My Hometown: A Softy for Milwaukee

Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, May, 2006 by Ted Loos

At 17, I was never too pooped to polka. I grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, and on Friday nights, a group of friends from high school and I would go to a restaurant outside town called Etzel's. It was a classic wood-paneled German-American joint, the kind of place where Friday night's fish fry was the biggest event around. We would drink beer, and once the polka band started up, we'd swing into action. Part of the fun was asking folks to join us in kicking up our heels to "Roll Out the Barrel."

It was a blast, but it was also proof of something I feared: Milwaukee was irredeemably dorky. In the mid-1980s, the city was most famous for Laverne & Shirley, a reference still maddeningly brought up by everyone not from there.

A friendly, safe place to grow up? Definitely. But cool ...