Foresight of Sorts and 70 Year Old Bullet Holes

These are bullet holes from a shootout in 1936. If you look closely, you can see that the inner and outer windows were installed around the shattered glass - presumably not long after the damage was done, since it seems difficult to believe that anyone would toy with the possibility of already broken glass going completely to pieces during a Wisconsin winter.

I've posted on this before - as it turns out, my favorite German restaurant in a pine forest/site of a 30's FBI/bank robber shootout was, indeed, used as a location for the new Johnny Depp/Christian Bale movie. This means that there is a longer account of the shootout online than I remember being on the placemats - and granting me many nights of worry about .45's in the woods - and it makes the story more complicated than I remember it being, with the inn-keeper taking a huge amount of money to house the gang, and then, double-crossing them and telling the feds - who, apparently, didn't question his story (maybe they appreciated that 1936 was a bad year for inn-keeping?).

Even though the whole event was a pretty awful scene - two people died because the FBI mistook them for bank robbers - before the actual robbers got away (though they left their womenfolk to face the feds), and the proprietor himself ended up sitting in the lodge while law enforcement shot it to bits, the preserved broken glass and the glass case full of the personal effects that the gangsters left behind seems to show an adept appreciation for the kind of draw he had on his hands. By the time that we started going there, this was all a long time ago - I only knew who John Dillinger was because of the placemats - and the whole display - bulletholes included, had a kind of moth-eaten, campy film noir quality, even though it derives its entire meaning from fact, not pure invention - it's a quite a set of decisions and motives to think about with dinner, in what, with more perspective than my deeply impressionable, imaginative 9 year old self's ease in imagining tommy guns in the woods, I now understand is a pretty peaceful setting (red pines, serene lake, cream-based soups).

UPDATE: My parents think this may be a fake bullet hole, but a real leftover from the filming. There's really no way to know, since there are definitely real ones still there. And my mom sent me to this - clearly the Times is more on top of this story than I am. But the most disturbing thing I learned, I think, is the size of a full-grown sturgeon. 6-8 feet. Yikes.