READ MORE FROM OUR “HAPPY DAYS” FEATURE HERE.
A crowd formed along the Milwaukee River. It was the morning of Aug. 19, 2008. On the Wells Street Bridge, a statue stood underneath a green sheet. About 5 feet, 6 inches tall, it drew the attention of hundreds – not only on the bridge, but from people living in the riverside apartments and working in the neighboring buildings who looked out from windows and balconies and rooftops to the scene unfolding below. Even pontoon boats stopped underneath to gaze up. Two gray-haired men stepped up to the sheet-covered statue and with a flourish pulled back the covering to reveal what lay beneath.
Ayyyyyyyyy.
The Bronze Fonz, after months of hype, was finally unveiled in Milwaukee. Henry Winkler ran his hands over his likeness’s metallic hair as the crowd clapped and cheered. The moment was celebratory, but the statue’s reveal came after a year of debate and infighting, ignited when Visit Milwaukee, the city’s tourism bureau, announced the decision to commission this $85,000 monument to the Milwaukee-set ’70s sitcom classic, “Happy Days.”
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“The Bronze Fonz is a symbol of how backwards this city is and the decisions that people are making. … There are tons of theaters and galleries that don’t get funded. … The priorities in this city are f—ed,” said Mike Brenner, an artist and gallery owner who vowed to close his gallery if the Bronze Fonz ever saw the light of day (and then actually did so a month before it was unveiled).
The statue’s potential location bounced from Wisconsin Avenue to Water Street to the RiverWalk, with artists protesting its placement as detracting from future public art nearby. There were plans to throw Fonz effigies in the river as a protest, and counter-plans for folks to dress in Fonz’s classic leather-jacket getup and rally in his defense. “Milwaukee seems determined to remain a city committed to ugliness,” wrote one disgruntled reader to the Journal Sentinel. “[The statue] looks backward in the city’s history to a time that never existed.” David Fantle, the director of public relations for Visit Milwaukee at the time, mounted a defense. “It doesn’t define today’s Milwaukee,” he said. “The Bronze Fonz is what it is – a fun photo op.”
The conflict was a flashpoint in Milwaukee’s longstanding, mixed relationship to the sitcom, which first aired 50 years ago on ABC. The show, set 20 years earlier in a hyper-nostalgic 1950s, was notably anodyne – a family-friendly affair that, while beloved by many, divided Milwaukeeans. On one hand, the city had its name attached to an extremely well-known piece of pop culture – on the other, the show didn’t have much to do with the real Milwaukee – and it was a little bit silly.
“Some people here find the associations with the Fonz almost embarrassing,” says Michael Newman, a UW-Milwaukee media studies professor. “Why wouldn’t we want to be known for something we did or something that actually happened here as opposed to at Paramount Studios?”
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Winkler, for his part, never got any of the flak his likeness, or his show, did in Milwaukee. The actor looks on his reception in Milwaukee with fondness. “Who in their lifetime ever imagines that there’s going to be a statue of a character they created made?” he tells Milwaukee Magazine. “I am so happy and proud to be an honorary citizen of Milwaukee. Every time I come to the city, I am treated with such warmth.”
So where exactly does “Happy Days” stand in Milwaukee’s history and culture? Is it just a beloved old sitcom? A reinforcement of a stereotype? A sweet reminder of a different time? A sentimental, nostalgic fantasy? And most importantly, what does it really have to do with our city?
THIRTY FIVE YEARS BEFORE the bronze was fonzed, Garry Marshall, Edward Milkis and Tom Miller were auditioning young actors for a new sitcom. The executive producers’ show, “Happy Days,” was going to revolve around the Cunningham family, a warm bunch who epitomized 1950s family values. Marshall had shot a similar pilot a year earlier, starring child star Ron Howard, that ABC had rejected – but now the station was returning to the concept, looking to cash in on a wave of ’50s nostalgia heralded by George Lucas’ 1973 box office smash, American Graffiti, and the hit Broadway musical Grease.
But where would “Happy Days” be set?
“Here’s what I’ve heard,” says Anson Williams, who played grinning goofball Potsie on the show. “Garry was from New York, Eddie was from LA, and Tom was from Milwaukee. … They flipped a coin, and Tom won.”
That story – likely apocryphal, as it implies a three-sided coin – isn’t the only account of how the show found its Milwaukee setting.
According to Marley Brant in her sitcom history book Happier Days, Marshall wanted to set the show in his Bronx neighborhood, but “ABC thought the locale might be too regional and ethnic. [A network executive] thought the viewing audience would be more comfortable with a Midwestern family. … [Miller’s] Wisconsin it was.”
Miller spent his first 18 years in the city, where his family ran a dry-cleaning business and lived in Whitefish Bay. In 1958, he graduated from Nicolet High School and went on to study drama and speech at UW-Madison. From there, he moved to Los Angeles where he started his career in television. “My real introduction [to Milwaukee] was through Tom,” Winkler says. Miller peppered the show with little Milwaukee touches – the diner has a UW-Milwaukee banner, Richie wears a Wisconsin letter jacket, the Packers are a frequent subject of discussion.
“I do think that ‘Happy Days’ helped put Milwaukee on the map for some people,” says Elana Levine, a media professor at UW-Milwaukee. “It mattered in terms of Milwaukee’s national profile.”
But what really drove the show was its time, much more than its place. When “Happy Days” premiered in 1974, the country was undergoing one of its most tumultuous eras. “America went through the ringer in the 1960s,” says John Gurda, a Milwaukee historian who grew up in the city in the ’50s. “Everything from the Civil Rights Movement to the counterculture to the revolution in music that kind of replaced what had been there in the 1950s.”
Milwaukee went through that ringer just as much as any other city. In 1956, sitting mayor Frank Zeidler was challenged by Ald. Milton McGuire, whose campaign revolved largely around his opposition to the city’s expanding Black population, which nearly tripled to 62,458 between 1950 and 1960. One of McGuire’s campaign slogans was “Milwaukee needs an honest white man for mayor,” and he promised to keep the city free of “Southern migrants.” Zeidler prevailed, but racial tensions persisted, reaching a zenith in the ’60s housing marches, when activists walked the city streets for 200 days protesting segregated housing ahead of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
That same year, “youth culture” and “free love” were in full swing in Milwaukee when Summerfest launched its first iteration with a logo evoking a big ol’ pot leaf. The fight for LGBTQ rights was also intensifying, with 1961’s Black Nite Brawl near Downtown putting the city’s gay subculture – and its frequent persecution – under the spotlight. That’s not to mention the war in Vietnam. In Milwaukee, 14 men (including five Catholic priests) stole thousands of draft cards from the Brumder Building on Wells Street and burned them in a park with homemade napalm, leading to their arrest.
By the time the ’70s came along, the top comedies were CBS hits “M*A*S*H,” “Maude” and “All in the Family,” which all had political bents (i.e., Archie Bunker and Mike Stivic screaming at each other about race relations). ABC was losing badly in the ratings, and its brass placed a bet on conventional America’s exhaustion. No more leaning into the counterculture. With “Happy Days,” they would put on rose-tinted glasses and look to a ’50s of the cultural imagination – leather jackets, doo-wop, motorcycles, necking.
“The ’50s absolutely felt like a simpler time. In large part, because we were simpler. We were kids,” Gurda says. “It was a time of grade school crushes and Buddy Holly. When you have a sea change in a culture’s evolution, that makes what went before a lot more powerful.”
“Happy Days” didn’t entirely duck thornier issues, but when it approached a potentially controversial topic, it did so with a very light touch. In a season three episode, Fonzie responds to teenagers who won’t attend a party with his Black friend by calling them “nerds.”
“What ‘Happy Days’ did was take ’50s nostalgia and resituated it outside of youth culture and its anti-war feeling and experimentation with drugs and the rest of it,” says Daniel Marcus, a media professor who studied at UW-Madison and has written extensively about the political power of nostalgia. “It depolarized that nostalgia and made it less conflictual. It was important that the Fonz actually got along with the Cunningham parents – they liked the Fonz, and he liked them. It wasn’t like he was leading a youth revolt.” Marcus points out the Fonz was a greaser, not the other rebellious youth of the ’50s – the beatniks (think Jack Kerouac), who were far more similar to the ’60s hippies that the show was avoiding.
“A friend of mine, who was born in 1965, watched [“Happy Days”] as a little kid with her father,” Marcus says. “She said to her father, ‘Wow, all sorts of cool things happened in the ’50s. Did anything cool happen in the ’60s?’ And he said, ‘No.’ Of course, a lot of things happened in the ’60s, but he didn’t want to talk about those things.”
With that in mind, Milwaukee served more as a backdrop for an ultra-stylized, idealized past than a real city. UWM professor Newman wrote a 2010 article for media journal Flow about the show’s sense of place – or lack thereof. “Setting the show in Milwaukee was a way of striking a note of Americana – an idealization of ‘normal’ America,” he wrote. “It’s hard to be proud to have been chosen as an undistinct enough place to stand in for Anytown, USA.” Reflecting on his article now, Newman says: “I don’t think they ever exposed a single frame of film in Milwaukee for ‘Happy Days.’ … In the imagination of Hollywood, Middle America was kind of an imaginary place of childhood innocence that is pretty white, that is centered around the nuclear family, that has these old-fashioned values.”
So did the show bear any resemblance to real life in Milwaukee? Or was it all a fantasy?
THE ONE THING that really did ring true about ‘Happy Days’ was the drive-in,” says Gurda.
We can thank Tom Miller for that. “Tom inspired the creation of Arnold’s,” Williams says. “He used to hang at this place called The Milky Way, and they designed the drive-in around his experiences there.”
The Milky Way in Glendale, now a Kopp’s location, was the closest drive-in to Miller’s Bay Ridge Avenue home. Gilles to the west and Leon’s to the south were also both hot spots, and the scenes that played out in “Happy Days” weren’t that far removed from what Milwaukee teenagers experienced in the ’50s – although some of the rougher edges were softened. “The owners had to be pretty vigilant,” Gurda recalls. “During football season, I remember fistfights breaking out that almost got out of control.”
While the drive-in rang true to the Milwaukee experience, one of Miller’s other key contributions to the show did not – and that was Henry Winkler.
“I mean, Fonzie literally has a New York accent,” says Levine.
“I don’t know anyone who talked like that – ever – in Milwaukee,” Gurda says.
Miller championed Winkler for Arthur Fonzarelli, despite his being half-a-foot-shorter than the Italian stallion Marshall imagined for the character (not to mention Jewish). And he was proven prescient – Winkler’s slick take on the cool cat shot the show into the ratings stratosphere. But even Miller admitted that the Fonz was straight from Garry Marshall’s Bronx. “There was no Fonzie among the kids I knew,” he told the Journal Sentinel in 2008. (Miller died in 2020 at age 79.)
Greaser culture did exist in Milwaukee, though – and for many, it was the epitome of cool. “My brother was a greaser,” Gurda says. “There was an attraction to that [style]. I remember we were on a family trip, and I was left alone in a hotel room with a bottle of his Brylcreem. I just doused my hair. It was disgusting.”
Although some stylized aspects of the show had truth to them, the overall feel was still far from reality. “I didn’t feel any Milwaukee reverberations [in the show.] It didn’t feel familiar,” Gurda says. “I didn’t feel like it was my town.”
For one, the show didn’t look like Milwaukee. While the Cunningham house was supposed to be at fictional 565 N. Clinton Dr., the real house used in exterior shots was at 565 N. Cahuenga Blvd. in Los Angeles, a few blocks from Paramount Studios. The Milwaukee represented on the show looked much more like the many suburbs Milwaukee annexed during the ’40s and ’50s – or burgeoning Glendale, the home of The Milky Way.
Milwaukee was a far grittier place than those growing suburbs. In 1950, the city’s brewing industry was booming – Schlitz was the largest brewer in the nation, shipping more than 5 million barrels of beer annually. Pabst was fourth, Miller eighth and Blatz ninth, making Milwaukee the “Beer Capital of the World.” It was a decidedly working-class city, with crowded factories, belching smokestacks and increasingly congested traffic. This urban reality was far from the Cunninghams’ peaceful domicile – but it did find some expression in the “Happy Days” 1976 spinoff “Laverne & Shirley,” in which the leading ladies worked assembly line jobs at fictional Shotz Brewery. “We played everyday people, blue-collar workers,” Shirley actress Cindy Williams told Milwaukee Magazine in 2022. “We struggled to pay the rent, the electric bill, the gas bill. … That’s also why it’s set in a city like Milwaukee.”
With that in mind, the spinoff came a little closer to the feel of Milwaukee than “Happy Days” ever did. Milwaukee, to be frank, wasn’t seeing happy days in the ’50s. The city hadn’t had any significant construction since the 1930s, and industrial smog had turned many of its facades dingy. Years of budget cuts, demolition to make way for freeways, and focus on suburban expansion led to a Downtown that The Saturday Evening Post in 1951 described as having “a look of being half-finished. Parking lots and filling stations make ugly gaps, like missing teeth. … Block on block of run-down frame houses blights the center of the city.”
That infrastructure crisis was at its worst in the Third Ward, Walker’s Point and around North Avenue. In 1953, Mayor Zeidler said that 10,000 housing units north of the Menomonee Valley should be torn down “tomorrow.” Despite that, only nine blocks of blight were cleared by 1956. The reason for the slow progress was something of an open secret. In 1957, Zeidler told a labor group, “To many people, urban renewal means only public housing, and to them public housing means housing for migrant Negro families, so they are against the whole program.”
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Development through the ’50s and ’60s (including the construction of County Stadium) helped to bring many areas of the city to a better standard, but others were largely ignored. The consequences of this de facto segregation and the lack of development are still felt today.
“‘Happy Days’ ended up more idealized middle American, a very white representation,” says Newman. “I think Gary Marshall’s [Bronx] idea for the show felt more urban and ethnic. … That [1950s] period has reached a point in media where it’s hard to disentangle what’s our imagination and what’s reality.”
The reason for that, Newman explains, is that the ’50s were also the era when televisions entered every home. In Milwaukee, for much of the ’50s, WTMJ was the only station, and variety comedy shows and local hits like “Bowling with the Champs” presented a rosier self-portrait of the city in real time that primed the pump for “Happy Days” nostalgia.
“Anything with a script and a laugh track is, by nature, a fantasy,” Gurda says, and this is especially true of “Happy Days,” which fully embraced its ethereal “Milwaukee” as a semi-suburban amusement park far from the real thing, save a few nostalgic touches.
Oh, and also – one particular “Happy Days” inauthenticity, while small, might sting a little more for Milwaukeeans. The Fonz started the show riding a Harley Knucklehead, but by season two it was traded in for a smaller, easier-to-maneuver Triumph … made in England.
EVENTUALLY, “HAPPY DAYS” JUMPED THE SHARK – a phrase it introduced into the zeitgeist when the Fonz literally waterskied over a tiger shark in season four. But the show itself didn’t figuratively jump the shark until its later seasons after Ron Howard left, when new characters failed to match his energy, and the audience dwindled before the show ended after 11 seasons in 1984. (Winkler was 38 years old by the last episode.)
While dozens of other ’70s sitcoms were quickly forgotten, it has stuck around long after Fonzie hit his last ayyyyyy. “People love the family and wish they had a family like the Cunninghams,” says Marion Ross, who played Richie’s mother. “Family values never go out of style.”
“There’s a new generation of fans becoming aware of the show,” says Don Most, the actor and singer behind the redheaded prankster Ralph Malph. “I think the longevity has to do with the chemistry of a really talented cast. We’re a total family. … Anson, Ron, Henry and I still have a group text.”
The show’s lingering cultural power was undeniable. And that influence stuck around Milwaukee, too.
But while “Happy Days” looked to the past, Milwaukee has moved into a new future. The city has experienced a renaissance, with a burgeoning food scene, booming arts and entertainment, ongoing development across Downtown and its surrounds – and a constant push for a more inclusive and widespread access to that growth. The city has come far, not only from the real 1950s, but from its associations with “Happy Days.”
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“The older the show gets, the less familiar it is,” Newman says. “As time goes by, you feel less of that embarrassment, sure, because I think now it’s becoming historical as opposed to familiar pop culture.”
Fifteen years after the statue went up, the Bronze Fonz still stands strong. And, for the most part, it’s lost the sheen of controversy it once held. Journal Sentinel columnist Jim Stingl seems to have hit the nail on the head in 2008, when he predicted the fate of the statue – and by extension, “Happy Days” in Milwaukee. “No one will be forced to watch reruns of ‘Happy Days,’” he wrote. “The Milwaukee Art Museum 10 blocks away won’t collapse into rubble. Arts galleries won’t be forced out of business. … Milwaukee’s founders won’t rise from the dead and accuse us of frivolity. The statue won’t solve all the city’s problems, but then again it won’t worsen them, either. … It’s just a bit of harmless fun.”
The 1950s Milwaukee of “Happy Days” is a place that is visited by an alien played by Robin Williams, a place where the “She-Devil” girl biker gang kidnaps Chachi, a place where the Fonz fakes his death to escape the mafia, and much, much more.
To put it succinctly: It’s not the 1950s. And it’s not Milwaukee. But it can still make us smile.
Historic Milwaukee images contributed by: John Eastberg, David Leister, Adam Levin, The Milwaukee County Historical Society, Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Historical Society.
