Looking Back: Nixed newspapers, mama mania and the island life
One hundred fifty years ago, the Aug. 10, 1872 Charlevoix Sentinel warned its readers of the paper’s imminent demise: “GONE Ur. [sic] CERTAIN. THE SENTINEL cannot last much longer. A county subscriber has stopped his paper because we refuse to publish his nonsense.” Would that many editors around the country today might be intrepid enough to follow in owner/publisher Willard A. Smith’s footsteps.
The same issue reported that several of Charlevoix’s married men couldn’t handle their wives not being at home to see to their every need. Some couldn’t handle being home alone themselves. “Sorry for Them.—Five of our prominent citizens are boarding at the Fountain City House (hotel, now the Weathervane Terrace), enjoying the sweets of temporary bachelordom and the hospitality of Richard (Cooper, the proprietor). Several others are scattered about town, cooking their own grub and looking anxiously lakeward for the white hull of the steamer that is to bring the runaway wives. The ladies are all possessed of a mania for visiting their mammas.”
One hundred years later, Charlevoix Courier editor Bob Clock wrote an editorial on the therapeutic value of taking a trip from Charlevoix over to “America’s fabled Emerald Isle” on the Beaver Island ferry. He based his comments on the experience of a young lady named Sandy who had been a pupil of his when Bob taught school in Holly, Michigan. Now in her mid-20s, and working in Ann Arbor, Sandy said “I can only stay away from the Beavers for so long. Then I have to go back.”
Bob wrote: “Several years ago after moving to Ann Arbor from Holly, Sandy had a problem with drugs. But she’s off them now. She figures that life can be heady enough without the use of mind-expanding chemicals. Besides, there’s always at least one trip a year to Beaver Island--a mind-expanding experience if there ever was one. She camps in the island’s parks and hikes along the island’s moist, hard-packed roads in the shade of towering birches and hemlocks. Who needs drugs?
“It is a wonder that psychiatrists don’t start prescribing Beaver Island as a cure for patients beset by the cares of a work-a-day world. As soon as the Beaver Islander clears the pierheads, mainland worries become smaller and smaller, just like the vanishing Charlevoix shoreline. The jangle of telephones, the clatter and whirr of machinery, the roar of highway traffic—all are replaced by the pleasant slap of waves against the bow as the Beaver Islander churns toward her home port.
“Life on the island is the next thing to idyllic. Perhaps because of their isolation, the Islanders welcome all travelers like long-lost kinfolk. If you don’t feel at home on Beaver Island, there’s a good chance you’ll never feel at home anywhere in the world. Sipping beer in the cool recesses of the Shamrock on the Beachcomber on a sunny afternoon. Swimming in the surf in the village park. Hiking or pedaling a bicycle down the island’s pleasant, tree-shaded byways. Lunching at the Castaways with a dockside view of St. James Harbor. Dining out at the Circle M. Bedding down at night with the sound of surf in your ears. Or camping out, as Sandy does, under the stars. The spell of Beaver Island is difficult to translate into words.
“If you thrive on elbow-to-elbow crowds and are turned on by the racket and excitement of big cities, you probably won’t like it. But if you savor the gentle things of life—the piney scent of deep woodlands, vistas of endless blue water and the no-strings-attached friendship of the island’s Irish inhabitants, then Beaver Island awaits—just beyond the horizon.”
For many, the unexplainable, irresistible lure of Beaver Island still holds true today.
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This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: Nixed newspapers, mama mania and the island life
