Looking Back: War of the words
CHARLEVOIX — The Charlevoix Sentinel for April 19, 1873 is missing from the microfilm files, so this will skip ahead a week to April 26.
It is being written while the weather outside is glorious — a short sleeve shirt day. But such was not the case 150 years ago. “The Ice.—Prospects for an immediate opening of navigation are not flattering. Nothing but ice can be seen to the westward, but considerable water is seen to the northward; although reports come that the ice is comparatively solid in the Straits. Pine Lake (Lake Charlevoix) is not yet open.” This at the end of April, when connections with our neighboring inland lakeside communities were accomplished almost entirely by water?
Sentinel editor Willard A. Smith was pleased to announce the imminent arrival of a new “jobbing” press that would greatly expand what he would be able to accomplish beyond the printing of the Sentinel. “Jobbing.—Again we call attention to the fact that we are ready to receive orders for all kinds of job work. (This meant individual, customized orders for a great many printing applications, much as Village Graphics does today.) By first propeller (steam driven boat) we shall receive a new first-class ‘Globe’ job press, new type and material, inks of all colors, and paper and cardboard of all qualities. This involves great expense, and we hope to receive the patronage which the enterprise merits.” Charlevoix continued to progress, with Willard in the vanguard.
Two recent Looking Backs reported how our intrepid Mr. Smith had come to verbal blows with the Cheboygan newspaper’s editor who had, without permission, nonchalantly lifted some of the Sentinel’s items as column filler for his own paper. This issue, apparently, was not going to go away anytime soon. Willard was not averse to using sharp, even insulting, language to get his point across. The Cheboygan editor responded in kind. Here is Willard’s latest response:
“Finis.—The so-called editor of the Cheboygan Independent continues to devote a half-column (half a column??) to vituperous abuse of our humble self. Verily, he possesses the cheek of a Dick Turpin, though not half the honesty. (Dick Turpin was a murderous English highwayman who was executed in 1739 for horse thievery, and whose name became legendary, a romanticized byword for dashing if unscrupulous knaves and rascals.) The readers of both papers have long since judged of the right or wrong in the case, and we shall have nothing more to say about it. Our former feeling of indignation has given place to contempt for the pilfering fool. He infers that we are beaten in the argument. Check again!
“We class him with the clothes-line thief who lately, upon being discovered at his nefarious work, threw sand in the eyes of his discoverer, to avoid detection and make good his escape. He says that our language is that of a blackguard! More cheek! When we parley with thieves we use language more emphatic, and comprehensive to their narrow intellects. Now, you puerile, illiterate, soft-pated thing, dry up!” Oy vey.
Fifty years later, the April 18, 1923 Charlevoix Courier reported on the final additions to the Belvedere Club’s hotel and grounds. A scandal-plagued boys home, originally constructed as a luxury resort hotel near Boyne City that never panned out, had been vacated. A Charlevoix man got the contract for razing, and sent his son and other local fellows down to do the job. They brought sections of the building back to reconfigure it into the club’s social center, the still functioning and classy Belvedere casino, the green lakeside building at the corner of Belvedere and Ferry avenues, 100 years old this year. Also, a solarium, or sun parlor, and adjacent veranda were added to the hotel, at the same corner, commanding a magnificent view down the expanse of Lake Charlevoix. They lasted until the badly aged hotel was taken down in December of 1960.
“Many other new improvements have just been made, the most important of which is the addition of some thirty new bathrooms. Almost every room or suite now has a private bath—a very unusual accommodation for a summer hotel. The few remaining rooms without baths have practically all been equipped with hot and cold running water.” The Belvedere Hotel, with its 80-plus rooms, was only a third as large as the 250-room The Inn hotel at the east end of Dixon Avenue at Mercer Boulevard, but its name and repuation was as easily recognized across America from coast to coast, and abroad.
Fifty years ago, on April 18, 1973, Charlevoix Courier editor Bob Clock reported his and his wife Judy’s experience at the Weathervane Inn. Out of the blue, they had been invited to a promotional dinner hawking a new residential development in Arizona called Prescott Valley, to be built about 90 miles north of Phoenix, platted for about 10,000 homesites. Little more than half a dozen couples attended the freebie. Some had already signed up and gone west to investigate their new investment. After commenting on the smooth sales pitch he and Judy heard, the usual encomiums to the place as a new heaven on earth, Bob, an adopted son who had come to love Charlevoix more than anyplace else, concluded his experience in two simple sentences that said it all:
“What’s more, I couldn’t move to Arizona unless the Coast Guard would let me take the fog horn with me. How would I go to sleep at night without it?” Bob was referring to old Ferdinand, named after the popular Disney cartoon bull, whose bellowing BAAAA—booom could once be heard all over town, easily carried by the sometimes pea soup fogs that used to plague Charlevoix.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: War of the words
