November 1941 — Seventy-eight hundredths of one percent

On Friday, November 14, 1941 — two days after the footings were poured, two days after the summons was served — the council sold the bonds.

Sixty thousand dollars of the hundred and ten thousand the city had been authorized to borrow in April. Six banks and bond houses bid for it. Every one of them offered the money for less than one percent.

0.78%

Seventy-eight hundredths of one percent per annum. City Clerk Fred L. Kramer told the council what the bidders' representatives had told him: it was the lowest rate at which any municipality had ever borrowed money, so far as they knew. They were positive no city in the middle west had ever borrowed this cheaply. They did not know the coastal rates well enough to say whether it was a national record.

The issue went to the First National Bank of Chicago, which bid one percent with a $376 premium and would also print and supply the bonds. Halsey, Stuart and Company of Chicago were next at $351; then the Milwaukee Company of Chicago at $301; Kalman and Company of Minneapolis at $201; Harris Trust and Savings of Chicago with the State Bank of La Crosse at $126; and the Wisconsin Company of Milwaukee at $42.

The bonds were called a ten-year issue, though in practice they averaged five and a half years: the city would redeem a tenth of them annually, six thousand dollars in 1942 and six thousand in each of the nine years after.

For four years this building could not be afforded. In November 1941 La Crosse borrowed the money for it more cheaply than any city in the middle west had ever borrowed anything.