Story originally printed in the Onalaska Life or online at www.onalaskalife.com
Published - Thursday, March 13, 2008
Builder recalls 1960 origins of star, cross
The Holmen Village Board gets credit for putting the lighted star on Star Hill. The cross was Art Moe’s idea, and at the time it went up, it wasn’t universally well received in the community.
In 1960, Moe was a successful builder who grew up in Holmen and was keeping plenty busy building homes and scout camps. In a phone interview from his home in Stone Lake, Wis., which is near Hayward, Moe recalled that members of the village board had seen a blufftop star up in Blair, Wis.
 Holmen Village Board members recruited Art Moe to build the giant star on Star Hill back in 1960. It was his idea to make it double as a cross. The cross has been the subject of a complaint because the cross is on village-owned property and the electricity to light it is paid for by the village. Photo by Randy Erickson |
“They thought that’d be quite a thing to do,” said Moe, who is 80 years old. “We looked at it and I said, ‘Sure, we can do it, but it’s going to be expensive.’”
It didn’t turn out to be all that expensive, though, said Rector Wall, who was the village clerk at the time and remembered the star as being in Bangor instead of Blair. The cost for the project, Wall recalled, was split between the village and the Holmen Lions Club, which had just been formed.
“I think probably the village paid more because they had more money,” said Wall. He also noted it was a longstanding tradition for the fire department to help out with changing light bulbs, which sometimes didn’t have a long life, thanks to local boys and the BB guns.
Moe contacted Mississippi Power and Light, the electric utility back then, and talked the company out of some poles. Then he went to the lumber yard his grandfather started and got a bunch of 2x8s and 2x12s and laid them out on the concrete slab in front of his garage.
He drilled the holes and bolted everything together. “Then we took it all apart and put it together up on top,” Moe said.
To mount the star and cross on the poles, Moe borrowed a 40-foot ladder from the fire department and recruited Ralph Anderson to help. Anderson, he said, was the only guy in town with spiked shoes for pole climbing.
“We had quite a time. ... It wasn’t a pleasurable experience,” Moe recalled. “Damn, 40 foot was a long way up, and you were on top of a bluff to boot.”
The work was worth it, though, as the star was a big hit with the community, which at that time had only about 450 people, Moe said.
The cross, on the other hand, had a few detractors, he recalled, but the objections had nothing to do with separation of church and state. Moe took the dimensions for the cross from his Lutheran Bible, and he later got “static” from some Holmen Catholics.
“There was a little friction,” he said. “They said it was a Lutheran cross. It’s just one of those things — small people with big mouths.”
Moe is equally baffled about the controversy that arose last week after a Holmen resident, Eric Barnes, lodged an informal complaint with the village because the cross, which is lit during the 40 days of Lent, stands on property that the village bought five years ago.
“That don’t make sense,” said Moe. “Why are they objecting to the damn thing?”
A lot of area residents had the same question on their mind, judging from several interviews, a handful of letters to the editor and an unprecedented outpouring of reader commentary on the Holmen Courier Web site.
It doesn’t make sense to Gene Alberts, who was the village administrator and clerk five years ago when the village bought the property, largely because space was needed up there for a larger water reservoir. But then again, Alberts said he knew it was coming.
Members of the village board didn’t really discuss the potential for conflict or even a lawsuit over displaying a religious symbol on government-owned property, Alberts said, but they knew it could be an issue. At the time the property was purchased, La Crosse was in the heat of a legal battle over display of a 10 Commandments monument in a downtown city park.
“John (Chapman, village president) and I both knew somebody would eventually say something,” said Alberts, who is now assistant vice president of finance at Viterbo University in La Crosse.
“It’s just so silly that people get worked up over something like this,” Alberts said.
Barnes, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse physics professor who raised the issue, said he expected there would be a negative reaction when he raised the issue.
“If you have a different opinion, you always hear the same things: ‘Why are you bucking the system,’” Barnes said.
He has received e-mails from people criticizing him for objecting to the Star Hill cross, but he also has received just as many e-mails applauding his stand. The criticism doesn’t bother him, he said.
“Everybody is entitled to their opinion,” he said.
As of midday Tuesday, Barnes still had not heard from anybody at the village regarding what the village was going to do about his concerns, if anything.
Barnes said he hopes Holmen’s solution doesn’t mimic La Crosse, which transferred to a civic group a small patch of park land that the 10 Commandments monument sits on, now with a double fence around it.
If Holmen transfers the land to a civic group, Barnes said he will ask the village to sell him a plot of land for the same price.
“If they’re giving away land, I’d like to have some, too,” he said. “I think that’s a pretty disingenous way of dealing with the problem.”
Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or (608) 786-6812.
All stories copyright 2006 Onalaska Life and other attributed sources.