In 1822, Colonel Brady and five companies of the 2nd Infantry established Fort Brady on the site of the French stockade Fort Repentigny (1751), along the St. Mary’s River at Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan Territory, near Lake Superior. The outpost became an important defense structure in the upper Michigan frontier. In 1857, most of the soldiers at Fort Brady were withdrawn and transferred to Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Brady rose in rank to brigadier general later that same year, after ten years service. Brady had command of the garrison at Detroit by 1828.
He participated in the Black Hawk War. Five years later, in 1837, Brady was given command of Military Department No. 7, headquartered in Detroit. He remained in the position for seven years, during which time he was in command over the removal of several Native American tribes as well as an incident known as the “Patriot War”. When the U.S.-Mexican War broke out, Brady was too old to join the troops in the field but he assisted by helping to raise troops and equipment and shipping it to the war zone. In 1848, three years before his death, Brady was promoted to the rank of major general.
One of the founders of the U.S. Army and the Detroit Brady Guards, Brady died at the age of 86 following a carriage accident. When his pastor told him he was near death, he responded: “Mr. Duffield, let the drum beat; my knapsack is slung; I am ready to die.”
Source : Hugh Brady wikipedia entry
My Knapsack Is Slung: The Detroit Light Guard (1225 Corps Support Battalion in Iraq (2004-2005) / Hrad Kuzyk
On April 15, 1859, former Gov. Luren D. Dickinson was born in New York. Dickinson moved to Michigan as a teenager and settled in Charlotte. There, he was a teacher, farmer and school principal. Dickinson was elected to the Michigan House in 1886. He also served in the Senate. Dickinson was elected lieutenant governor in 1914, serving six terms before being elected to that office again in 1938. With the death of Gov. Frank Fitzgerald on March 16, 1939, Dickinson became Michigan’s oldest governor and the only lieutenant governor to succeed an incumbent who died in office.
Michigan’s thirty-seventh governor, Luren D. Dickinson (1859 ~ 1943), prided himself of being a frugal farmer. As a young man he taught school and served as principal of Potterville High School before becoming superintendent at age 21. He later served as assessor, township clerk, township supervisor, state representative, state senator, and seven terms as lieutenant governor. In 1939 he became governor, at age 79, upon the death of Governor Frank Fitzgerald. In 1940 he appointed the state’s first woman lieutenant governor, Matilda Dodge Wilson. A devoutly religious man, Dickenson claimed he had “a pipeline to God,” ardently opposed liquor, and waged war on “sin and high life practices.” He lost his election bid in 1940.
Source : Michigan History magazine and Luren D. Dickinson.
On April 15th, 1861, then President Lincoln put out a call for military volunteers from the states due to the outbreak of the Civil War. Michigan Officials discerned that they did not have the $100,000 dollars to properly organize and equip the 1st regiment formulated in Michigan. The city of Detroit stepped up and loaned the state 50% of the money needed for Michigan to supply troops for the Union.
“Old Slow Town” Detroit During the Civil War by Paul Taylor. A new historical publication for 2013
The Detroit Tigers’ famed “Blizzard Game” was held on April 15, 1911, when the snowfall was so thick that batters were making base hits on account of the ball getting lost in the snow. According to the website Stuff Nobody Cares About, the game was finally called when players could no longer see the pitcher as they stepped up to the plate. Look closely; the flying snow is visible in this shot from our Photo Friday archives. Find the full story here: http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/…/baseball-in-a-blizzard-…/
At the suggestion of the crew, the newlyweds Helen and Dickinson Bishop (Helen was pregnant) were put in the first lifeboat to be lowered into the water from the Titanic. Their lifeboat had 28 people, although it could carry twice that number. While “the officers implored people to get aboard,” Dickinson Bishop said, many thought the lifeboats were more dangerous than the ship. Millionaire John Jacob Astor and his wife for example declined a spot on the first lifeboat. By the time they realized the boat was really sinking, only Mrs. Astor was allowed on a lifeboat.
The Bishops were among the 706 survivors; 1517 passengers and crew were not.
For the full article, see Julie Mack, “Titanic tale: Southwest Michigan newlyweds survived ship’s sinking but did not live happily ever after”, MLive, April 7, 2012.
See Dowagiac Daily News, May 10, 1912, posted in Encyclopedia Titanica.
Emily Goldsmith and Frankie Goldsmith in a photo taken in Detroit in 1913.
On the evening of April 14, 1912, in the chilly waters of the north Atlantic, the passenger ship RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and quickly sunk. Of the estimated 2,224 people on board, more than 1,500 died in the frigid waters in what was the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history.
Less than a week later, while news continued to trickle in about the Titanic sinking and loss of life, the Detroit Tigers opened their new steel-and-concrete ballpark, called Navin Field. Located in the Corktown neighborhood on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull Avenue, it was a splendid new venue for the growing city’s popular baseball team. The club featured star outfielder Ty Cobb, a one-of-a-kind performer who delighted fans with his daring style of play.
Ironically, the two stories: the tragic sinking of the British passenger liner and the debut of a new baseball park in the emerging automobile capital of Detroit, would converge in the life of a remarkable young man who survived the disaster but never fully recovered from the horror of it.
Frankie Goldsmith was nine years old when he boarded the Titanic at Southampton in England with his father, mother, a friend of his father’s and a teenage son of a friend of the family. The five members of the party were all third class passengers on the maiden voyage of what was being called the “greatest ship ever constructed” and others in the shipping industry were claiming was an unsinkable vessel.
The Goldsmith’s destination was Detroit, where they had family who previously migrated to the United States. Frankie’s father, Frank Sr., was a skilled toolmaker and he carried on the ship a suitcase of custom tools and items of the trade. The Goldsmith’s planned to stay with family until Frank Sr. secured a job or opened a tool shop of his own. The lure of the American dream had them excited for the future.
Little Frankie met and played with several children his age who were also in third class. Passengers in third class slept and ate in the third class section of the ship and only were allowed to ascend to a deck that was for third class passengers. Little Frankie enjoyed the brief periods on deck observing the north Atlantic journey, but he always remembered the chance to visit the bowels of the Titanic, where he saw the dust-covered workers stoking the great furnaces of the ship.
Just before midnight on April 14, a large iceberg emerged in the path of the Titanic. There was no avoiding it. The berg carved a sharp cut into the ship, dooming her. In less than three hours the great ship would disappear beneath the cold waters, taking more than 1,500 souls to their deaths. Among them were Frank Sr., his friend, and the young 16-year old friend of the family who traveled with them. Frankie and his mother Emily were in one of the lifeboats that had been launched in the frantic moments following the ship’s collision with the iceberg. Despite the seriousness of the situation, many passengers refused to enter a lifeboat, never believing that the ship could be sunk. The death toll was skewed toward class: most third class passengers did not survive. If you were in first class you had a much better chance.
Many women and children were loaded onto lifeboats, which is where nine-year old Frankie found himself as the tragic event unfolded. “My dad reached down and patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘So long, Frankie, I’ll see you later.’ He didn’t and he may have known he wouldn’t,” Frankie wrote later in his memoir about the incident.
As it became evident that the Titanic was going to go down, thousands of people realized they were facing their fate. With their lifeboat only about 60 percent full with two crew members handling it, Frankie and his mother were paddled away from the site of the great ship. Tragically, they could hear the frantic wailing and desperation of those in the water.
“The sound of people drowning is something I cannot describe to you and neither can anyone else,” Frankie said. “It is the most dreadful sound and then there is dreadful silence that follows it.”
Another survivor, a man named Archibald Gracie, described the scene:
“…there arose to the sky the most horrible sounds ever heard by mortal man except by those of us who survived this terrible tragedy. The agonizing cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning none of us will ever forget to our dying day. ‘Help! HELP! BOAT AHOY! BOAT AHOY!’ and ‘MY GOD! MY GOD!’ were the heart-rending cries and shrieks of men, which floated to us over the surface of the dark waters continuously for the next hour, but as time went on, growing weaker and weaker until they died out entirely.”
Eventually the screams disappeared and all that was left was a large floating debris field and the 20 lifeboats with about 700 survivors. The total capacity of the liefeboats was only 1,178, about half the number of passengers and crew of the ship.
Within a few hours, Frankie and his mother and the survivors on the other boats were rescued by the RMS Carpathia. But while he was alive, Frankie was not without fear. His mind turned to the fate of his father. Confusion about rescue efforts (some thought as many as five ships had answered the rescue call and that most passengers had been picked up) muddied the situation. An officer on the Carpathia told Frankie that his father, safe on another ship, “would probably reach New York before you do.”
But Frank Sr. was gone, a fact that young Frankie took a long time to accept. First he would spend years dealing with the horrible mental images that stayed with him from that fateful night.
Living in the shadows of Navin Field
With the patriarch of their family lost, the lives of Emily Goldsmith and Frankie Goldsmith were shattered. After a few weeks in New York recovering, the two of them were sent by train to Detroit thanks to a donation from the Salvation Army. They were greeted at the train station by their relatives. The next few years would be very difficult for Frankie.
Goldsmith felt tremendous survivors guilt, and for a long time he refused to believe that his father was dead. He clung to the idea that Frank Sr. was rescued by a passing ship and would walk through the door any day. For a long time he had a difficult time communicating to people and he suffered nightmares.
Emily and Frankie eventually settled in a small house on Trumbull Avenue, only a short distance from Navin Field. But the proximity proved to be painful. When the Tigers did something on the field to rouse the home crowd, the resulting roar terrified Frankie.
“[Navin Field] was a scary place to me for a long time,” Frankie wrote years later. “Every time I heard the collected voices of the crowd cheering I was reminded of the screams from [the people] who were in that water.”
Despite the lure of the ballpark, Frankie never attended a game at Navin Field and never took his children there. He could walk past Navin Field (later Briggs Stadium during his years in Detroit) but he wouldn’t go near it when a game was being played.
When his mother remarried and her new husband decided to move into the Corktown neighborhood, Frank Jr. fled out of the house and lived with relatives rather than stay near Navin Field.
In 1926 Frankie got married. He remained in Detroit through World War II, when he worked as a civilian photographer for the U.S. Army Air Corps. He later settled in Ohio and opened a photography shop. By the little I can find about his mid-life, Frankie eventually overcame the horror of the Titanic disaster and enjoyed raising three sons, one of whom was named Frank II.
Goldsmith died in Florida on January 27, 1982, at the age of 79. His memories of the Titanic and his thoughts about living his early life without a father were too painful to express in words, but he left behind a diary and notes that he’d written throughout his life. One of his sons published them under his name as Echoes In the Night: Memories of a Titanic Survivor in 1991. In accordance to his wishes, Frank Jr.’s ashes were scattered over the area where the Titanic had sank, reuniting him with his father.
Source: Dan Holmes, “A Titanic survivor: The boy who was terrified by Navin Field in Detroit“, Detroit Athletic Co., February 12, 2018
Brothers Peter and Jerry Cusimano — storeowner’s in Detroit’s Eastern Market — started the tradition of throwing an octupus onto the ice at Red Wing games. The fish market owners flung the premier eight-legged cephalopod across the ice at Olympia Stadium on April 15, 1952.
Why an octopus? Having eight arms, the octopus symbolized the number of playoff wins necessary for the Red Wings to win the Stanley Cup.
Since 1952, the practice has persisted with each passing year, moving from the Olympia Stadium to Joe Louis Arena and now to Little Caesars Arena. In one 1995 game, fans threw 36 octopuses, including a specimen weighing 38 pounds (17 kg).
Eventually, the Red Wings would adopt the octopus as their unofficial mascot, creating a purple octopus named Al. During playoff runs, two of these mascots are hung from the rafters of Joe Louis Arena, symbolizing the 16 wins now needed to take home the Stanley Cup.
The practice has become such an accepted part of the team’s lore, fans have developed various techniques and “octopus etiquette” for launching the creatures onto the ice.
Al Sobotka (Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports)
Al Sobotka, the head ice manager at Little Caesars Arena and one of the two Zamboni drivers, is the person who retrieves the thrown octopuses from the ice. When the Red Wings played at Joe Louis Arena, he was known to twirl an octopus above his head as he walked across the ice rink to the Zamboni entrance. On April 19, 2008, the NHL sent the Red Wings a memo that forbade this and imposed a $10,000 fine for violating the mandate. In an email to the Detroit Free Press, NHL spokesman Frank Brown justified the ban because matter flew off the octopus and got on the ice when Sobotka swung it above his head.
In an article describing the effects of the new rule, the Detroit Free Press dubbed the NHL’s prohibition as “Octopus-gate”. By the beginning of the third round of the 2008 Playoffs, the NHL loosened the ban to allow for the octopus twirling to take place at the Zamboni entrance.
Sources :
Colleen Burcar, It Happened in Michigan : Remarkable Events That Shaped History, Globe Pequot; 1st edition (January 11, 2011), p.131.
WXYZ Detroit video about the tradition of throwing octopus on the ice at Red Wing Games.
The Legend of the Octopus : A Detroit Red Wings’ Tradition
Legend of the Octopus Wikipedia Entry.
On April 15, 1977, the formal dedication the Detroit Renaissance Center, the gleaming cluster of four 39-floor office towers and a 73-story hotel, was held.
In 1996, General Motors bought the Center and announced major renovation plans — the removal of the berms at the top of the list. Other changes to what became GM World Headquarters, such as the five-story Wintergarden and a glass entry, opened the skyscraper’s face to downtown.
Has Henry Ford II’s vision for revitalization finally come to fruition at the hands of GM? Or has downtown’s recent resurgence, led largely by another business titan, Quicken CEO Dan Gilbert, benefited the complex? Whatever the answer, the newly illuminated GM RenCen has become synonymous with Detroit, a photo-op image for the country as seen from the Goodyear Blimp and an anchor for the RiverWalk and summer activities along the international border.
At any rate, the central tower, the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, is the tallest all-hotel skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, and features the largest rooftop restaurant, Coach Insignia.[9] It has been the tallest building in Michigan since it was erected in 1977.
For the full article, see Mark Kurlyandchik, “GM Renaissance Center Celebrates 35 Years”, Hour Detroit, April 2012.
For most athletes the peak of their professional careers occurs between the lines. Once they retire from the game, they recede into the background of history. But for Whizzer White, his years as a star running back in college and in the pros with the Lions served merely as prelude to his historic tenure as one of this country’s greatest legal minds.
Byron Raymond White was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, an expansive and beautiful community situated on the Cache La Poudre River north of Denver. He excelled at academics and sports as a youth. He was presented with several options upon his high school graduation: he was offered a football scholarship by five schools; a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals dangled a $5,000 signing bonus if he would become a pro baseball player; and he won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford in England. He pursued the latter option, putting off his football career for one year. He returned to the U.S. to play halfback for the University of Colorado.
His college athletic career was tremendously successful. He lettered four times for the Buffaloes football team and served as captain for two seasons. In his senior year he led the conference in rushing and paced his team to a perfect 8-0 record. He played second base for the baseball team for three years and was offered a contract by the Cardinals, Browns, and the White Sox. As point guard for the basketball team he helped the Buffs to the initial NIT tournament in 1938, advancing to the finals at Madison Square Garden.
But it was on the gridiron where White earned a reputation as a star. He was agile and elusive out of the backfield as a ball carrier. A newspaper editor gave him the nickname “Whizzer,” a moniker that followed him the rest of his life, even after he gained fame in Washington D.C.
“Whizzer” White finished second in the Heisman Trophy as a senior and was coveted by many NFL teams. Pittsburgh selected him fourth overall in the 1938 NFL Draft and as a rookie he led the league in rushing and was the highest-paid player in the league. In the off-season he attended Oxford and continued his education in pursuit of a law degree at Yale. He played the 1940 and 1941 seasons for the Lions, leading the league in rushing for a second time in ’40. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Navy.
After the war, White finished his law degrees rather than return to the NFL. There’s little doubt that “Whizzer” could have been a Hall of Famer had he been able to concentrate solely on football. But he had different interests and goals in mind.
White practiced law in Colorado for 15 years starting after WWII. He quickly established himself and his firm as the best in the state. In 1960 he led John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in the state. After JFK was elected, he appointed White as U.S. deputy attorney general. In 1962 Kennedy appointed the 44-year old White to the United States Supreme Court. He was so universally popular that he was affirmed via a simple voice vote.
“He has excelled at everything. And I know that he will excel on the highest court in the land,” Kennedy said.
Byron “Whizzer” White spent more than four decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, defying labels as a “liberal” justice by often siding with the other side or dissenting over controversial decisions. He tended to favor a less ideological court, preferring the judiciary keep their politics out of the business of justice. He retired from the bench in 1993 and died in 2002 at the age of 84. He’d come a long way from his days as a college athlete and star in the NFL. He’d lived enough for many lifetimes, and he’d served his country in uniform and in his robe on the highest court in the land.
On April 15, 2002, Supreme Court Justice Byron Raymond “Whizzer” White died.
Sources:
Dan Holmes, “Whizzer White starred for Lions, but his “second” career was more famous“, Detroit Athletic Co., April 9, 2018.
For the first time since the 1960’s, students and members of the public are now once again able to fish the Red Cedar River. During the December 2012 Board of Trustees Meeting, the Board of Trustees lifted the fishing ban. To commemorate the occasion, the DNR released into the Red Cedar River over 3,000 steelhead trout. This act of being able to fish the Red Cedar River will be in affect for three years. At the end of the three years, the Board of Trustees will decide if they will extend the fishing ordinance.
For more information on fishing in Michigan, visit http://www.michigan.gov/fishing
Red Cedar River at MSU to be stocked with steelhead to enhance fishing on campus, Michigan Newswire, April 15, 2013.