FOUNTAIN CITY, Wis. (AP) - David Fugina likened his childhood to that of Huckleberry Finn.
But his is more of an alternate ending to Mark Twain’s classic river traveling tale - one where Huck meets the love of his life at a school picnic, has a stint in the U.S. Navy, joins his family’s decades-old law practice and settles down along the Mississippi River he conquered in his youth.
David Fugina’s story of staying in Fountain City starts generations before he was born, tracing back to when his ancestors first settled in the bluffside area.
His great-grandfather was a merchant and the father of seven children. His great aunts and uncles included a steamboat captain, a doctor, a druggist and a sister who cared for the parents.
And then there was his grandfather, Martin Fugina, an attorney who started the family legacy in 1895, by opening a law practice in Fountain City at the age of 20.
Martin Fugina also served Fountain City as the city attorney and Buffalo County as district attorney from 1898 to 1908 and as a judge from 1909 to 1925, traveling to Alma by train to preside over and hear cases. The 17-mile journey to Alma was a big commitment for his grandfather at that time, David Fugina told the Winona Daily News , as relying on a train and its stops meant Martin Fugina could be gone for days at a time.
In 1935, David Fugina’s father, Marvin Fugina, joined the family practice his father had started, doing legal work until his death in 1988.
Marvin Fugina and David Fugina were close, David Fugina said, and it was a shared loved of the Fountain City outdoors that kept them that way.
They spent mornings in the duck blind and Wisconsin autumns in the woods, searching for that trophy buck. With the river and the woods on either side of them, David Fugina remembered growing up outside with his father.
In particular, when he was 11 years old, David Fugina remembers his father taking him by boat to Whitman Dam. David Fugina got out, and his father had him swim back with Marvin alongside him in the boat watching. The river rat’s adventure and success swimming back safely earned him his father’s trust in taking the boat out by himself, giving David Fugina free reign over the river.
“I grew up with a gun in one hand and a fishing pole in the other thanks to my dad,” David Fugina said. “I love the area here. I love the outdoors, I loved everything about it, and I always considered myself lucky because I had a goal. I realized early on in life that there was nothing else that I could do in Fountain City and have the kind of income that I wanted have, the kind of freedom that I wanted, unless I became an attorney.”
With his passion for hunting, fishing and the Fountain City outdoors translated into a desire to become an attorney, David Fugina headed for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1950s. At the time of his college schooling, it was required to take two years of ROTC, upon which David entered the Navy.
After his undergraduate graduation, David Fugina went to the Navy Supply Corps. School in Athens, Georgia, a selective school that helped him obtain a master’s degree in five months. That education and being at the top of his class, led him to serve in the Navy for a year in Key West, Florida, around the time he and his wife Jeanne were married.
“It was like having a honeymoon for a year because here we are in Key West,” David Fugina recalled. “At the officers’ club, drinks are like 15 cents, live orchestras on the weekend. Here we are dancing on the patio outside with the palms and the moon and the waves crashing on the shore.”
The picturesque first year of marriage was six years in the making, after the couple met one summer before high school began, when Jeanne father was hired as the superintendent of the newly merged Cochrane-Fountain City School District.
Jeanne had been settling into life at her old school when she was plucked and placed into the small river city district. She was accompanied to the picnic with girls she had never met before, meeting up with her husband and his friend as well.
“I was a little overwhelmed,” Jeanne Fugina remembered, “probably just trying to take in these new people.”
The group of kids would wind up playing records and dancing at David Fugina’s house.
“And I came home that night, and I told my mother I just met the girl I’m gonna marry,” David Fugina siad.
There was one hiccup, though. David Fugina already had a girlfriend, who happened to be the school’s home economics teacher’s daughter and accompanying Jeanne that night.
“I told her that was just my practice girl,” David Fugina said.
Throughout high school and undergraduate school, the couple dated for six years, and Jeanne soon became just as much the river rat as David Fugina, spending time water skiing on the river. She recalled one embarrassing time when her suit was caught on a nail on the edge of the boathouse, and when the engine of the boat revved up, there Jeanne was left, dangling.
“We have a few embarrassing stories along life,” Jeanne Fugina said with a laugh.
Along with the embarrassing moments and the laughter, she said they have also had stability.
“I was just, I don’t know, just blown away by this new person who seemed to know where he was going in life,” she said.
Younger than he was, Jeanne graduated with a nursing degree in the summer of 1964, and the next weekend, David Fugina said, they were married and headed for Key West to spend their first year of married life.
The next year they returned to Wisconsin so David Fugina could earn his law degree at the University of Wisconsin Law School, but Fountain City was never out of their sights. Even during his undergraduate schooling, David Fugina would return to Fountain City in the summers and weekends to work and hunt. It was only during his time in the south that he ever truly left the bluffside town he had always called home.
The couple waited four years into their marriage to have their first child. David Fugina graduated from law school in January 1968, and Eric, the couple’s first child, was born April, 30, 1968. The couple later had another son, Mark.
The couple returned permanently to Fountain City, which garnered some good-natured teasing by his law school comrades. As a good student, David Fugina could have had his pick of places to practice law, but the river, his family practice and the town he had always known were ready for him to return.
“I took a lot of kidding when I was in law school because I graduated near the top of the class and people said ’Why on earth to you want to go back to a one-horse town like Fountain City when you could go to someplace else and make more money?’” David Fugina said. “And I always said ’Well I’d rather be someplace where I can go duck hunting every morning, bow hunting every night and fishing out my front door and know my clients. And that’s really true.”
David Fugina joined his father in 1968 at the family law practice, giving father and son 20 years of law together before Marvin Fugina died. For more than 10 years before his death, Marvin Fugina also served as Buffalo County Family Court commissioner.
Going to church with his clients and seeing them around town made his clients like family, David Fugina said, and in the short time he was doing divorces, he even had couples asking him to represent both of them, despite his inability to do so.
David Fugina’s primary work was in income tax work for his clients, claiming that it was the “glue” that held his practice together for so many years. David asked clients questions and filled out input sheets, while his wife and a legal secretary entered the data into a computer. It was the one time a year he saw all of his clients, who brought their hunting photos and talked about the local woods along with their income taxes.
David Fugina estimated he did about 25,000 tax returns in his career, if not more.
He also served as city attorney, much like his father and grandfather before him for 120 years, until April 2015 when the city appointed the firm then known as O’Flaherty Heim Egan and Birnbaum to the position, at David Fugina’s recommendation.
Despite the 20 years of law he practiced with his father, it’s not in the hallowed halls of the family law practice or in the city chambers where the family served as city attorney for three generations that David Fugina feels his father’s absence the most.
“Where I really miss dad is out in the duck blind or out deer hunting,” he said.
When he became a father, David Fugina found himself in the role his father served for all those years as he was learning to hunt and fish. Eric Fugina and Mark Fugina grew to love the outdoors and hunting, growing up in the same woods and floating on the same river their father did years ago.
And Jeanne Fugina took it up, too.
“I have two boys, and when they’re little, mom is the thing. But as they got older, dad’s the thing,” she said. “He taught them hunting and fishing. Being the only woman in the house, in order to be part of their world, I deer hunt, I turkey hunt, I go to the farm and work, I go fishing with him. I’ve enjoyed it, too. I’ve become more of an outdoor person than I ever was.”
The family also purchased a farm just eight miles away from their family home up on the bluffs of Fountain City. When he was working in the law office, David Fugina left the office at 4 p.m. and was bow hunting by 4:30 p.m.
He’s roamed outside of his Fountain City woods, too, hunting in places like Africa and Alaska. His home and offices are shrines to his skills and capability, with animals lining the walls, including those from different countries, deer from his own woods and rattlesnakes from when hunting them was legal.
In 2016, David Fugina retired after nearly 50 years of practicing law, but found it difficult to find an attorney to take over his law business. It’s a phenomenon he’s noticed growing up and working in a small community, watching local dentists, doctors and now attorneys leave for bigger cities.
“These offices are simply closing,” said he, who was able to finally have the same law office that became city attorney take over his practice.
After more than 120 years, the Fuginas were done with the law in Fountain City and Buffalo County. Their children found other passions in life, and it was time for the city’s own Huck Finn to find time relax the only way he knows how and has done his whole life.
And in getting to that point, if he had to, he’d live it all over again.
“I’m one of the very lucky ones, and I know this if I had my life to live over I would do exactly the same thing,” David Fugina said. “I’d marry Jean, I’d come back here and I’d do what I did for the last 50 years, because I enjoyed the heck out of it.”
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