Mike "Big Mike" IthierMr. Michael Ithier was born in Wauwatosa, but grew up in Milwaukee. He has been a resident of the Washington Park neighborhood and has lived on West Galena Street for over 58 years. He has lived in different neighborhoods throughout Milwaukee before his family settled in Washington Park and West Galena Street in 1968. At the time that they settled in Washington Park, they were the only Hispanic family on Galena, which was majority German and Jewish families. At the age of 17, Mr. Ithier was drafted onto the Baltimore Orioles professional baseball team where he played for eleven years before retiring due to a shoulder and bicep injury. He came back to Milwaukee where he played professional softball on the Milwaukee Schlitz team.
Mr. Ithier lives in the home that was once owned by his father, where North 38th Street meets Galena. He has seen the area change has people have moved in and out of the houses along Galena Street. He also own the empty lots on either side of his home, which he came to acquire some time after moving back onto Galena. As a child, Mr. Ithier watched his mother work hard to improve the neighborhood through her work as an executive for the Model City Program. He has seen the resources being pulled/moved out of the neighborhood over the years. Important resources like bus stops, grocery stores, schools, churches, etc, forcing the residents to look resources further away or go without. He sees programs like the BLC as important because they help bring attention to conditions of varies people from all over the city. He has seen how the area has become more and more unsafe compared to when he was a child. “We never needed to lock our front door. We had a storm door with a latch [on it] and we would go to sleep,” Mr. Ithier said about the sense of safety he felt in the area growing up. “Now, you aren’t even safe with bars on your windows.” But Mr. Ithier remains hopeful that Galena Street can become a safer place for everyone. His hope for the city is that a change in leadership will help revitalize efforts to assist many of the neglected neighborhoods within the city. His hope for the community is that people come to together to fix the issues they see within the community. “Not just one person can turn a neighborhood around. You need a group of people.” |
Playing professional baseball
Childhood memories
On injustice
On BLM
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