Last night I clicked on my northern Wisconsin home-town newspaper, the
Spooner Advocate and was quite taken by this
obituary. As a child I remember my father arranging to purchase hay or a farm implement from Chaney, and a couple of times I sat in the car while he hunted up Chaney in the barn or in a field. Once I caught a glimpse of him in town at a distance. He was the only black man (except for his brother who owned a bar) living in the region, and I remember as a little girl feeling sorry for him because he was black and couldn't help it. Who knew he had a family! What a surprise it was for me to learn last night that his son Felmers went on to be Milwaukee's first black police sergeant and a civil rights activist and leader of the NAACP. In fact, in 2000 a correctional facility was constructed there and named for him. His father was an elderly man when he and my father did business, and his son would have gone to school a generation before any of us kids did.
