There is no escaping Scott Walker -- not even by fleeing into the distant past.

Our governor’s countenance is everywhere lately, and it was disconcerting recently to find a remarkable facsimile of it on the front page of the Dec. 21, 1908 edition of The Milwaukee Journal.

Walker’s doppelgänger (or is the other way around?) is A.F. Solliday, scion of a pioneer Watertown family -- his father was mayor and a state senator and was briefly considered gubernatorial material -- who in the early 1900s gave up a dental practice there and moved to Milwaukee to sell cars at the Solliday Motor Car Co., located Downtown on 4th.

Solliday made the paper because on the evening of Dec. 18, 1908, he and several clients had dinner and drinks at the Gargoyle restaurant on 3rd and Grand (now Wisconsin) Avenue.

Afterwards they took an automobile tour of the east side, with stops at several saloons. Driving back Downtown via Oneida (now E. Wells) St. after midnight, the car driven by Solliday plunged into the Milwaukee River because the bridge was not in place.

Solliday’s two passengers drowned, but he was plucked out of the water by the steamer Iowa, which happened to be in the vicinity.

"My time simply hadn’t come," proclaimed Solliday, who a year later moved back to Watertown and resumed his dental practice. Later a bank president, Solliday died in 1958.

Even some of us on the right hope Gov. Walker’s time will never come, presidentially speaking, and that, unlike his early 20th century phantasm, Iowa won’t come to his rescue.