Lois Love: Pride in a Greener, Cleaner Neighborhood

Meet Lois Love. Ms. Love has lived on 27th and Capitol for 22 years.

“We’ve had flooding. We’ve had issues with water. At one point our basement was flooded. Our whole area has flooded. One of the things that we’re trying to do to combat that is I have a rain garden,” says Ms. Love, who also has a rain barrel. “That’s over a thousand gallons of water that may not be coming into my basement. Now, we also have two small gardens in the backyard. That also collects a lot of water.”

She also looks forward to the improvements proposed for Melvina Park. Ms. Love credits neighbors and everyone involved for coming together to clean up the space for the next generation of use by young and old. “We have a lot of partners that we’re working with to make our little rainbow dream come to life,” she says.

Queen: A young girl’s perspective

Reggie Boston: Neighborhood OG ‘Addicted to Fishing’

Meet Reggie. Reginald “Reggie” Boston—a.k.a. OG Boston—grew up in Milwaukee’s Franklin Heights neighborhood in the 1970s. In 2020 he bought a house on 29th Street just a block from Melvina Park.

Born in 1966, Reggie has put down roots in the same neighborhood where his dad once worked for nearby A.O. Smith and where he still knows friends and neighbors from growing up.

Reggie loves to fish. He owns a 14-foot fishing boat and enjoys trawling at Random Lake, Montello, Princeton, Madison—wherever the fish are biting in Wisconsin. He runs with a crew of about eight longtime friends and their wives who all love to fish. They call themselves “Addicted to Fishing.”

“They call me the Lip Snatcher! Whatever’s biting, I catch that lip coming up out of the water,” Reggie says.

Tom Fehring: Chronicling the Corridor’s Industrial Innovation

Meet Tom. Thomas H. Fehring, P.E., is a retired Milwaukee engineer who compiled the history of The Magnificent Machines of Milwaukee and the Engineers Who Created Them.

One of those industrial innovators was A.O. Smith, a company that once occupied a sprawling industrial campus south of Capitol Drive and west of Hopkins.

It was right here—across the railroad tracks from what is now Melvina Park—where the world’s first automated auto frame assembly line was created.

Known as the “Mechanical Marvel,” a team of A.O. Smith engineers—in 1930 there were an incredible 400 on staff—designed the robotic system that filled a factory with a complex array of riveting machines. In went sheets of steel; out came assembled auto frames. This automated system went into operation in 1921 and was in use into the 1950s. A.O. Smith could produce an astounding 10,000 auto frames per day.

“It was incredible,” Tom says. “It was the most sophisticated engineering machine in the world at the time.”

Alvin Middleton: Sharing the wisdom of age

Lovie Thomas: Singing a Song of Hope

Meet Lovie Thomas. Ms. Thomas has lived at 29th and Melvina since 1971.

“I love living there. It’s been beautiful. But in the later years now it has been something different. We work hard trying to keep it up and make it look well.”

To know Ms. Thomas is to know she loves to sing. Age 80 in 2022, she has been singing since she was age 3. “I have traveled overseas to France and to Italy and to Africa [singing]…. I sing wherever. Funerals. Weddings. Baby showers. I just came back from my cousin in Detroit and I thought I was just going to sing one song and as soon as I get through with that one, she just kept playing the songs. And she knew that I knew those songs, and so she started playing them, and I started singing. So, there it is.”

James D. Brown: ‘Take care of your park because it's your park’

Meet James D. Brown. Mr. Brown has lived just off 29th and Melvina since 1979. He owns the home at 2916-18 W. Melvina St. where he and his wife raised his two sons. His oldest son is married and lives in Milwaukee. His other son moved to California. He is proud of both of them.

He also takes pride in his home and neighborhood. He believes people should take pride in what they do.

“Take care of your park because it’s your park,” Mr. Brown says. “Take care of the place you own, you’ll have it. If you don’t take care of it, then you’ll lose it…. Pick up the paper. Watch for vandalism. Keep it clean like your house. Take care of it like you own it. It’s your area. You live in it. You gotta take care of it.”

Henrietta Cloyd: ‘I think it's going to be a brighter future’

Meet Henrietta Cloyd. Ms. Cloyd has lived at 3937 N. 29th St., a block north of Melvina Park, since 1970. “I love it because of my neighbors, basically,” she says.

Although the neighborhood has changed since she moved here, Ms. Cloyd believes things are on an upswing. “It’s going to get better. It’s getting better…. I think it’s going to be a brighter future with the park down on the corner, and the neighbors and everything contributing their expertise [for the park].”