Engraving of Will Carleton by Arthur Rice, 1890.
William McKendree Carleton, The Bard of Michigan
10/21/1847, Hudson, MI – 12/18/1912, Brooklyn, NY
An actual photo.
Carleton, a farmer’s son, was an 1869 graduate of Hillsdale College and internationally-recognized poet, editor, and lecturer, described the inspiration for his most well-known poem:
“Over there to the west, in Hillsdale, there stood in the old days a county poorhouse,” he said.
“Sometimes, I used to visit the inmates there and hear their troubles.
And sometimes I used to see old people … who had out their property in the hands of their children, passing up the road on their way to the poorhouse on the other side of the hill.”1
Upon his death, Carleton became the unofficial “poet laureate.” With the Public Act 51 of 1919, the Michigan legislature required teachers to teach at least one of his poems to their students, and October 21 was officially named as Will Carleton Day in Michigan in memory of “Michigan’s pioneer poet.”2
These selections by and about Will Carleton held at the Library of Michigan:
- City Ballads. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1885.
- City Legends. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1889.
- Farm Ballads. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1874.
- Farm Legends. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1875.
- Poems: by M. Carleton Will. Chicago, IL: Lakeside Publishing & Printing Company, 1871.
- Poems for Young Americans from Will Carleton. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1906.
- Rhymes of Our Planet. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1895.
- Songs of Two Centuries. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1902.
- Young Folks’ Centennial Rhymes. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1876.
1The Collegian. Hannah Niemeier, “Will Carleton: Poet of the People” March 23, 2017.
One of the authors featured in Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Authors. Also available online
Frederick N. Bonine (October 21, 1863 – August 22, 1941) was an American sprinter and eye doctor. He held the world’s record in the 110-yard dash for 35 years from 1886 until 1921. He later became an internationally known eye doctor who saw over one million patients at his office in Niles, Michigan.
Bonine was born in Niles, Michigan in 1863, the son of a physician. Bonine attended the Niles public schools before studying at Freiburg, Germany. He then enrolled at the University of Michigan where he was a member of the football and track teams. At one time he held 10 campus track and field records. Bonine (near lane in the photo below) won the 100-yard dash at the Intercollegiate Association Championships at the Manhattan Athletic Club grounds in 1885, beating runners from Harvard and Columbia in the final and giving him claim to being U-M’s first national champion. In 1886, Bonine set a world’s record with a time of 10.8 seconds in the 110-yard dash. The record stood for 35 years until it was broken in 1921 by Charley Paddock.
After completing his medical degree at the University of Michigan and studying further in Europe, Bonine returned to his hometown of Niles, Michigan, and set up an eye clinic above the corner drugstore. Each year, tens of thousands of patients from around the world reportedly sought treatment at Bonine’s office. Bonine regularly treated as many as 517 patients in one day and regularly saw 200 patients in a day. Hundreds lined up each day, none with appointments, to see him, with each being charged the same fee of two dollars for a first visit and one dollar for subsequent visits. Special buses from Chicago to Niles ran twice a week to bring patients to see Bonine. Several restaurants, gift shops, and hotels in Niles reportedly “owed their existence to the patronage drawn to this small city by his fame.” One newspaper wrote:
“So numerous were the patients who filled his office each day, that brutally long hours were required to care for them. He never spared himself, frequently remaining until 10 o’clock or even midnight to finish. An indefatigable worker, he had the assistance of only a small office force. It was said of him that he rivalled Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas A. Edison for going without sleep. . . . A time-worn, old-fashioned suite of office in Niles was a crossroads for that vast army of unfortunates with afflicted eyesight who came from the four corners of the earth seeking the professional assistance of Dr. Fred N. Bonine.”
He was reported to have seen 1,500,000 patients in nearly 50 years of practice.
In 1912, he served as a medical advisor to the United States team at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Bonine was also a member of the Michigan State Athletic Board of Control and the Michigan Boxing Commission. He became a close friend of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey after reportedly saving Dempsey’s eyesight at the height of the boxer’s career.
He also found time to do his civic duty in Niles, serving as mayor for nine years.
Source :
Frederick N. Bonine wikipedia entry
“11,000 Pay Tribute at Dr. Bonine Rites; Stores and Factories Closed in Honor of Niles, Michigan Specialist“, New York Times, August 26, 1941.
On October 21, 1929 President and Mrs. Herbert Hoover visited the newly opened Greenfield Village in Dearborn to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of incandescent light. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford also attended the Light’s Golden Anniversary event.
Light’s Golden Anniversary, Part 1
Light’s Golden Anniversary, Part 2
Light’s Golden Anniversary, Part 3
For more information, read “World’s Tribute to Edison Voiced by Hoover; Thousands Hail President During His 30-Mile Ride”, Detroit Free Press, October 22, 1929, front page.
There’s nothing like Monday night football in downtown Detroit.
The parties. The tailgating. The excitement.
Whether at Ford Field, the Pontiac Silverdome, or Tiger Stadium, the Lions have a long history of hosting evening pigskin.
It did not all begin, however, with the long-running Monday Night Football that debuted in 1970. For years before that, the NFL played occasional Monday night games, several of them in the Motor City.
You may even be surprised to know that the Lions were the first National Football League team ever to play on Monday night.
It was October 21, 1934. The Lions were in their first year in Detroit since moving from Portsmouth, Ohio. They had played five games so far that season, and had yet to lose. In fact, they had yet to give up any points, having outscored the opposition 52-0.
The Lions originally were scheduled to welcome the Brooklyn football Dodgers the day before. But inclement weather made conditions miserable, and Lions’ owner W.J. Richards decided to postpone the contest until Monday. Rather than play during the afternoon, when everybody would be at work, Richards opted for an 8:15 PM start time. In those days, the team played at old University of Detroit Stadium, which supposedly boasted one of the better lighting systems in all of sports. Detroit won, 28-0, in front of roughly 11,000 folks, which was a typical Lions home draw for that season.
The Lions went on to win their first ten games, including the first seven by shutout. But it all proved for naught as they lost their final three, finishing in second place in the NFL’s Western Division, behind undefeated Chicago. There would be no postseason football in Detroit that first year.
For the full article, see Scott Ferkovitch, “The Lions hosted the first Monday Night Football Game in NFL history“, Michigan Athletic Company Blog, December 20, 2016.
University President Alexander Ruthven helped break up a fight between sophomores and freshman who had turned water hoses on their traditional rivals. The sophomores pulled the pants off of more than 30 freshmen before Ruthven arrived and sent several students to the Dean’s Office.
Source : “This Week in Daily History“, Michigan Daily, October 15, 2002.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, including massive coastal sand dunes on the Lake Michigan shore and North and South Manitou Islands, is established.
An old Chippewa Indian legend says that the dunes were created when a mother bear and her two cubs fled a forest fire in Wisconsin by swimming across Lake Michigan. The mother bear arrived first and climbed up on a bluff to wait for her cubs. Sadly, the exhausted cubs drowned, and when the mourning mother died, the Great Spirit Manitou marked her resting place with a single forested dune called Sleeping Bear. Her two cubs are the Manitou Islands.
Today, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore encompasses a thirty-five mile stretch of Lake Michigan’s eastern coastline, as well as North and South Manitou Islands. The park was established primarily for its outstanding natural features, including forests, beaches, dune formations, and ancient glacial phenomena. In 2002, nearly 1.2 millions people visited the park, which has an annual bugdet of around 3.3 million dollars.
For more information about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, see Sleeping Bear: Yesterday and Today, Including Ghost Towns, Lighthouses and Shipwrecks of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore by George Weeks.
Sources :
Michigan Historical Calendar courtesy of the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.
Michigan History, September/October 2011.
Sleeping Bear Dunes official website.
Michigan State 41, Northwestern 38 (Oct. 21, 2006) – 35 points
Via Sporting News: Under then-coach John Smith, Michigan State engineered the largest comeback in college football history against Northwestern. The Spartans opened the game with a field goal before the Wildcats tallied 38 unanswered to take a 35-point advantage with 9:54 left in the third quarter. But on their next possession, Spartans quarterback Drew Stanton led a nine-play, 65-yard drive to start shifting momentum back in his team’s favor. Over the next 22 minutes, Michigan State’s defense forced four three-and-outs and two interceptions to give the Spartans a chance to kick a game-winning field goal with 13 seconds remaining.
The University of Michigan welcomed its largest-ever class of first-year students this fall, helping to push the Ann Arbor campus’ overall student body to more than 50,000 students for the first time in the university’s history.
The new class also is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse classes in years, with 37 percent of first-year students identifying as persons of color.
The record-setting enrollment caps an admissions season marked by skyrocketing student interest and the ongoing global pandemic.
Nearly 80,000 prospective first-year students applied to enroll at U-M this fall — nearly 15,000 more than the previous year — creating the largest applicant pool in the university’s history.
From this fall’s 79,743 applications, U-M offered admission to 16,071 first-year students.
Of those admitted, 75 percent of in-state students and a third of out-of-state students eventually enrolled, creating a first-year class of 7,290 students. The class is more than 400 students — or 6 percent — larger than last year’s class.
Total undergraduate enrollment increased by 3 percent over last fall, from 31,329 to 32,282 students. In-state students account for 52 percent of the overall undergraduate student body. Graduate and professional school enrollment also grew, from 16,578 last fall to 17,996 this year, the highest total in U-M history.
Source : Don Jordan, “U-M’s 2021 fall enrollment tops 50,000 for first time”, University Record, October 21, 2021.
Chelsea is incorporated on this day in 1864.
Settled in 1834, this Washtenaw County community was first called Kedron until it was renamed after Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Source : Michigan History magazine, October 2003.
Michigan’s first attempt at a live mascot was carried off by no less a tradition-builder than Fielding Yost himself, longtime head football coach (1901-1923, 1925-1926) and athletic director (1921-1941), first at the Michigan Stadium Dedication Game against Ohio State (Oct. 22, 1927) and again when Michigan played Navy that season.
Yost was a visionary but he was also a competitor. He built Michigan Stadium so that, some day, it could be expanded to fit some 300,000 football fans. (Michigan Stadium is not even halfway there more than eight decades later.) And Yost’s competitive nature drove him to pursue a live mascot for the Wolverines football team.
The rival Wisconsin Badgers had wowed fans by using a live badger to rally support back in 1923. Almost immediately Yost set about one-upping the team from Madison by bringing in a live, caged wolverine. Two of them, actually, Bennie and Biff.
“Today, for the first time in the annals of Michigan gridiron history, a Maize and Blue team will take the field of battle with two live Wolverines as mascots on the sidelines,” the Michigan Daily declared the morning of Oct. 22, 1927, the day of the dedication game. The wolverines were a gift of two Detroit-based alums, Fred Lawton and Clark Hyatt, both of the Class of 1911.
“Up until today,” the article continued, “Michigan teams have had a mascot, and that mascot was a wolverine, a mounted one that has graced the trophy case in the administration building at Ferry Field for some time.”
The plan was for the wolverines — Bennie and Biff — to be walked around on leashes. And when Michigan faced Navy that November, the wolverines were going to meet Navy’s mascot, a live goat, at midfield. But Biff and Bennie proved too vicious for any of that.
The live wolverines were a disaster. When Biff was first placed into his cage a week before the game, he snapped a bar in two with his teeth. Said Yost of the wolverine experiment, which ended after that first season: “It was obvious that the Michigan mascots had designs on the Michigan men toting them, and those designs were by no means friendly.” After the season, Bennie was sent to the Detroit Zoo while Biff was placed in the now-defunct University of Michigan Zoo.
For the full article, see James David Dickson, “The wolverine that wasn’t”, Michigan Today, June 16, 2011.