Erv Uecker & Ross Walker: love is the message

Young love

“We met at a friend’s apartment,” said Ross. “We both had short flings with a mutual friend nicknamed Bernice Bernini. We remained friends after that until he died. I used his apartment to change clothes and shower. One day, I showed up and Erv was at that apartment.”

“Ross used to come and go, but eventually we got together,” said Erv. “We planned a birthday celebration for Bob at Illinois Beach State Park."

"I conned my mother into doing some cooking. I don’t know how we got everything in the car. When we got to the beach, there were all these fierce black flies biting people, which wasn’t fun."

"We had another friend, Bunny Barkus, who lived near Michael Reese Hospital. He had this balcony that we weren’t supposed to use, but we got a grill out there, and boom! We had our beach party at that apartment. After that, we started hanging out together.”

“We had a get-together for our friend Bob’s birthday that October, and all our mutual friends were laying on the living room floor. My poor mother was stepping over 10-12 bodies. Those were the drinking days.”

“Ross stayed that night at my folks’ house, and that was the real beginning of our time together. We continued living at home for a while before we got our first apartment.”

“We moved 11 times together,” laughed Ross.

Midwest modest beginnings

Ross remembers being an outgoing child.

“I started working when I was eight or nine years old,” said Ross. 

“I grew up in the Cicero – Berwyn area, and I took a job with this nice old Italian man who had the newspaper concession. He was most definitely connected with the Chicago Mafia somehow."

"He’d get all the neighborhood kids to sell papers outside Western Electric, which employed 30,000 people. We’d have 300-400 newspapers stacked outside of the exits, with two people vending papers at 4 cents a pop outside each exit."

"I became the favorite child of that guy because I could count better than he could. He was a bookie, and he gave me a brown bag with all the betting slips and money.”

“There were all these old Al Capone properties, leftover properties that were now bars, and I would take all these bags to the properties for him,” said Ross. 

“I remember one place had a wall that opened up with another world behind it! I made good money for a kid.”

“I grew up in a two-flat with a basement apartment, with my maternal grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins on the first floor; my parents, brother, and I on the second floor, sometimes with my paternal grandmother, aunt, and cousins; and the basement apartment was a combination of my uncle and his wife, and cousins."

"This was the basis for a wonderful childhood. My grandmother – who was involved with a Lithuanian catering business -- took me everywhere I wanted to go; my mother and father were very good to me. In later years, my aunt and uncle built a house and moved my grandparents out."

"New owners moved in below us, and my parents wanted out. So, we moved to Chicago, where I was living when I met Erv.”

“While I was still in high school, I worked at my aunt and uncle’s restaurant. My uncle’s family was Italian, and the restaurant had breakfast, lunch, and pizza. So, I’d go in there, work breakfast, go to my overcrowded high school with split shifts, work the lunch shift, go upstairs to do homework, and go then work again until 10pm.”

On the day Erv Uecker was born, the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his motorcade to the convention went right past the hospital Erv was born in. 

Erv's grandfather remarked on FDR passing by the hospital, "There goes one president, and here comes another president" referring to the birth of his grandson.

“Despite my dramatic entrance, my upbringing was very vanilla,” laughed Erv. 

“I was an only child, so I was very closely watched and guarded. When I started to spring out on my own, I had to do some fighting to assert myself.”

“I’d been working for the American Can Company before the war. I went into the Navy for four years and was stationed in San Diego."

"During the Korean War, I went to Japan for two years. I was assigned to an admiral’s staff blockading Korean posts. There were three destroyer ships, and we would move every six months from ship to ship. Once a month, the admiral would arrange for us to sail over to Pusan, Korea for one day of combat pay.”

“I came out while I was in the Navy, but it wasn’t ‘coming out’ like we know it today. You came out to close friends, but you did not come out to family, and you did not come out to the Navy.”

“I befriended one of my Navy buddies from San Diego, where his parents owned a large orange grove in a suburb, and I wound up living with them for my last years of the Navy.”

“He was one of the first Volkswagen dealers in the USA, selling the old Beetle, so I paid $400 and got my own Beetle from him."

"When it started running out of gas, you had to turn a lever on the dashboard to access the reserve tank. There was no gas gauge and no heater, but somehow, I drove that car to Chicago, and afterwards, two weekend trips to New York City."

"I ran 40,000 miles on that car and then sold it for three times what I paid for it. At that time, they were only available on the east and west coasts.”

Gay Chicago

Erv and Ross reflected on the gay hotspots of their era.

“One of our friends – that we were both dating at one time or another – lived a few blocks from Oak Street Beach, and that was the cruising spot,” said Erv.

“The Clark Theater was a regular theater, but it was known for its notorious bathroom and balcony scene. There was a movie theater in Old Town that showed gay movies. I remember going to a great big disco down on Diversey."

"There was a restaurant on Dearborn & Division that was extremely popular. The intersection was nicknamed ‘Queerborn & Perversion.’ Of course, everyone knew about the Gold Coast, which was a big leather bar at that time.”

“There were a few gay bars near Oak Street Beach, including The Haig (also known as “The Wrinkle Room”) and Sam’s. We didn’t really go to Sam’s regularly, but if you went in there on a Saturday night, it was so crowded. You were shoulder to shoulder. There were underage people in all the bars, and the bars were always getting raided. Sam’s had a light that would flash, and everyone would clear out the back door.”

“We were close to being raided more than once.”

“There was Mark’s, a restaurant on Diversey nearly a half block long, with booths along the streetside windows. Grey Line Tours would come down, and all the queens in the restaurant would perform a floor show for the tourists in the windows.”

“One place we went regularly was Louis Gage’s, out in Franklin Park outside Chicago city limits, so there were no restrictions on bar hours. An African American woman named Georgia played music and sang if people kept the liquor coming. 

"Louis was a former all-star football player. That bar was never subject to raids because Louis paid off whoever he needed to. Later, the place just blew up and burnt to the ground. It was an early morning, so there was nobody in there, but in one morning it was gone.”

“Erv was never really big on seeing drag,” laughed Ross. “But he sure liked to see men.”

Coming together as a couple

First, Erv and Ross lived together on the South Shore in a small apartment and then moved to a larger 1-bedroom apartment nearby for 10-11 years. After that, they moved to Evanston.

The couple never had any problems renting apartments together, although it was common practice – and perfectly legal – to deny same-sex roommates a rental agreement.

“The landlords knew what was going on,” said Erv, “And even during my pastor days, whether we lived in church houses or apartments, we always had an open house."

"We never hid anything, but we never wore a sign, either.  We were never in your face. If you asked, we were always honest.”

“When we first met, we spent Christmas Eve with Erv’s parents, which was very calm, peaceful, and nice,” said Ross, “and the next day, he was taken to meet my family."

"Our house was the gathering place, with everyone talking at the same time, in several languages louder than the next. That was his introduction."

"He was welcomed by everyone in my family with open arms without exception. And that was the start of over sixty years of holiday traditions.”

“Erv’s family was not quite so warm to me at first,” said Ross, “and the first person who opened to me were his cousin and his wife."

"She knew the situation, but it took a while for the others to understand it. His parents saw us as good friends who lived together and left it at that. Aunts and uncles always sent us gifts as a couple. We did a lot of entertaining, and we always made our families very welcome wherever we were living.”

Chasing their dreams

After the war, Erv returned to American Can Company. They offered him a promotion to assistant manager.

“I declined the promotion, because I was getting ready to go to mortuary school.”

Coming to Milwaukee

“I wasn’t a real bar person,” said Erv.

“We had a weekly sharing group that would meet – all gay men and one woman (Josephine) at Gary Hollander’s home on Saturday mornings. That was a lot of fun."

"One of those gay men was Jeff Miller, who first brought the AIDS Memorial Quilt to Milwaukee for its unveiling at UWM. He was the boyfriend of Dennis Wesela, who was shot and killed at the Factory, while they were both working there.”

The couple started spending more time in Milwaukee.

“We attended a Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago, and the national MCC board asked Erv to check in on the Milwaukee congregation,” said Ross. 

“We started attending services in Milwaukee," said Erv. "It was mostly a bunch of gay men who wanted to attend church on Sunday, and go to the bars afterwards."

“The meetings were held in the Village Church, which was then in the lower level of Juneau Village next to Captain’s Steak Joynt."

"Later, the Village Church bought the second Factory location on Juneau Avenue. The head of the church was really into line dancing and belonged to an organization that met out at the bars. He worked for the Medical College of Wisconsin at that time."

"I remember there was a big rush to get out of church on time to get to Park Avenue, because they had a big beer bust on Sunday nights.”

“Eventually, MCC and Village Church went their separate ways.”

Ross and Erv moved to Milwaukee in 1980. If it had not been for MCC, Erv and Ross wouldn’t have wound up involved with the BESTD Clinic, where their generous contributions became legendary.

Facing the crisis of the century

“Two of the MCC parishioners became great friends of ours,” said Erv. 

“Bob and Teddy had some loose affiliation with the clinic and introduced us to some of our closest friends. I remember when Dr. Roger Gremminger was just starting his counseling venture. He bought the building, and had a mortgage on it, and later he would donate it to BESTD.”

One Saturday morning, Gary Hollander told the couple, “We really need people to get involved with the Milwaukee AIDS Project or the Brady Clinic.” 

Ross thought, “I don’t know anything about health care.” Erv, on the other hand, had served as the Chair of Augustana Hospital in Chicago. He asked, “where do you need help most?”

And that’s how they arrived at the BESTD Clinic in 1985. It was one of the most transformative times in Wisconsin LGBTQ history.

“The Milwaukee AIDS Project was founded by a ridiculously small group of people like Dr. Paul Turner, Doug Johnson, Sue Dietz, Dr. Roger Gremminger, and a few others."

"They were the people who saw something big that needed attention. AIDS was just emerging in Milwaukee. It was still known as GRID. They were all volunteers – and these volunteers started the first response to a catastrophic health crisis.”

“They sought doctors who would treat people with AIDS. At the time, there were none in the area. They sought funeral directors who would bury people with AIDS. At the time, there were few to none in the state.”

In late 1985, Don Schwamb and Marc Haupert formed a new non-profit corporation called the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin. The MAP volunteers joined this committee, knowing that paid staff was urgently needed to contend with the crisis. 

In 1986, MAP’s assets and programs merged into ARCW, while BESTD remained an independent organization.

“At one of the board meetings, I was sitting in the waiting room, and someone came out and said, you’ve just been elected to the board,” said Ross. 

"I went in for training and worked a couple of nights a week. Eventually, I became the president, and Erv became treasurer. We would do paperwork by day and work the clinic at night. We would do community outreach day and night! We liked to go to the M&M Club for supper afterwards.”

“This became a sixty hour a week job for each of us. We spent a good deal of time making connections within the city and the state. We became good friends with Paul Nannis, the city health commissioner, who made sure we got what we needed from the City of Milwaukee."

"We were doing their job for them: if we did not see these people, they’d wind up at the city clinic.”

“I remember having dinner with Paul at Mimma’s when the crypto crisis emerged,” said Ross. “Paul got a phone call and was out the door like a cannonball.”

Erv and Ross were deeply involved in creating the BESTD Clinic space we know today.

“We virtually gutted the old place,” said Erv. “We moved the clinic functions upstairs to the apartments above Brady Street Hardware."

"We developed a relationship with Mimma, who helped us raise money. We put together a program at the Pabst Theater with famous violinists in a string quartet. This was a $100/plate dinner, and Mimma secured donations so that BESTD got the entire $100/plate."

"We offered a fantastic meal and concert, with a bus to take everyone out for drinks and dessert after the show."

“Paul introduced us to Sarah Dean, the executive director of the Bader Foundation, who visited the clinic while it was in shambles."

"She committed to cover the remaining expenses of remodeling, which were estimated at $75,000 at that time. When it was all done and over with, she also covered our $21,000 deficit, leaving BESTD debt-free in the end.”

After the remodel, Erv and Ross did community outreach with Bill Meunier, who had a PrideFest office on the second floor; Michael Lisowski, who ran a youth group at the facility; and various other program leaders. 

BESTD became a “fair-haired child” of the State of Wisconsin. When the State needed to do a mass training session, Mimma agreed to host it and feed everyone in her own remodeled space. People came from all over the state to attend.

One of the couple’s favorite memories is Thanksgiving, when Mimma would close the restaurant to make dinner for BESTD’s HIV+ clients and their families.

“We created a safe holiday dinner for people with HIV/AIDS and gay men with nowhere else to go,” said Ross. 

“We would have a hundred people or more at these dinners. We cannot say enough about how meaningful this was for people. When Mimma’s closed, we lost a solid partner on Brady Street.”

“Ross was in one of the first pride parades,” said Erv. 

“Barb Coyle organized the event. She was the voice of the lesbians for a long time – she even had her own radio program. She and her partner Jill were very prominent.”

“Looking back at BESTD Clinic, we’re proud of the time we’ve put in, and the people who’ve crossed our paths,” said Ross. 

“We were there in the high years of the AIDS Crisis. Erv ran the support group for partners of people with HIV/AIDS and I ran a support group for people living with HIV/AIDS. When volunteers struggled to deliver positive test results to a client, they turned to me to deliver the news."

"That was not always an easy thing to do. I somehow got the name ‘angel of death.’"

"I cannot tell you how many of those conversations I had back then, including some of our own volunteers. Fortunately, some of those people are still with us, despite that long-ago diagnosis.”

“I decided to get involved with the ARCW Buddy Program,” said Ross. “One of the directors had a partner with HIV and needed the emotional support. I thought it was something I could be good at.”

At the time, people with HIV were still treated with extreme caution in medical settings.

“When a person with HIV went to the hospital, the staff came in with space suits to take care of them. I spent a lot of time at the hospitals in those days."

"I watched medical professionals who would leave things at the door. They were too afraid to come in. Fortunately, there were doctors that were very, very good and very, very dedicated.”

Ross remembers Dr. Cassandra Welch, who came in and did what needed to be done, for every patient.

“I asked BESTD to pair me with a Buddy in need, thinking it would be a gay man."

"I was paired with an African American woman with five children who lived near 24^th and Concordia. All her siblings had AIDS and two had already died. One of her babies had AIDS."

"Erv and I sat with her at Children’s Hospital when the baby died and supported the family through the funeral.”

“One day, we were coming home from an ARCW Buddy shopping trip when I got mugged. I used to pick her up and take her to Aldi so she could get the most bang for her buck. We were unloading the groceries, and I was leaning into the car to get the last bag."

"All the kids were gone, and when I came up out of the trunk, I had a gun at my head.”

"After I returned home, the phone rang. Someone had found my wallet and wanted to return it for a reward."

"We had two phone lines at home then. As the car pulled up outside the house on the street, Erv called the police. Minutes later, a squad car pulled up behind them. Another squad car came to the house, so we listened over the walkie talkie as a high-speed chase ensued across the northwest side of Milwaukee. Eventually, the car crashed into a tree.”

“We were asked to come down and identify the car,” said Ross. “They did not want us to see the people."

"While we were sitting there, they opened the trunk in the distance. There were massive amounts of guns in the trunk. When we got home, we got another call: we have found your wallet. Talk about déjà vu!"

"Fortunately, it was a legitimate call. The driver had thrown it out the window during the chase. And after all that, the police kept the wallet for evidence. We eventually got a few dollars back.”

After decades of volunteering, Erv and Ross remained highly committed to the cause.

“It’s possible for people to do something just because they want to do it, and not just because they’re getting paid to do it,” Erv told QVOICE Magazine in February 1997.

“Knowing that we’ve helped people along the way………that’s what I get out of this,” said Ross.

Memorable moments

Erv and Ross are proud to have attended Stonewall25 in New York City in June 1994.

“We even have a piece of the mile-long flag from the march,” said Ross. “People were holding up the flag every ten feet or so. The crowds were throwing money onto the flag, so every now and then, they would tip the flag so money would fall into buckets. They got a corner they could not turn, so they had to cut the flag to finish the parade.”