin newspapers said he “is going to look around for German U-boats,” probably as a joke. In January, 1918 he visited Carlisle on his way to visit his family in Wisconsin. In February, he wrote that he enjoyed the Navy and “was soon to play in the championship football game of his ship’s league.” No mention was made about how he transferred from the Army to the Navy. The last mention of him in Carlisle publications came in March when he visited Wallace Denny at the school while his ship was in Philadelphia.

<end of part 2>

Gus Lookaround (part 1)

August 19, 2022

Last week a reporter from the local newspaper called asking if I knew anything about August Lookaround for an article he was putting together. About all I knew was that Gus had played on the Carlisle Indian School football team but not much more. Expecting to find enough for a 300-word blog posting I agreed to do a little research and get back to him. 2,000 words later, I have too much for a blog post and don’t have a book in work into it could fit neatly. So, I’ve decided to serialize it on my blog.

August “Gus” Lookaround from Keshena, Wisconsin arrived at Carlisle in April 1912 at twenty years of age. His deceased father was full-blood Menominee and his still alive mother was half-blood. Prior to coming to Carlisle, Gus had attended Keshena Indian School through the fifth grade. After that he attended Tomah Indian School in Tomah, Wisconsin, where he graduated after completing eighth grade. At five feet ten inches tall and weighing one hundred seventy-eight and a half pounds, Gus was a prime candidate for the athletic teams.

He was first mentioned in print in mid-September when head football coach Pop Warner said of the new men trying out for the team, “the most promising of whom are [Joe] Guyon and [Gus] Lookaround, two good-sized fellows who have entered the school since last season.” He got some playing time in the early warm-up games against local small colleges, playing right tackle against Albright College and Lebanon Valley College right guard against Dickinson College. When Sam Burd, the previous year’s captain was called home to Montana, Warner had a vacancy to fill at left end. He tried Lookaround against Villanova and Syracuse. Roy Large eventually got the position but Gus had made a good impression for a first-year man.

At the start of the 1913 season, wags at out-of-town papers had some fun at Gus’s expense. The Meriden Journal said: “Carlisle has a tackle on the football team whose last name is Lookaround. Suppose his first name was Taka.”

He started the 1913 season at right tackle but was shifted the left tackle for the Dickinson game. Last year’s tackles, Guyon and Calac, had been moved to the backfield, leaving both tackle positions open. Gus was back at right tackle the rest of the schedule. Monty placed Gus on his All-American Tenth Team at season’s end.

<end of part 1>