On October 14, 1984, the Detroit Tigers took Game 5 of the World Series against the San Diego Padres to win the franchise’s fourth championship. Kirk Gibson hit two home runs in the clincher, and Sparky Anderson became the first manager to win a World Series in both the National League and American League.
Source : Detroit Historical Society.
Yes, we set a brand new World Record for the Most Rosie the Riveters here in Ypsilanti, Michigan on October 14, 2017… with 3,755 people dressed as Rosie the Riveter in attendance, including 57 original World War II Rosies!
The reason we gathered in Michigan to set a new record was to support the Yankee Air Museum’s effort to save, preserve, and renovate Rosie’s historic World War II-era factory: the Willow Run Bomber Plant! Once renovated, the Bomber Plant will become the Museum’s new home. But we still need your donations to make it happen!
The Willow Run Bomber Plant near Ypsilanti, Michigan was built in 1941, and produced over 8,600 B-24 Liberator bombers during WWII. It was the largest factory under one roof in the world at 3 million square feet in size, with two half-mile-long assembly lines. Willow Run employed 42,000 workers… and one third of them were women who were paid the same as the men! Willow Run was where Rose Will Monroe, the “original Rosie the Riveter” of WWII-era movie newsreel fame, worked. She was filmed by the government under the direction of A-list actor and producer Walter Pidgeon, and her face and name were familiar to WWII-era movie-goers as a personification of the popular “Rosie the Riveter” wartime propaganda character.
Rosie the Riveter, both then and now, represents ALL female wartime workers who stepped up to fill the many roles left behind by men who went to fight overseas. These women riveted, welded, kept the railroads running, conducted street cars, typed and filed, sewed parachutes, and even played pro baseball!
In a related story, Michigan could have an official state airplane under SB 0326 passed this week (2015) — one that lives on in history as a famous World War II airplane produced by women who served as the inspiration for Rosie the Riveter.
The B-24 Liberator was the most produced U.S. wartime aircraft and was used in each of the major theaters of World War II by each branch of U.S. armed forces as well as several Allied forces. Although the United States stopped using the planes shortly after the war ended, the model remains a famous and highly prominent feature in the country’s wartime history.
Around 40,000 employees built more than 8,600 of the planes in Michigan at the Willow Run Bomber Plant in Ypsilanti. The plant, operated by Ford Motor Company, is also famous for hiring many women to work in the factories and inspiring the “Rosie the Riveter” imagery — the official Rosie the Riveter, Rose Will Monroe, worked at the plant.
The legislative effort to honor the B-24 Liberator was headed by Sens. Rebekah Warren (D-Ann Arbor) and Patrick Colbeck (R-Canton), who joked on the Senate floor this week that it’s one of the few times they’ve strongly agreed on an issue.
At the height of production during the war, Warren said a B-24 Liberator came off the assembly line every 55 minutes — by comparison, the two other U.S. plants were putting out one per day.
Warren said naming the B-24 Liberator the state airplane would help remind people of Michigan’s history as a manufacturing powerhouse, as well as honor the men and women who served the United States not only by flying the planes, but by churning them out.
“While many of our men were fighting in Europe, Italy, and Asia, the women picked up where they left off in the factories making sure they were full of workers building these bombers to help us win the war effort,” Warren said. “We are trying to make a statement about the importance of our history. We are trying to remind people about Michigan’s manufacturing might.”
Colbeck said formally preserving the legacy of the B-24 in Michigan at the state level would honor the World War II veterans and those who crafted the planes to contribute to the war effort.
“This is a prime example of how in Detroit we are known as the automotive manufacturing capital of the world, but back during World War II, we were known as the Arsenal of Democracy,” Colbeck said. “There’s no better emblem of that Arsenal of Democracy, that can-do spirit, and that manufacturing know-how here in Michigan, than the B-24.”
The Senate voted out the bill, SB 0326, unanimously.
Sources:
Kathleen Lavey, “Wanted: 1,500 Rosies for record-setting riveter pic”, Detroit Free Press, October 17, 2015.
“Michigan-Made WWII Bomber Plane Honored In Senate Bill”, Inside MIRS Today, October 23, 2015.
Dominic Valente, “Rosie the Riveters break world record at Willow Run Airport”, The Ann Arbor News, October 24, 2015.
“Michigan smashes world record for Rosie the Riveter gathering“, MLive, October 14, 2017.
Hasan Dudar, “Thousands of Rosies turn ‘We can do it!’ to ‘We did it!'”, Detroit Free Press, October 14, 2017.
Flora Temple was foaled in 1845 it Utica, New York from the sire Loomis Bogus and a dam named Madame Temple. By 1861 she had become a racing icon, the “Queen of the Turf” and was the second mare, after Lady Suffolk, to trot the mile in under 2:30. Flora equaled or lowered the record six times, continually beating her own best times. Flora Temple is the “Bob Tail Nag” referred to in the famous song “Camptown Races” by Stephen Foster, so popular that ships were named after her. After her death in 1877, she was inducted into the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 1955 as an “Immortal” because she won 92 races in her career. This image depicts Flora Temple at her last home, Erdenheim Stud Farm, owned by Aristides and Geroge Welch.
On October 15, 1859, the horse “Flora Temple,” racing at the National Racing Park in Kalamazoo, broke the existing world’s record for trotters, running the mile in two minutes, nineteen and three-quarters seconds, and attracting the attention of Currier and Ives who made an engraving of the race. This was not the first time she broke the record, but the sixth, and she would go on to earn 92 records.
Sources :
Flora Temple Entry, National Museum of American History
The Burt Lake Burn-Out was a forced relocation of the Burt Lake Band of Chippewa and Ottawa Indians in northern Michigan’s “Tip of the Mitt” region on 15 October 1900. On that day a sheriff and his deputies burned down the band’s village at the behest of a local land developer who claimed to have purchased the village land parcels for back taxes. The event has been since labeled: “A Bitter Memory,” “A Shameful Past,” or “Legalized Arson.”
Professional research by Dr. Richard White, Stanford University, Dr. George Cornell, Michigan State University, and Dr. Alice Littlefied, Central Michigan University, has shown that it was all of these things and was allowed to happen as a result of the state and federal government officials’ inclination to either misinterpret, forget, or deny the written treaty language of the 1830s and 1850s, in the agreements between Washington, D.C and the Michigan based Burt Lake Band of Ottawa Indians.
Sources :
Burt Lake Burn Out wikipedia entry.
Patrick Sullivan, “Burnout”, Northern Express, March 23rd, 2015.
Eric Hemenway, “The Burt Lake Burn-Out”, Michigan History, January/February 2016.
Photos from Leelenau Historical Society
Great Lakes boat captains have always had a reputation for being a little salty. Maybe it’s the rough seas or long hours at the helm.
But not many skippers can say they’ve also been their island’s midwife, its postmaster, and later a cook and baker catering to millionaires aboard a Lake Michigan car ferry.
So in honor of Mother’s Day – and the upcoming sailing season – we’re tipping our caps to the memory of Florence Haas, the first licensed woman captain to pilot a passenger boat on the Great Lakes. Stories of her prowess on the water still linger in Northern Michigan’s Leelanau area and offshore on South Manitou Island, where her namesake Florence Lake continues to draw visitors.
Vignettes that detail her life show she had a steady hand with her boat, a steely nerve when it came to reading a storm – and more than her share of salty sass.
Case in point: A newspaper article hailing Haas’ accomplishments describes the time she had to calm a panicked lumberman when her boat was caught in a sudden squall on Lake Michigan. She was running him between South Manitou and the old resort town of Glen Haven on the mainland – the area now part of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
Half-way into the 10-mile trip, “he became greatly alarmed and offered her $500 to turn back,” according to an article in the Grand Rapids Evening Press. “With a flash in her blue eyes, she turned upon him and said: ‘You keep still and I’ll land you on the other side for 50 cents, which is the regular fare.’ ”
The Reliance, Florence and Joseph Haas’ mail boat. Photo courtesy of the Leelanau Historical Society Museum.
ISLAND GIRL TO TEENAGE BRIDE
Haas’ love for being on the water likely ran in her DNA, according to numerous newspaper clippings and family remembrances shared with us by the Leelanau Historical Society & Museum.
Her father, Isaac Raymo, had a resume that included deep sea diver, lumberjack and boat captain by the time he and his wife, Isabelle, moved their family from Wisconsin to South Manitou Island in the 1870s. Florence was the second-oldest girl in a family of 11 children.
By 16, she’d gone to Manistee to elope with Joseph Haas. Why the quickie wedding? It seems the headstrong Florence was a lot like her future mother-in-law.
“Maria Hoffman Haas, the mother-in-law to be, a woman of strong opinions, disliked young Florence Raymo, a woman of equally strong opinions,” Florence Haas’ great-grandson, Don Roy, wrote in an essay about her adventures.
The young couple returned to the island, where they ran a small farm on the west end by the lighthouse. They raised three children on an income from farming, fishing, then later running a mail boat and passengers several times a week between the island and the mainland.
They made the 20-mile round trip by sailboat, the Reliance, then later switched to a gas-powered engine. They also sailed often to Green Bay, sometimes sailing through the night at 12 mph with Florence Haas at the helm while her husband and son slept on the boat, according to newspaper accounts.
Haas’ sailing abilities and her gender began making headlines. Some described her as the “fair skipper,” and others announced “Woman captain is pride of officers.” They talked about her making “perilous trips,” while emphasizing her ladylike appearance, as if the two should be at odds.
According to one article with a Holland dateline:
“There is not a better sailor on the lakes than the captain of the Reliance,” said Lieutenant Ballinger of Chicago at Macatawa Park the other day. Mr Ballinger is government inspector of the lifesaving stations in this district and his remark was made while in conversation with Captain Morton of Grand Haven, superintendent of life saving stations in the district, who echoed the statement. The captain of the Reliance is a woman, and it was to this everyday modest, womanly woman, whose home is on the bounding waters, that these men, whose positions gave them the ability to judge, paid so high a tribute.”
SAILING SOLO, PUTTING HENRY FORD IN HIS PLACE
In 1912, Haas found herself widowed and carrying on with the mail route alone. Joseph Haas drowned in Lake Michigan that year. According to accounts, he was moving a case of beer from his boat when he lost his footing and fell, hitting his head and landing in the water. Rescuers tried to help him and reported seeing air bubbles in the water, but could not reach him in time.
Relatives’ accounts say Haas continued her captain’s duties for another five years before going to work on boats and car ferries that carried passengers on the Great Lakes. She was a cook and baker aboard these ships, which led her to rub elbows with some famous passengers.
A grandson, Theron Haas, wrote this remembrance of his grandmother’s encounter with industrialist and Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford:
“Mr. Ford was trying to get the Railroad Company to make a connection at Escanaba. As the Company already had 4 ports of call on that side of the lake and with only 4 boats they felt they already had a full plate. Anyway, getting to Escanaba in the winter was harder then Menominee, which was bad enough. Mr. Ford came to Frankfort one day and arranged for the carferry No.4 to take him and his entourage to Escanaba. Grandma was first cook and my mother was cabin maid.
>The boat left Frankfort in the morning. Mr. Ford came back to the galley where he engaged my grandmother in conversation. There was a large passage way between the galley range and the pantry. It was like a doorway and Henry stood in this, leaning against one side and his arm across the top to the other door jam. There was plenty of room for Florence to pass by him and under his arm. She was preparing dinner and, among other things, she was preparing pies for the oven.
According to my mother, he tried every which way to get one of those pies. Even offered her $5.00 for one. She told him there was just enough to go around and he would get his share at meal time. I guess she just couldn’t be bribed. Can you imagine telling someone like Henry Ford he couldn’t have something he wanted, in that day and age? He went ashore in Escanaba and had a meeting with the city fathers. The whole trip must have been a big disappointment for him. He didn’t get all the pie he wanted and the carferry’s never stopped at Escanaba.”
Haas’s no-nonsense integrity didn’t always win her friends.
She was irked when a cost-cutting carferry official told her to stop baking fresh bread in the galley kitchen and start serving the day-old loafs he had delivered from a mainland bakery. She got even more ticked when she noticed gallons of red paint that had been delivered to the ferry ended up coating the barns at this same official’s farm, all painted by ferry workers.
To make her point, she had the porters throw a shipment of day-old moldy bread overboard, then went to the manager’s office to underscore her knowledge of his deception.
“She went over to the office and told the Superintendent what she had done. He flew into a rage! He didn’t stay raged very long. She got out her ‘little black book’ and recited the incident with the red paint. He folded. She got her lard, flour and yeast,” her grandson wrote.
REMEMBERING HER ISLAND
Haas moved away from her beloved Great Lakes for her retirement. She invested in Texas real estate and lived her final years in Galveston. She made her last trip to Michigan to visit relatives in 1942, a year before her death.
She’d made arrangements to be buried in Green Bay, next to family, because by that time, South Manitou was considered to be too remote for a resting place, her relatives said.
In the decades that followed, her grandchildren said they found letters and other mementos detailing Haas’ remarkable career on the Great Lakes. Some contained a glimpse into her island days, and how she’d carved a life of “firsts” from her corner of the world.
From her great-grandson Don Roy’s essay:
“She often spoke of the old days on the island and I always listened. She gave me a five-generation picture of our family. She was always proud of her heritage. From her English mother she traced her origins to colonial times. Her father was French. I sometimes wonder if her French-English background did not often set her apart from the other German settlers on South Manitou Island.”
>Most of all, her grandchildren remember her as seeming full of hope. She had a certainty that things would always get better.
“They do not make her kind any more. The mold must have been lost!”
Florence Haas, circa 1920, standing with Archie Roy, who married her granddaughter.
Source : Tanda Gmiter, “Great Lakes’ first woman boat captain remembered for steely nerve, sass”, MLive, January 30, 2019.
One of Michigan’s most tragic stories happened in the town of Metz, somewhat west of Millersburg and 15 miles south of Rogers City.
On the morning of October 15, 1908, a fire swept 35 miles all the way to Lake Huron; in doing so, it wiped out the town of Metz killing 37 people and leaving 700 residents homeless.
A tad south of Metz was the Detroit & Mackinac Railroad, whose administrators sent a special train to Metz in order to save some townspeople. 40 residents, mostly made up of mothers with their children, got on board with some possessions. By the time the train was ready to leave, the town was engulfed in flames and the train tracks led right through an intense blaze…so intense, it melted & warped the rails which derailed the train. Some of the passengers jumped off the rail car and were able to escape, but about a dozen people were burned to death in the gondola….9 of them children, as their ash & bone remains revealed.
Source : John Robinson, “Michigan History: The Metz Fire, 1908“, 99.1 WFMK Blog, January 4, 2019.
On Oct. 15, 1910, Stanley Ketchel’s brilliant and flamboyant life was snuffed out on a farm near Conway, Mo.
His legend was not.
In 2001, when HBO televised a Floyd Mayweather championship fight from Van Andel Arena for the first time, the first place the star-studded announcing crew wanted to visit was Ketchel’s final resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery on Walker Avenue NW.
In 2000, days before Mike Tyson fought his only professional bout in Michigan, he was asked if he had any personal plans while in Detroit. He said his only plan was to visit Grand Rapids and pay respects to Ketchel.
Ketchel crammed a lot of life into 24 years. Historians remember him as one of the finest middleweight champions ever, a pure fighter with few boxing skills who won by the urgency of his fury and weight of his fists, and as a man with enough gall to challenge the great heavyweight champion of that era, Jack Johnson — and perhaps even double-cross him.
“Stanley Ketchel was one of the all-time greats,” said historian and author Bert Randolph Sugar. “At the turn of the last century, he was probably the equal of every fighter of that era, except Jack Johnson, and probably the equal of all athletes in popularity, except for (baseball players) Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner.
“That’s how big he was,” Sugar said.
The Ketchel legend does.
In 1954, Ketchel was part of the original class inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He also is in the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.
The Ring magazine ranks Ketchel as the eighth-best middleweight in history, behind some of the greatest fighters ever, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Carlos Monzon and Marvelous Marvin Hagler.
In a recent book, Bert Randoph Sugar ranks Ketchel even higher, placing him 20th all-time among all fighters, regardless of weight division.
“He was basically an animal in the ring, and with his teeth bared, and his eyes a little cockeyed, he came at you and kept coming at you,” Sugar said. “For whatever reason, in the ring, he was the quintessential killer. He just kept coming. He was one of those throwback, Neanderthal-type fighters who would throw a punch and be halfway back to the dressing room before his opponent hit the canvas, because he was so confident in his power.”
Honor at home
In his hometown, the legend is fading.
The only tangible memorial to Ketchel here is a historical marker near the intersection of Bridge Street and Stocking Avenue. However, more recently a Grand Rapids Community Legends status has been erected.
For the complete story, including details about the murder, see David Mayo, “Profile: Boxing great Stanley Ketchel“, MLive, October 10, 2010.
According to the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Agricultural College (M.A.C) professors used a train to take an agricultural road show to the Upper Peninsula, including exhibits on various agricultural products, techniques, etc. in various cars and providing 2 to 5 hour lectures at each stop.
Source: “TEACHING U. P. FARMERS: M. A. C. Professors Are Making Tour With Special Train”, Detroit Free Press, October 15, 1912, via ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Detroit Free Press (1831-1922), October 15, 1912. Access restricted to the MSU community and other subscribers.
On October 15, 1913, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell during the administration of President Richard Nixon, was born in Detroit. Because of his role in the Watergate conspiracy, break-in, and attempted cover-up, Mitchell became the first U.S. Attorney General in history to serve a prison sentence.
Source: Mich- Again’s Day
The first four-way traffic signal tower in the world was located at the Woodward and Michigan Avenue intersection in October, 1920. The tower was manually operated and had 12 lamps, three in each direction. In December, 1920, signals were added along Woodward Avenue at Grand River, State, Fort and Congress, but all were controlled from the manual tower at Woodward and Michigan.
William L. Potts, a Detroit police inspector, is universally accepted as the originator of the first four-way traffic signal.
Note: The Red Tape Editor arbitrarily designated the 15th since the article only says October 1920.
For more information, see Sheldon Moyer, Mr. Trafficlight, Motor News, March 1947, pp.14-15, 27.