Bill Walkner has spent the last five decades of his life living in the city of Two Rivers. He’s retired now, but he was a working man. He raised a family on his paycheck from the factory or the boatyard. All the while, he played the guitar and wrote songs about life. “It makes me feel good. It’s usually the first thing I do when I get up in the morning; I play something I’ve probably played a thousand times.”
Bill says he’s comfortable here. “I don’t have no big ambitions or whatever.”
He got his first guitar in high school, when his older brother came home from college. “He needed some money. So, I give him $30. So, that was my first guitar. I remember just getting terribly bloody fingers from playing it.”
He started writing his own songs, filled with his observations on life. He sings, “Sitting here making up tunes, making up melodies. Most might say I’m only wasting time. But music took the time to get to know me, help me sweep the cobwebs from my mind.”
After high school, Bill went to work at Hamilton Manufacturing, joining his father and two of his brothers at the massive factory along the river. “Smart kids went away to school, you know. Us dumb kids, we went to work in the factory.”
Two Rivers was a humming factory town, and Bill had plenty of venues for his music. “Just in this little area, there must have been a dozen different place where you could play live music, you know. Now there’s only one left.”
Over time, Hamilton shut down, and factory was torn down. After a while, all that was left was the Hamilton smokestack, a symbol of industry visible for miles. “I was kind of sentimental about the old place because I worked there and Pa worked there and stuff.”
The city held an event to celebrate the demolition of the stack, and Bill was asked to sing a song he had written about the factory, then he joined the crowd to watch the tower come down. “ I was sad to see it go, but once you realize that it’s just an old carcass of a building and there’s nothing going on there, you know, it has a ghostly appearance.”
Bill says writing a song about the factory is cathartic. “I don’t go to a therapist; I just make up a goofy song.”
Whether goofy or serious, you can’t separate the songs from the songwriter. “(It’s) sort of like a diary of your life.”
