Good morning,

Our forecast calls for a mostly sunny day, with a high temperature of forty-nine degrees.  There will be a Common Council meeting tonight, at 6:30 p.m.  The agenda is available online.

There will be a special meeting of Whitewater’s school board tonight, in closed session at 6:30 p.m. and open session at 7 p.m.

It’s Music Fine Arts night at Lincoln School tonight at 6 p.m.

Here’s a trailer for the upcoming film Super 8, from J.J. Abrams, that looks promising —

Good morning,

It’s a sunny day forecast for Whitewater, with a high temperature of forty-three degrees.

There’s a Park and Rec Board meeting scheduled for 5 p.m. today.  The agenda is available online.  Later, at 6 p.m., there’s a meeting of the Planning Commission.  That agenda is also available online.

There’s also a School Board meeting tonight at 7 p.m.

The Wisconsin Historical Society writes that in 1854,

According to Sauk County’s Web site, “On the night of March 14, 1859, the Baraboo River, greatly swollen by spring rains and melting snow, went on a rampage, taking out a dam that supplied power for the flour mill of Bassett and Pratt. The flour mill was then the ‘largest institution of its kind for many miles around and about it centered the interest of the entire community’. Nearly 500 men responded to the catastrophe. The progress of the water was checked by the felling of trees. The flour in the mill was hauled to safety with team and wagons. The flood caused damage to the lower Maxwell Dam.” To see what life was like then in Baraboo — and throughout much of southern Wisconsin at the time — read this letter by settler Charles Abbott to his family in New Hampshire. “It is a universal rule here to help one another…,” he writes. You can find materials about the history of your own community in our online collection of Wisconsin Local History & Biography Articles.

Good morning,

It’s a mostly sunny day for Whitewater today, with a high temperature of forty-two degrees.

The Comment Forum will be on hiatus today, but back next week.

The New York Times recalls that on this day in 1941, President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill:

Five minutes after the bill was signed the President approved a list of undisclosed quantities of war materials to be transferred at once from the American Army and Navy to the British and the Greeks, to bolster these powers in their life-and-death struggle with the Axis. Most of these first materials, the nature of which the President guarded, will go to Great Britain. Having thus promptly set the machinery to motion toward making the United States “the Arsenal of democracy,” Mr. Roosevelt began work on a request to be sent to Congress tomorrow for an immediate appropriation of $7,000,000,000 with which to press the lease-lend effort to the fullest possible extent under the new law.