On February 23, 1802, adoption of fire regulations marked the beginnings of the City Of Detroit Fire Department.
Sources:
On February 23, 1870, what was then known as State Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) opened its doors to 10 female students. These women, ranging in age from 16 to 23 – studied subjects including chemistry, botany, horticulture, floriculture, trigonometry, surveying, and entomology. No special courses for women were offered at that time, so they took the same classes as men and participated in the daily fieldwork alongside male students.
Source : Michigan State University Diversity and Inclusion Page
A few weeks earlier, according to Michigan History, Elizabeth Stockwell from Kalamazoo was the first female to attend the University of Michigan on February 2, 1870.
Source : Michigan History
The Village of St. Ignace in Mackinac County was incorporated. The village is Michigan’s second-oldest continuous settlement and remains the county seat of Makinac County until this day.
Source : Michigan Historical Calendar, courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.
For more information, see History of St. Ignace : St. Ignace was among the largest settlements in New France for the last decade of the 15th century until the establishment of Detroit in 1701.
No matter which party you support, former Governor G. Mennen “Soapy’’ Williams demonstrates how a single leader can change a state and its culture rapidly. He served six terms as Governor of Michigan from 1949 to 1960, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1961 to 1966, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines from 1968 to 1970, and as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court (Chief Justice from 1983 to 1986). He died on February 2, 1988 at age 76.
Heir to the Mennen shaving lotions fortune (hence the nickname), Williams started off as a lawyer, earned 10 battle stars during World War II, and then joined the civil service force at the Office of Price Administration and later the Liquor Control Commission. He ran for governor as a Democrat in 1948 — against the will of his mother, who refused to donate any of the family fortune to a Democratic candidate. In office, he helped push the decades-in the-making Mackinac Bridge to completion and started the annual bridge walk tradition.
After the governorship, he served as a foreign diplomat for Presidents Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court in 1970 and remained on the bench until 1986, serving as chief justice his last four years.
Sources:
Michigan Supreme Court Historical Society, National Governors Association, Detroit Historical Society, DTMB
Detroit Historical Society Facebook Page
Joseph Serwach, Soapy at 100, Dome, February 20, 2011.
Justin A. Hinkley, “Murray who? Meet state office buildings’ namesakes”, Lansing State Journal, October 27, 2015.
For more information, see Soapy: A Biography of G. Mennen Williams by Thomas J. Noer (University of Michigan Press) – With a stunning 1948 upset that reflected his unrivaled campaigning skills, G. Mennen Williams became Michigan’s 41st governor, only the second Democrat to win since the Civil War. This book charts the highs and lows of the governor’s life and distinguished political career, including the construction of the Mackinac Bridge, leading the state to financial bankruptcy, 1960 presidential aspirations, his unabashed liberalism, his time as the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and the origins of both his nickname and trademark bow tie. The MSU community and other subscribers can access the book online via Ebrary or EBSCO.
It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of World War II: six faceless figures straining together to plant the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi, high above the volcanic killing grounds of Iwo Jima.
The powerful image, taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal in the early afternoon of Feb. 23, 1945, was instantly recognized as an artistic masterpiece and widely disseminated as a symbol of American resolve and triumph. The composition was so perfect that some insisted the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo was staged.
It wasn’t. The bloody reality is that three of the flag raisers — Sgt. Michael Strank, Pfc. Franklin Sousley, and Cpl. Harlon Block — later died during the five-week campaign to seize the Japanese-held island. Sgt. Bill Genaust, the cameraman who filmed the flag raising — more proof of its authenticity — also was killed.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, preparing to once again ask a weary nation to sacrifice part of their paychecks to help finance the war, recognized the photo’s potential public relations value. The survivors — officially determined to be PFC Ira Hayes, Cpl. Rene Gagnon, and Navy corpsman John Bradley — were whisked off the island and sent home to headline the 7th War Loan drive. The 58-city bond tour included a two-day stop in Detroit in May 1945. One thousand schoolchildren greeted the heroes at Michigan Central Station.
But over the last few years, comprehensive investigations by historians and the commandant of the Marine Corps have revealed that two of the feted flag raisers, Bradley and Gagnon, were erroneously identified as being in Rosenthal’s photo. Bradley’s removal from the famous tableaux was particularly surprising. He’d been the subject of a bestselling book, “Flags of Our Fathers,” later turned into a critically acclaimed film by Clint Eastwood.
As a result of the findings, a local Marine regained his place in history: Pfc. Harold Schultz, of Detroit, a quiet, amiable individual who would have been embarrassed by the attention the revelation brought.
“He never sought fame or glory,” his stepdaughter, Dezreen MacDowell, said recently.
Schultz on Iwo Jima
Schultz was born Jan. 28, 1925, and grew up at 235 Boyd St.in the Springwells-Fort Street neighborhood. His father worked in the foundry at Ford Motor Co.’s Rouge plant while his mother was a machine operator at a screw products plant. His older sister and only sibling, Emma, worked the counter at a candy store.
Schultz attended Southwestern High School. He was 18 when he enlisted in late 1943. According to his draft registration card, he was 5-foot-6, 150 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair and a ruddy complexion.
Schultz was a member of the 5th Marine Division. On Iwo Jima, he had just been assigned to a mortar squad when he helped a cluster of Marines hoist a makeshift flagpole at the top of Mount Suribachi.
Attached to the 20-foot section of pipe was a 96-by-56-inch flag, which fluttered dramatically as Rosenthal hastily swung his Speed Graphic camera around and, without using his viewfinder, snapped the scene. It was all over in the blink of an eye.
Two weeks later, Schultz suffered shrapnel wounds on his left hand and stomach. He was discharged as a corporal in October 1945.
There actually were two flag raisings on Suribachi, spaced roughly two hours apart. Rosenthal had captured the second raising, in which a larger flag replaced the original. There was considerable confusion, as many Marines weren’t sure which flag-raising they had witnessed or participated in.
‘I was a Marine’
The lack of facial features in Rosenthal’s photo, and his failure at the time to get the participants’ names, hindered positive identification. Block, for example, was originally misidentified as Sgt. Henry Hansen, who had raised the first flag and later was killed on Iwo. That error wasn’t corrected until 1947.
Ivory, a native Detroiter who served with the Marines in Vietnam, has long been active in veterans affairs. From his Maryland home, where he’s working on a book about the battle, he shared the few biographical scraps he has been able to collect about the enigmatic Schultz.
“Schultz settled in Los Angeles after the war,” he says. “He’d met a girl from Glendale named Mary, who he corresponded with while overseas. But she died young of a brain tumor.”
Schultz found a job with the post office. Despite the warm, sunny clime, he routinely wore a flannel shirt.
“It’s like he never left Detroit,” Ivory said.
But he had left, and aside from a brief period following his discharge, he evidently never returned. Over the years, the infrequent phone calls to family in Detroit “would start off cordial, then grow angry and end abruptly,” Ivory said.
Clues included a broken helmet strap
Ivory speculates Schultz may have suffered some undiagnosed psychological damage. On Iwo, one of his best friends had been “blown to bits just a few feet away.” After the trauma of combat and the death of Mary, his fiancee, Schultz was content to quietly sort mail for 35 years.
Schultz didn’t drink, smoke or swear. He never had a driver’s license. His only known vices were Glenn Miller records, Hedy Lamarr movies, and the $2 window at local racetracks. He once attended a 5th Division reunion in San Francisco, where he met Rosenthal, but made no claims to fame.
In 1989, when he was 64, Schultz married a neighbor, Rita Reyes. According to MacDowell, he only mentioned the flag-raising once, a passing remark during dinner.
“My God, Harold, you were a hero,” his stepdaughter said.
“No, not really,” he said. “I was a Marine.”
“And then he didn’t want to speak any more of it,” MacDowell recalled. “He just felt like he was doing his duty to his country.”
On May 16, 1995, Schultz was found dead in bed, the victim of a heart attack. He was 70. His grave marker at Hollywood Forever Cemetery mentions his service and Purple Heart but not his role in history.
It was only in 2016, after archival forensic experts had used the latest technology to scrutinize piles of film, documents and photos, that the Marine Corps officially corrected the error. Clues to his identity were a broken helmet strap and the way he slung his rifle.
Schultz was not the only “mystery Marine.” In 2019, another high-level investigation determined that the figure long thought to be Gagnon actually was Cpl. Harold Keller, an Iowa native who died in 1979. Like Schultz, Keller was aware that he’d been in the photo but never publicly declared the fact.
“It’s just amazing that two men could be in the most famous photo in Marine Corps history and keep it a secret their entire lives,” Ivory said. In today’s fame-at-all-costs world, “that probably says more about us than it does about them.”
Source : Richard Bak, “Free Press Flashback: How fame found a humble Detroit Marine after Iwo Jima“, Detroit Free Press, May 27, 2022.
Sister Helen Prejean, author of the best-selling book turned movie, Dead Man Walking, today came to Michigan to warn policy-makers to “look down the road” before putting the death penalty on the ballot.
“I am here to talk to you before you go down that road,” said Prejean to a packed capitol building committee room. “I want to say to Michigan, not in your state, you were the first English-speaking government to put in your constitution that you wouldn’t have the death penalty.”
Prejean was in Michigan at the behest of Sen. George McManus (R-Traverse City). McManus said he has been a long-time opponent of the death penalty.
“I don’t like to see government in the killing business,” said McManus. “It’s that blunt. It’s that simple.”
In a release, McManus pointed out that the death penalty will cost Michigan taxpayers three times more for each execution than a life sentence behind bars. Currently, the State of Texas spends $2.3 million per execution.
A 1995 California study shows that homicides increased twice as fast during the years in which California carried out executions as when there were no executions-a fact that McManus asserted proves that the death penalty does not serve as a crime deterrent.
“It doesn’t deter crime,” said McManus. “It doesn’t save money. It doesn’t heal the victim’s family. So, if it doesn’t do all those things, what good is it?”
Prejean in her remarks, asked lawmakers to consider carefully just how they would craft a death penalty that treats all classes of victims and criminals the same.
“What are going to be your criteria?” asked Prejean. “Who are you going to sentence to death?”
Prejean contended that you cannot design a death penalty that treats all life equally.
“Will it be policeman? Will it be if you kill a child … you’re going to have to define a child. Our state, Louisiana, says 12 or under. How are you going to face a mother that comes before you and says: ‘my child was killed who happened to be 13 years old. Are you going to say my child isn’t worth the death penalty because my child happens to be 13 and not 12.'”
Many states and the federal government provide for the death penalty for those convicted of killing police officers. Prejean asked lawmakers what they would say to a woman whose husband was a fire-fighter killed by a sniper while working on a burning building.
“How are you going to do this? You’re not going to do this any better than anyone else,” said Prejean. “There will always be a difference between when a nobody from Detroit gets killed … and a judge is killed. There will always be a difference if a white suburban housewife is killed or if a minority kid or a black kid is killed.”
To prove her point, Prejean pointed out that 76 death row inmates have proven their innocence-inmates that often lacked the financial resources to mount a successful defense in the court system.
One such case occurred last fall in the State of Illinois. Anthony Porter, a 16-year death row inmate was vindicated when five Northwestern University journalism students and their professor turned up evidence that proved he didn’t commit the double murder he was convicted of. The guilty party in the crime confessed and turned himself in earlier this month.
Prejean noted that often death row inmates that are proven innocent are vindicated because journalists or others investigate the actual circumstances of the crimes involved not, as death penalty advocates would argue, because the “system works.”
Source: “Anti-Death Penalty Author Brings Message to Michigan“, MIRS Capitol Capsule, Tues., Feb. 23, 1999
Olivet College, Michigan’s first coeducational college and the first college to admit blacks, was established on this day in February 24, 1844.
The college — named for Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives — didn’t get a charter in 1845, likely because of its abolitionist views, but it ultimately received one in 1859.
The school was founded by the Rev. John J. Shipherd, a Congregational minister, who had cofounded Oberlin College in Ohio in 1833 and came to Michigan with 39 missionaries. The institution bought 40 acres for $100, and the first classes were held in a log cabin that December.
Olivet College Today
Sources :
Historical Society of Michigan and Michigan Every Day.
Zlati Meyer, “Michigan’s 1st coed college, Olivet, founded in 1844”, Detroit Free Press, February 22, 2015.
On February 24, 1928, the use of marijuana was outlawed in Detroit. Interestingly, no state or federal restrictions were on the books at that time.
In 2012 the Detroit City Government is attempting to keep a ballot proposal to legalize small amounts of marijuana for Detroit residents off the ballot.
Statewide, Marijuana advocates are collecting signatures for a ballot to legalize marijuana in Michigan.
Sonny Eliot, the legendary Detroit weatherman whose career in
television and radio spanned over 60 years was a Prisoner of War during World War II. Eliot enlisted after Pearl Harbor and became a B-24 bomber pilot assigned to the 8th Air Force, 577th Squadron, based in Norwich, England. On February 24, 1943 Eliot’s B-24 was shot down during a bombing raid of Berlin. Landing in a field Eliot was quickly captured and was ultimately interred at Stalagluft 1, in Barth, Germany, where he was for the remainder of the war.
Source : Michigan Heroes Museum, Frankenmuth, MI
Automotive designer Roy Brown Jr., who died on Feb. 24 at age 96 in Ann Arbor, Mich., had a long and mostly successful career for Ford, but he’s best remembered for one spectacular miscalculation. The Ford Edsel, which lasted just three model years — 1958, 1959 and 1960 — was a moderately priced status car, aimed at upwardly mobile young families who weren’t yet ready for a Lincoln Continental. Instead, it became one of the most infamous automotive flops ever, earning a spot on Time magazine’s list of the “50 Worst Cars of All Time”.
Here are 10 facts about Brown and his ill-starred creation:
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- The Edsel cost $250 million to develop, the equivalent of slightly more than $2 billion in today’s dollars.
- Ford set out to develop what public-relations executive C. Gayle Warnock described as “some kind of a dream car – like nothing they’d ever seen.” To that end, the designers included numerous distinctive features that set it apart from other late-1950s American cars. The most obvious was the unorthodox vertical oval front grille, inspired by European limousines, but the car also incorporated technological advances such as a push-button transmission control on the steering wheel and a “unique warning light system” that would alert drivers when they were low on oil or gasoline.
- When the car was under development, an advertising agency came up with a list of 18,000 possible names, but the company also turned to poet Marianne Moore. According to Bill Bryson’s book Made in America, Moore’s suggestions included Mongoose Civique, Utopian Turtletop, Resilient Bullet and Pluma Piluma. Eventually a Ford executive, Ernest Breech, decided to name the car after Henry Ford’s late son, Edsel. That dismayed the researchers, who had tested that name already and found that 40 percent of consumers responded with “What?” when they heard it. “It fails somewhat of the resonance, gaiety and zest we are seeking,” another Ford executive admitted at the time, according to historian David Lanier Lewis.
- To promote the car, Ford sponsored an October 1957 TV special, The Edsel Show, which starred Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, the Four Preps and Rosemary Clooney. It attracted 50 million viewers.
- After the Edsel sold poorly in its first three months of release, in December 1957 Ford offered eight-inch plastic souvenir models of the Edsel if they would stop by the dealership for a test drive.
- Brown also supervised the design work on the 1955 Ford Futura concept car, which later was acquired and transformed by George Barris into the Batmobile. Brown later designed British Ford’s successful Cortina.
- Five of the Edsel’s seven model names later were repurposed for other cars, including two built by competitors: the Chevrolet Citation and the AMC Pacer.
- Philosophy professor (and later U.S. Senator) S.I. Hayakawa wrote a 1958 essay (quoted here) in which he denounced the Edsel, criticizing what he called Ford’s “efforts to turn out a car that would satisfy customers’ sexual fantasies and the like.”
- In a 1985 interview with the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Brown attributed the Edsel’s failure not to his design, but to Ford’s mistake in trying to enter a market segment that already had too many competitors. The similarly priced DeSoto, he noted, was discontinued in 1958, the year after the Edsel’s debut.
- For years, Brown continued to drive an Edsel convertible when he was in Michigan. He recalled in the Sun-Sentinel interview that people often stopped him in the Edsel and offered to buy it. To which the Edsel’s chief designer said that he usually replied, “Where the hell were you in 1958?”
Source : Patrick Kiger , “Roy Brown Jr.: He Was ‘Mr. Edsel’”, AARP Blog, March 6, 2013.