The One, Two, Three Count

August 14, 2004

On April 29, 1937, the headline on a New York Times article read, "Braddock to Train for Bout With Louis In Sumptuous Camp on Lake Michigan". The story was datelined Chicago, but the sumptuous camp was at Grand Beach, Michigan, five miles up the shore from Michigan City, Indiana. James J. Braddock was looking to defend his heavyweight title against 23-year-old contender Joseph Louis Barrow in a bout scheduled for June 22nd. It looked like the match would be held in Chicago, in spite of a pending New York injunction. As Braddock's manager Joe Gould put it, "Braddock will positively defend his title this Summer. Naturally, we hope it will be against Louis in Chicago. However it is necessary that Braddock be established in camp, and regardless where his title defense takes place, he will remain at Grand Beach for at least two months." The Barrow camp seemed to be betting on Chicago as well, for the challenger would go into training at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 75 miles northwest of the Windy City.

A photograph of the champ and his sparring partners out for an exercise jog shows the three men running downhill toward the camera along a sloping boardwalk. Behind them, atop a ridge, stands an imposing three-story building with a tower on the corner (one of two, actually) stretching off-camera at the other end, all done in mock Tudor, or Pseudy Tudey, architecture, giving the whole structure a vaguely Shakespearean look. Some "camp". This is the Golfmore Hotel. Braddock will rough it in one of the gilded hostelry's 175 guest rooms.

Resort founders Floyd Perkins and George Ely were obviously doing something right. It was their 18-hole golf course that had given the hotel, opened in 1921, its name. Besides golf the resort provided opportunities to go horseback riding, swimming and, in the winter, ski jumping. Soon another nine holes were added in a nearby location. Twice a day trains of the Michigan Central Railroad would pull into the station, near the fourth green, and discharge wealthy sportsmen from Chicago, eager to hit the links. Other resorts opened nearby. The future looked rosy.

Then came October 1929. The hotel struggled to play through, but was forced to close in 1931, after only ten years of operation. It was reincarnated in 1936 with the added attraction of roulette tables, slots and other gaming seductions and it was then that Braddock arrived to train. Another boxer, Max Baer, had trained here earlier in the decade, as had the Golden Gloves team when they prepared for an international match with the Irish Amateur team.

Chicago fight fans were pleased when they learned the New York court challenge had failed; the fight went on, as scheduled, as 60,000 fans paid $700,000 to jam themselves into Comiskey Park.

The New York Times reported the next day, "Loser Carried Unconscious to His Corner After Being Pounded to Canvas." Joe Louis (he dropped the 'Barrow' to fight professionally), the Brown Bomber, became the first black boxer to hold the crown since Great White Hope Jack Johnson took the title in 1908, and would remain champ for a record-breaking twelve years. Michigan governor Frank Murphy banned gambling in 1937.

On November 19, 1939. the Golfmore Hotel burned to the ground.

Back to square one for Grand Beach.

Script 376

(c) 2004 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Town Made to Order

Sep 6, 2003

Spectators gathered, in 1908, on new docks at the harbor entrance to Gary, Indiana, peered off to the west, watched as small dots slowly grew in size just off shore. The dots separated, became four distinct vessels, steaming toward the piers jutting out into Lake Michigan. First to arrive was the gunboat Wolverine, followed in turn by the training ship Dorothea, the revenue cutter Tuscarora, and the fourth vessel, the steam vessel E. H. Gary. As the latter neared her dock the Stars and Stripes was run up a flagpole where it flapped in the breeze as the Wolverine loosed a 21-gun salute into the July air. On board the steamer was the reason for all the celebration, 12,00 tons of iron ore. Before the unloading there were speeches from officials standing on the Gary's bridge, including a candidate for the U. S. vice-presidency. It was the final years of the Gilded Age, so we can be sure the oratory and the toasts followed each other in rapid succession. Somebody was sure to have uttered the words, "a new era" and, for better or worse, it was. By the end of the shipping season close to a million tons of raw ore would enter the iron maw of the Gary blast furnaces.

If anyone in that welcoming crowd hadn't known of the guiding force behind this magic city that appeared out of the swamps and dunes, its name and the name of the first cargo carrier was a dead giveaway. It had become evident to United States Steel Corporation president Elbert Gary, sitting in his quietly bustling New York office in the early 1900s, that much of the far-reaching empire under his control was limping along with antiquated equipment, decrepit, rusting machinery that cut into efficiency and, most importantly, profits. Retrofitting existing plants would be hideously expensive and labor-intensive; far better and cheaper in the long run to start from scratch. It had to be along the western Great Lakes, near ore sources and existing factories in the Chicago area. Waukegan was already too congested. Land immediately around Chicago was expensive and carried a heavy tax burden. The answer lay just east of the Illinois-Indiana border. Mile after mile of swamp and sand dunes, practically uninhabited. Parcel by parcel the giant corporation began quietly buying up the needed property. The final acquisitions were made by 1906. 9,000 acres of beachfront property: 7.2 million dollars. A few billion sand fleas: Free. Dune grass and sluggish swamp water: Free. A brick-and-steel cash cow that should never run dry - PRICELESS!!

The science-fiction term 'terra-forming' had not been coined in 1906, but the concept was well understood. Crews began shoving huge sand dunes into inlets along a half mile stretch of lakefront. Part of the winding, east-west Calumet river was straightened and shifted half a mile to the south, acting as a dividing line between the workers' residences and commercial buildings to the south, and the blast furnaces and factories to the north. A grid pattern emerged as building lots were marked off and streets laid down. Running like reinforcing rods through the ruler-straight, criss-crossing, sidewalk-lined roadbeds, two major thoroughfares appeared. They were quite impressive, but there wasn't a lot of imagination put into their naming - Fifth Avenue running east-west, and Broadway running north-south. A twenty-five foot deep canal was gouged away to run through the middle of the industrial area, and piers were run out into the wind-driven surf. The Pittsburgh of the West was on its way.

Script 328

(c) 2003 David Minor / Eagles Byte

The Importance of Being Sturdy

Dec 14, 2002

In 1882 a visitor in his late twenties stood with his head tilted back, near the northwest corner of Chicago's Grant Park, and surveyed the narrow structure thrusting skyward. A bemused sneer crept into his voice (it hadn't usually too far to travel) and he proclaimed it a "castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it." Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wilde had rendered his judgment. Perhaps the Irish visitor, author of the children's classic The Selfish Giant, might have found the structure of greater interest had he know of its reputed ghost. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Chicago had been jacked up out of the mud. Much of the fill used was gained by deepening the Chicago River, thus distancing citizens even further from the muck. Engineer Ellis Chesbrough had managed to make the drains empty properly, but the problem of waste disposal still remained. The city's water commissioners went for the cheapest solution (surprise, surprise) - just dump the raw sewage into the river. Much cheaper than dumping it into the lake, digging a sewage canal to flow the sludge to the Illinois River, or even, what sounds more like a 20th Century "green" plan, to pump it into reservoirs and turn it into manure. So off the odoriferous mess went, into Lake Michigan. Except for the portion that the city drew off of to provide its drinking water. And for making ice when the stockyards came along later on and added to the melange.

River water stank and could kill you, but off where the sun rose every morning was this huge lake. If you could get out past the floating slop hugging the shore you could find all the clean water you needed. In March of 1864, despite all those who said he couldn't pull it off, Chesbrough set out to bring potable (if not pure) water to thirsty citizens (nearly 110,000 of them in 1860). The first task was to build and sink a "crib" of iron and timber, two miles from shore, containing an iron cylinder that would be sunk 33 feet to the lake bottom and bore through another 31 feet into the lake bed. The upper portion was filled with stone ballast. Then other gangs of laborers and mules began tunneling toward the city, beneath the lake bed's surface. When they had finished Chicago had a two-mile long iron soda straw, five feet in diameter, lying on its side beneath its lake bed, one end at the crib out in the lake, the other end near Grant Park.

The final step was to build a pumphouse at the park end. Architect William W. Boyington designed a mock-Gothic structure to be built out of Joliet limestone. When completed it was topped by the 154-foot stone tower that so bemused Mr. Wilde. It contained a three-foot diameter iron pipe which, when partially filled with water, would act as a governor, modulating the water flow into the pumping station. Completed in 1869, Wilde's "monstrosity" and the building at its foot would be the only structures standing two years later when the O'Leary family stable - it i said - launched the Great Chicago Fire. Which brings us to our ghost.

Based on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, the legend has it that one municipal employee stayed behind when everyone else fled the lethal heat. In the manner of Nellie Swinging From the Bell and Casey at the Throttle, this anonymous hero kept the pumps running until the last minute, for firemen that had already lost their battle, then did the only thing possible and hanged himself before the flames reached him. A number of tourists down through the years swear they've seen a hanging figure through an upper window. Guess you'll have to go and look for yourself.

Script 295

© 2002 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Seat of Kings?

December 2, 2000

Approaching the Wisconsin city of Green Bay, at the southern end of that bay, I can't help wondering if the locals weren't a bit apprehensive. That spoiler of pleasant fictions, DNA. I mean it doesn't rank up there with being tied in the last 13 seconds of a home game, with an inferior team on your twelve yard line, having three downs to go. Nothing like that. But still.

This story begins elsewhere. New York State, actually. In the year 1821 Eleazar Williams, a part French, part Mohawk, Episcopalian preacher began visiting the Oneida in the center of the state. Speaking their language fluently, he began efforts to reunite the two Christian groups of the tribe. He was not successful in these efforts. But he also believed that the tribe needed to move further west and get away from the influence of whites. He turned up in northeast Wisconsin the following year and began negotiating for land with the local Winnebago, Menominee and Ho-chunk. They resisted the idea at first but eventually the Menominee and the Ho-chunk agreed to the sale of over 65,000 acres for use of the Oneida. As several hundred York state Indians resettled near Green Bay, Williams was on his way to his ultimate goal, a new Iroquois Confederacy, west of Lake Michigan, with himself as its leader. It would not happen. Winnebago resistance to the idea continued and the Menominee began having second thoughts. Williams was unable to convince other Iroquois to make the move. He spent the next 25 years futilely waiting for the resurrection of his plans. Then, in 1853, he made one last stab at personal glory, a confession. He announced that in 1841, when France's Prince de Joinville toured the U. S. and visited Green Bay, they had met. According to Williams the nobleman had revealed a secret out of the past. Flashback time.

Late in the evening of July 3d, 1793, Marie Antoinette prepares for bed in her prison cell. Officials of the Revolution arrive suddenly to take her young son, the dauphin, away from her. In spite of her desperate, tearful pleading the boy is removed and set up in another part of the prison. He will spend almost the next two years there before dying miserably at the age of ten, probably of tuberculosis. The Committee of Public Safety decides word of the death must not get out. (If you've ever heard of Anastasia Romanov, read A Tale of Two Cities, or seen movies based on Alexndre Dumas, you know where this is going.) Once news of the dauphin's death is uncovered, the rumors begin flying. He didn't really die. Or someone did, but they had been substituted for the dauphin. It was said he had been spirited off to Yankeeland and was waiting quietly for the restoration. Now, in 1853, according to the preacher, the prince had revealed to him that he, Williams, was the Lost Dauphin. He claimed to have humbly kept his secret for 12 years, until a magazine had revealed the "truth". He died in 1870, his claims unproven. But it's not over yet. Just a year ago French geneticists announced they were going to compare DNA from Louis XVII's heart with that of his mother's hair. Should be interesting.

Script 198

© 2000 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Wooden World

September 23, 2000

If you were inland from Menominee, Michigan, on the evening of October 8th, 1871, and you looked eastward toward town, you might see the glow of the setting sun. Wrong direction? Of course. It was the glow of not-distant-enough flames. On this day major fires would begin raging in Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. The first two (Chicago and Peshtigo) were decidedly deadly. Chicago's flames killed 300 and left 90,000 homeless. Peshtigo's dead numbered somewhat over 1200. Menominee faced the same threat.

The western Great Lakes had seen very little rain since spring. Wood frame houses in the lumber towns lined streets covered in sawdust. The surrounding land was studded with piles of scrap from the sawmills; dust filled the hot, dry air. And then. Deer were erupting out of the woods, as well as wolves, and smaller wild animals. The roads eastward were soon filled with cattle, horses and wagons as those on the small outlying farms headed rapidly toward the town and the waters of Green Bay. The passenger steamer Northern City could be seen off across the waters to the east, headed toward town. Exiles from Peshtigo were making their way into town, as well as escapees from nearby flame-killed villages. The steamer docked and the captain agreed, even as crew members stomped out wind-born sparks, to take women and children aboard. Said he'd stay moored there as long as possible.

There can be moments of humor, even under the threat of annihilation. A drayman unloaded a cargo of furniture destined for one of the mansions on the far side of town. As he moved away from the pier a passer-by told him the house wouldn't survive. He should take the furniture back to the boat. He kept going, telling the advice-giver that the insurance company would pay for the furniture if it went up in flames. But not if it were back on the ship.

The fires could be seen from village now. Men formed into crews and began digging a trench across the road that led into town, beating out flames that leapt the barrier with their shirts, laying face down briefly in the marshy water when waves of scorching heat flowed over their heads. Their efforts paid off. As dawnlight overcame flamelight, they knew they'd saved their town.

There were a two surprises left, non-threatening ones. As women began coming down the steamboats gangplank, some leading children. a few tallish forms kept their faces hidden, struggled with long skirts. A townsman walked up to one of the latter, and with a curse planted a boot firmly in the seat of the skirt and knocked a few other figures to the ground. Seems a half-dozen men of the town were more afraid of fire fighting than they were of cross-dressing. Getting in touch with their feminine side, no doubt. The other surprise? The waters of Green Bay had been lowered a bit by the intense heat. The Northern City was stuck firmly on a sandbar.

Script 189

© 2000 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Right Place at the Right Time (script 178)

© 2000 David Minor / Eagles Byte

The lady just happened to be in town that day. The day was May 12th, 1883, a Saturday. The town was Fayette, Michigan. And the lady was a boat, a boat by the name of Lady Washington. Fayette's harbor, called Snail Shell due to its shape, offered protection from the lake's storms, and vessels often took refuge in its shelter. If there was enough of this once-thriving smelter town in 1959 to fashion into a ghost-town tourist attraction, a lot of the credit goes to the lady.

Foundries ran around the clock then, what we today would call 24/7, and most people worked Saturdays anyway, so it wasn't unusual for a clerk in the warehouse to be on the job. He happened to glance off toward the waterfront where the stock building was located. It's purpose was to hold the fuel, coke by this period, before it went into the furnaces. Suddenly he took another look. Flames were emerging from a corner of the building. No time to hesitate. There was a wind, a few sparks could set the whole wooden village ablaze. He turned in the alarm and it wasn't long before every inhabitant that could walk, including the kids, was on the scene. The timbers of the stock house, coated with years of coal dust, spread the fires like fuses in a melodrama. 65,000 bushels of charcoal caught, and finished the stock house. The fire engine had been dragged in and bucket brigades formed. But the former didn't have sufficient power, mere pails of Lake Michigan were next to useless, and the wind continued to blow. Fayette was going to go up in flames. Town in distress and, damsel to the rescue.

The discouraged townspeople were suddenly aware of the sound of an engine, coming from the docks. The Lady Washington was moving into position with engines revved up and pumps churning. With her help the battle finally turned. When the last flames were extinguished the Jackson Iron Company had been heavily damaged, but its town had survived. A number of smelter buildings were lost, to the tune of $40,000. The two stacks, the blast furnaces, the casting house and the engines that operated the machinery were also spared. As were the docks, coal bins, and stacks of cord wood.

What the fire didn't destroy that evening the passage of time and the depletion of local forests eventually polished off. In 1920 the iron works and the town it owned, was sold off for $10,000. The population dwindled, almost to the vanishing point. Over the next 39 years what was left changed hands several times. Eventually the state of Michigan took over, decided the place was worth rescuing as a tourist attraction, and set out on a massive restoration project.

Every August now, boaters gather in Snail Shell Harbor to watch as a local high school girl, the annual Queen of the Fleet, tosses flowers on the water to honor the fishermen who lost their lives on the Lakes. The guardian spirit of another, much older lady is most likely present.

Cornucopia of Apostles (script 64)

© 1998 David Minor / Eagles Byte

Eastward of Duluth-Superior, along the south shore of Lake Superior, lie several small fishing villages. Here, along the shoreline, Port Wing was the first consolidated school district in Wisconsin; early settlement and development of the territory was along the shore of the lakes.

Port Wing, by the way, may have been one of the first communities in the U. S. to bus students, so to speak. Wagons and sleds were used to bring them to the large three-story clapboard schoolhouse.

It was just to the east that Minneapolis lawyer Thomas J. Stevenson sailed along the shore around the turn of the century and noticed the abundance of wild fruit and grasses growing throughout the countryside. Remembering the mythological horn of plenty, he named the town he founded here in 1902 Cornucopia. He may have been a bit optimistic; the coming railroad bypassed the area.

The land past Cornucopia ends in a blunt, red-banked point, then Chequamegon Bay curves briefly back to the west. At the tip of this point the Red Cliff Reservation is home to nearly 500 Chippewa natives. It was one of these Chippewa, named Nanabazhoo, that caught the imagination of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although it appears he didn't fancy the name. Instead he borrowed the name of a legendary Onondaga chief here in New York, shifted it to the other end of the Great Lakes, and called his hero Hiawatha. So, if you're looking for the shores of Gitcheegoomee you might try north of Syracuse.

The final North American glacial period ended here somewhere around 14,000 B. C., in the period known as the Wisconsinian. One souvenir it left behind was a series of islands off the northern and eastern shore of the point. A group of Jesuits priests settled on the 21 islands in the group, later British trader Jonathan Carver set up a post there. Someone decided that there were twelve of the islands, and so they were named the Apostles. Curiously enough, none of the islands actually took on the name of apostles, unless there was a different set we don't know about, with names like Madeline, Basswood, Hermit, Manitou, Rocky, Gull, Stockton, Michigan. And Devils? I don't think so.

The islands became hosts to waves of tourists as resorts of the wealthy sprang up along the lake shore. If you ferry out to Madeline Island today you can tour a museum of the American Fur Company (which means it was British-owned) or play on a golf course designed by Robert Treat Jones. The Apostles have five lighthouse and six shipwrecks. One of the latter, the schooner barge Noquebay caught fire in 1905 and was beached on Stockton Island. Unlike many Lakes wrecks, there was no loss of life. But 600,000 board feet of hemlock lumber never made it to its final destination, the lumberyards of Buffalo.

Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas

© 1997 David Minor / Eagles Byte

It’s as far west as the salties can go. For those of you unfamiliar with Great Lakes lingo, a salty is a saltwater ship, and you won’t find one west of Duluth-Superior. To those of us who live at the eastern end of the Great Lakes, the western end may be relatively unknown. Every so often we’ll explore the shores of these five glacial souvenirs, and get acquainted.

Most lakes have fairly rounded contours. Lake Superior comes to a sharp point at its western end, where Wisconsin snuggles cozily into the lower curve of eastern Minnesota. That geography has shaped the history of two towns; made them first rivals, and then partners.

Superior, Wisconsin, was the first. England’s Hudson’s Bay Company had an outpost there as early as 1820, although an even earlier trading post at nearby Fond du Lac, Minnesota, 67 years earlier, would one day become a depot of the rival American Fur Company. Superior, formally settled in 1853, under the tutelage of a bevy of eastern capitalists and politicians, a consortium including Washington banker William Wilson Corcoran, Senator Stephen A. Douglas and Congressman John C. Breckinridge, stepped out ahead. Momentum increased when a military road to St. Paul, Minnesota, was constructed in 1856. Meanwhile, a rival had sprung up across the bay. Duluth, near Fond du Lac, was also settled in 1853 but, with no friends in high places, had only a population of eighty, seven years later. That changed when Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke became interested in Duluth as a lake port for the shipment of grain from nearby midwestern wheatfields to eastern markets. He was one of the sponsors of a bill in Congress to make harbor improvements at Duluth.

And improvements were necessary. Minnesota Point, an eight-mile long spit of sand, fifty feet in height, not only protected Duluth’s harbor, but made Superior closer to open water and therefore to shipping. When, in 1870, the bill failed in Congress, Cooke founded the Minnesota Canal and Harbor Improvement Company and began construction of a channel to sever Minnesota Point, opening the Port of Duluth directly to Lake Superior. The town of Superior, learning of the threat from their rival, sent representatives to Leavenworth, Kansas, the nearest Federal presence, to obtain an injunction against the project. The emissaries were successful and set off for home, galloping across the landscape, injunction in hand. But they underestimated the citizens of Duluth. Word of the legal prohibition raced ahead of them. Every able-bodied man in Duluth grabbed a shovel or a pick, rushed out onto the point, and completed the construction of the channel, hours before the injunction was scheduled to take effect.