Yankee Yooper on the Keweenaw

By Philip J. Howard Jr.

Michigans Upper Peninsula is one of Americas hidden treasures. Overlooked and ignored as a place to visit compared, say, to Vermont or coastal Maine. It is decidedly not Yellowstone Park, Disney World, or New Orleans. The UP and the yoopers, as they are called, like it just that way. They enjoy their own character, culture, and history. The land of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world, is their world along with the fingerlike Keweenaw Peninsula that dares to thrust deep northward into the heart of this beautiful, and sometimes dangerous, magnificent glacial gift. This is the setting for which Longfellow wrote his magical poem The Song of Hiawatha. Come along and enjoy the adventures of a surgeon working and exploring the land around the lake, the Keweenaw, the Copper Country history, the Ojibwa and Chippewa Indians, and more. How did the UP become an unexpected, greatly unappreciated golden gift to Michigan and pay Michigan back a thousand fold for begrudgingly accepting the UP. Come along with me and learn all about the yoopers, the culture, the history, Father Marquette, and Michigans connection to the Mississippi River and more. See how the UP transformed itself from a copper-mining industrial area back to a most beautiful and wonderful part of America. Ill even tell you where to get good meals and where not to get good meals. As a bonus Ill throw in a lot of useful medical advice with no co-pay!
Come along now. Lets go!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493187874

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Philip J. Howard, Jr., M.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2014905453

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4931-8788-1

                            Softcover                          978-1-4931-8789-8

                            eBook                               978-1-4931-8787-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Copyrighted cover map used with permission by Lake Superior Magazine,

www.LakeSuperior.com.

A portion of a full Lake Superior Map available from Lake Superior Port Cities Inc.

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

Words and Music by GORDON LIGHTFOOT

© 1976 (Renewed) MOOSE MUSIC LTD.

Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

All Rights Reserved

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Rev. date: 04/25/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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541488

Dedicated with thanks to my wife Joanne.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   Driving to Hancock, Michigan and Going to Work

2   Hancock, Houghton and Isle Royale

3   The Quincy Copper Mine First Day of Surgery

4   Emergencies A New Prospective Urologist

5   Nurse Lisa and The Ojibwa Nation and Casino

6   The Edmund Fitzgerald and Lake Superior Storms

7   The Toledo War and Michigan gets the Upper Peninsula

8   Keweenaw Geology, Ice Ages

9   Father Jacques Marquette The Original Yooper

10   Medical Black Holes and Munchausen Syndrome

11   The Transportation Problem

12   Benjamin Franklin and Copper

13   Douglas Houghton and Copper

14   Copper, Then Less Copper

15   The Keweenaw Future

Bibliography

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

On the shores of Gitche Gumee,

Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood Nokomis, the old woman

Pointing with her finger westward,

O’er the water pointing westward

To the purple clouds of sunset.

Fiercely the red sun descending

Burned his way along the heavens,

Set the sky on fire behind him,

As war-parties, when retreating,

Burn the prairies on their war-trail;

And the moon, the Night-sun, eastward,

Suddenly starting from his ambush,

Followed fast those bloody footprints,

Followed in that fiery war-trail,

With its glare upon his features.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Song of Hiawatha, Chapter 9,

Hiawatha and the Pearl-Feathers

L ET ME START out with a brief description of what makes a Yooper . As you read this little book you will know all about Yoopers.

Yooper: A special person from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

On Michigan’s UP, some bumper stickers say Yooper, proud of it. Another one proclaims I’m a Yooper. Many variations of this are seen, but the question remains—what is a yooper? It’s easy to say I’m a Vermonter, but you can’t say I’m a Michigander from the Upper Peninsula. That’s way too long and cumbersome. "I’m a UPier doesn’t sound good, but Yooper sounds right and has a nice feel to it. Like a person from Newfoundland is a "Newfie", same idea. Yooper, from the Upper Peninsula, the UP, it just works.

A yooper can be any age, male or female. A yooper can be a professional or a highly educated Ph.D, or a hardworking blue collar worker. A yooper can be a nurse, a doctor, construction worker, anyone who is gainfully employed, self confident and possesses an independent spirit. The one unifying theme of all yoopers is that they either live on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or, and this is very important to understand, they wish to return to the Upper Peninsula. Their private world is on the Upper Peninsula. A person is not disqualified as a yooper if they cross the Mackinaw Bridge and go down to the mitten, or go below as they frequently say. However, a strong desire to return to the UP is a key. A yooper might have migrated to Chicago, Detroit, Boston, or Kalamazoo, but will reside there temporarily to make a living. That person will always have their heart set on returning to the UP. Absence for years does not disqualify one as a yooper provided that one harbors a strong attachment to the UP and desires to return permanently at some stage of life. That yooper will always desire to return to the homeland, the heartland, the UP.

With that description submitted, let me tell you the story of my becoming a hybrid yooper. I became a Yankee Yooper. I have become a man with two beloved special homelands, Michigan,s Upper Peninsula and New England. Come along. We’re going to do some urological medicine, some explorations of the U.P., we’re going to meet a lot of yoopers and we’re going to learn a lot about the history and geology of the upper Midwest and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The Ferris School in Highland Park, Michigan, was where I attended grade school. My older brother and sister had gone to the same school ahead of me and were great students. My mother was quite a stickler, obsessive for studies and getting good grades. Her efforts had paid off well for my brother and sister who were model students and received straight-A report cards. It was steep downhill from there. Mother was worried, often hysterically, that I would be a total academic failure. I was sure of it.

On the school playground, however, I showed remarkable aptitude at playing marbles. At our Ferris School, before and after the regular classes, the kids in the fourth grade, boy and girls, all played marbles on the playground. Not traditional marbles but business marbles. The marbles were an alternate currency for us, a little like bit coin, and the more you collected the richer you were. The object was to hit a puree (a clear see-through marble with no bubbles in it) into a depression behind the dirt alley where one would roll regular marbles in an attempt to hit the puree into the hole in the dirt and claim the puree.

Hit in the hole and you get it, was the cry heard all over the playground. This was a fourth-grade passion, a complete addiction at Ferris School and, to me, was far more interesting than the multiplication tables. I collected so many marbles at the end of the school year I had completely filled a laundry tub with these marbles. It weighed so much nobody in the family could lift it. Today’s child psychologists would have labeled me an obsessive-compulsive sick kid.

There was one other thing that I was good at, checkers. My grandfather had taught me the simple principles of playing checkers when I was about five years old, and a lifelong love of checkers and, later on, chess was started. I could beat my super smart straight-A brother George who was five years older than me at checkers and that gave me a tiny glimmer of self-confidence. If I could beat my big smart brother at checkers, I reasoned, I couldn’t be a total dummy no matter what my mother told me.

Later on, in the fifth grade, playing marbles was for little kids. My interest in business turned to delivering newspapers. I started out with a small paper route delivering the Highland Parker, a weekly newspaper describing events in the community. This was okay but only took one day a week, and, if you paid attention, maybe you would make a dollar a week tops. I graduated on to the Detroit News, purchasing a route of thirty-eight customers on Tennyson Avenue. I initially had the west side of Tennyson, but before long, I purchased the east side as well, and then I had about eighty daily customers. This was a good thing for me. Every day, after school, I hopped on my trusty Schwinn and pedaled up the alley between California and Tennyson streets and picked up my eighty papers in the paper garage. Then each one had to be folded for throwing, stuffed into my official Detroit News carrier bag, slung over my handlebars for delivery. Then I would pedal over to Tennyson Avenue and ride down one side three city blocks long and then back up the other side three blocks carefully throwing each customer’s paper on the porch. If you missed, that was bad and time consuming, going back and getting off the bike and tossing it up on the porch.

The job in the summer was pretty easy going, but in the winter, with snow and ice, then you did earn your money. This enterprise netted me about ten dollars a week, and that was a time when a Coke costs a nickel, the papers cost a nickel, and a gallon of gas cost twenty-five cents.

Mrs. Hathaway, our sixth-grade teacher, was going to teach us about our state of Michigan, the geography, the lakes and river systems, and the upper and lower peninsulas. Mrs. Hathaway started us on a construction project.

Children, we are going to make a large model of the state of Michigan. This turned out to be a three-dimensional relief map of our state. We started with a wooden table made up of two four-by-eight pieces of heavy plywood resulting in a table that measured eight-by-eight feet. This was great. I actually started to love school and couldn’t wait for the next day. We got plaster all over ourselves, paint dripping on the floor, as our state of Michigan and the Great Lakes started to take shape. We were busily mixing up batches of plaster and building our state of Michigan, lower and upper peninsulas, and all the Great Lakes that surround the state. We had plaster dust and mixed up plaster and water all over the floor creating a janitor’s nightmare. Then we painted our Michigan with nice, waterproof paints. We filled the painted blue Great Lakes with water. We had made a three-dimensional relief map of the upper Midwest with Michigan in the middle! All of this work was so much fun, besides that, it was interesting. Thus began my lifelong fascination with the Great Lakes, the geography, the geology, history, economy, everything to do with Michigan. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, however, remained a mystery. How come it was part of Michigan instead, say, of Wisconsin or Minnesota? Where did the Great Lakes come from? Where did all the copper and iron come from? What part of Michigan yielded up all this copper and iron? How come it was there to begin with? Those questions would have to wait a while. Mrs. Hathaway was one of those rare, gifted teachers. She plugged me in and got me jump-started.

I went on, thanks to Mrs. Hathaway, to graduate from Highland Park High School, attend Bowdoin College and graduate from the University of Michigan Medical School. Internship and general surgical training were at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My urological training was under the great Wyland F. Leadbetter at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Forty years later, retired from my urology practice for about two weeks and sitting at home wondering if that was it for my medical career. Was I all done? A locum tenens physician recruiting service called me and asked me if I would be willing to go to Hancock, Michigan, and work for several weeks. They needed a urologist to fill in and asked if I could do a temporary urological assignment for them. I started thinking about it. I got out the maps to pinpoint exactly where the town of Hancock is located. There it was—Hancock, Michigan, exactly in the middle of the Keweenaw Peninsula. They wanted me to go to Michigan and the Great Lakes. The Keweenaw Peninsula juts up into the middle of Lake Superior. Making the Keweenaw Peninsula for Mrs. Hathaway was where I spilled a lot of paint and plaster on the Ferris School floor. Now I had a chance to go there and work. Now I had a chance to really do the Michigan Upper Peninsula, focus in on Lake Superior, and spend many glorious weeks on the Keweenaw Peninsula.

On September 15, 2005, with my wife, Joanne, we headed west for Hancock, Michigan, on the Keweenaw Peninsula and the shores of Gitche Gumme, the shining Big-Sea Water. This was the land of poetry, history, wonderful people, the Yoopers, and a lot of fun.

1

Driving to Hancock,

Michigan and Going to Work

A FTER THREE DAYS of packing our bags (Joanne does not pack lightly), we left Princeton Thursday morning and headed down Route 31 to the Mass Pike and headed west on our fourteen hundred fifty mile journey. Our objective was to get to Niagara Falls the first night. After a fast lunch at the Berkshire McDonald’s we headed on to Albany and the New York Turnpike. The New York Turnpike runs through beautiful countryside and reminds me of all the little towns we used to drive through when the family would drive from Detroit to Vermont and back for our summer vacations. The exits came along in order, Palatine, Herkimer, Schenectady, Amsterdam, Canajoharie, Schuyler, Utica, Canastota, Syracuse, and finally Rochester. It was already after four o’clock. We made Buffalo and traveled on over the Peace Bridge, and now on Canada’s Queen Elizabeth Highway proceeded on up to Niagara Falls. We searched around for the Old Brock Hotel, which was supposed to have a nice view of the falls. After several wrong turns and going the wrong way up a one way street, we found the Brock Hotel. The first room we were assigned smelled cigar smokey, and Joanne said, No good. Next we were taken to a top-floor room that was a magnificent two-bedroom suite with a large sitting room, and an outside patio with table and chairs, and a glorious view of the Niagara Horse Shoe falls. This was a great room, and we settled in. While Joanne unpacked, I ordered some drinks from the lobby bar, and then we sat outside on the