Traverse City Record-Eagle - Loraine Anderson

Loraine Anderson: TC's 1925 earthquake
Earthquakes are rare in Michigan, but Traverse City residents definitely felt the earth move beneath their feet and watched electric ceiling lights sway overhead on Feb. 28, 1925. "EARTHQUAKE HERE FIRST EVER FELT: Dishes Rattle, Chairs Rock, Smokers 'Swear Off' and People in High Places Come Down," Record-Eagle headlines shouted after tremors rattled the city at 8:27 p.m. that Saturday night.
Loraine Anderson: Great Lakes matter
I pick up Jerry Dennis' book to read "The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas." From the first page on, past and present merge. Pieces of childhood vacations and long beach walks float to the top of my consciousness. A part of the adult self dives deep and connects to the heart of something much on my mind these days: It is my gnawing concern about the future of these beautiful and important sweetwater seas.
Loraine Anderson: Powwow beats heart song
The images stick with me, a week after Peshawbestown's annual powwow. A little girl, at most two years old, toddles along behind her mom in the Sacred Circle. They are dressed in similar buckskin colored dresses. The mother's thick black hair is pulled into two braids. The little girl's hair isn't long enough yet for braids, and her hair wisps in an impish circle around her face.
Loraine Anderson: Tracking Titus
Harold Titus has been one of my favorite Traverse City historical characters since I read "Timber," his 1922 novel, last year. He intrigues me for many reasons. Part of his mystery is that he is virtually unknown today. He is "new" local history.
Loraine Anderson: I'm taking up gardening
It began on a Saturday morning in the second spring after The Grub Invasions. I was spading a section of dead lawn. The yard was a wasteland. That morning the flowers in a kitchen vase had died of thirst. Now I had unearthed a headless plastic toy soldier. Were these omens? Why did I think I would do better with a flower garden than grass?
Loraine Anderson: News, community, history
Features section editor Jodee Taylor asked me last week what people would learn if they came to the Record-Eagle's exhibit celebrating its 150-year history in Traverse City. It opens today at the Grand Traverse Heritage Center and will run through July. I stood speechless as 15 decades of life in Traverse City reported by the Record-Eagle and its forerunners scrolled through my head.
Loraine Anderson: Reading between flu lines
It's amazing how one small personal common detail can link past and present. Ralph Guido Wallace is my connection to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and World War I. He lived in my neighborhood. I know nothing more about this local soldier other than what I read in a 1918 Record-Eagle. He died Sept. 28, 1918, of Spanish influenza, seven days after he became ill in a New Jersey hospital.
Loraine Anderson: Newspapers face change
This column is, in part, a request. The Record-Eagle is preparing for its Grand Traverse Heritage Center exhibit in June and July, part of a year-long celebration of our 150th birthday. This column also is a commentary on newspapers today and predictions of their doom. It's true that the newspaper industry faces serious challenges today, but I don't believe the forecasts.
Loraine Anderson: Knickers raise eyebrows
Women's History Month is upon us. Here are two stories from the Record-Eagle History Project bound to raise eyebrows, elicit chuckles and increase 21st century awareness about how growing freedoms for women played out in more than voting booths.
Loraine Anderson: Erasing hatred, bigotry
The 1924 Ku Klux Klan violence in Traverse City has been the biggest surprise, so far, in researching and writing stories for the Record-Eagle's 150th Anniversary History Project. Local history writer Richard Fiddler tipped me off to this story in late 2007. His account of that Aug. 9 "night of terror" is the first chapter in his book.
Loraine Anderson: Election as reality show
A daydream dances into mind to the tune of "Hey, Hey, the Gang's All Here" as I read newspapers, watch TV and surf the Internet to get a fix on this year's presidential election. Joe Six Pack nurses his third beer and his cousin, Joe Camel, takes another drag on his cigarette. His pet pot-bellied pig rests at his feet. It is wearing lipstick.
Loraine Anderson: A TC sense of place
Jay Smith is back downtown. City workers returned his commemorative plaque last month to his walkway along Front Street between Kilwin's Chocolate Shoppe and Pangea's Pizza Pub. It rests now on a limestone slab at the foot of a gentle old tree in the rehabbed "pocket park." This is a good thing, and I'm grateful.
Loraine Anderson: Grand-scale checkmate?
Two recent headlines made me cringe. "Afghanistan, the good war" and "Russia plays chess, America plays Monopoly." They beg questions from this weary American about the Georgian-Russian conflict and the U.S. role in it. Are the world's nations mere pawns, places to buy, sell and sell out? Do their people have any say in what is happening?
Loraine Anderson: Where's the walkway?
Jay P. Smith, may you never go missing again. This column is about several things: A downtown walkway named for Jay 43 years ago; a plaque; and the links between visible local history, a sense of place and community in cities and villages that still have a unique character and natural beauty to them, and wise, community-oriented decision-making.
Loraine Anderson: Rocks are sands of time
It is a Sunday morning after a night of thunderstorms. I am picking up fieldstones on a cousin's 80 acres in Michigan's Thumb and putting them in my car. Some have to be pried from soggy earth, others rolled to the car and hoisted onto the sheet-covered back seat. I stand for a moment, rocks in each hand, catching my breath and looking across newly planted fields.
Loraine Anderson: Lakes too special to lose
I love the Great Lakes and walking along Lake Michigan. I love the sense of peace and poetry the "big lake" stirs in me, the way it clears minds and opens hearts. I like looking at pictures shot from space and seeing Michigan floating smack dab in the middle of the Great Lakes basin. In recent years I've come to worry about this magnificent watershed.
Loraine Anderson: Melkild's legacy relevant
Trees begin to bud along the Grandview Parkway and the trails lining the Boardman River. Earth Day is tomorrow, and I think about Martin Melkild, who died March 24 after a life well-lived for 90 years. His life was about earth-friendly living, conservation of natural environments and preservation of area history.
Loraine Anderson: Lost locket returns
A little over a year ago I lost a gold locket that has been in my family for more than a century. It belonged to my mother, my grandmother and probably my great-grandmother. I searched for the locket for many weeks after it went missing. At first, I thought I had simply misplaced it.
Loraine Anderson: What will we leave here?
'I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat," Stephen Vincent Benet says in the first line of "American Names." His 1927 poem comes to mind as I walk my dog through Ashton Park near Willow Hill Elementary. So does the first paragraph of "Indian Names in Michigan," a book by historian Virgil Vogel.
Loraine Anderson: The dog days of winter
I wake up Sunday morning to a real January winter day in the era of global warming. Oddly, I feel relief.
Loraine Anderson: A birthday mirthday wish
My birthday came last week, the one that delivers a gift all its own: The right to say for one more year, "I'm still in my 50s." A friend gives me "The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z," a hilarious new book by comedian-actor-playwright-author Steve Martin and New Yorker magazine cartoonist Roz Chast.
Loraine Anderson: 1907 penny, nickel are priceless
A picture comes to mind whenever I think of my great-Aunt Nellie, no matter how old she or I become. It is the first Thanksgiving of my memory. She is in her 40s, and I am maybe 2 or 3 years old. We are in a kitchen. She is holding me in her arms, probably to keep me from being underfoot as uncle Kenneth carves the turkey.
Loraine Anderson: Wakefield leaves rich legacy
I did not know local history writer Larry Wakefield well, so this isn't a eulogy. I do, however, want to pay tribute to him, other local historians, historical societies and libraries.
Loraine Anderson: Pulling threads and unraveling times of tumult
Some things can't be explained. They have to be pulled like a thread to see what unravels. The story of Wilhelm Heinrich Rummert is like that. He was the grandfather of my mother, a German war bride. I've been trying to get a sense of him and his times for the past year.
Loraine Anderson: An offshoot of digging up family roots
The spirits may be moving me. A year ago on Labor Day, I set out to learn more about my great-great-grandfather. All I had was his name, Charles Dickerson, and an 1864 Civil War letter he had written to his wife, Cordelia, as Union forces were closing in on Atlanta.
The gift of "Miss Navajo"
I carry many moments from this year's Traverse City Film Festival. Among the most treasured is Sunday morning at the State Theatre before, during and after "Miss Navajo."
Produced and directed by Billy Luther, it is a documentary about a Navajo beauty pageant where contestants are required to know Navajo stories, language, history, government, how to shear a sheep and even butcher one. Luther follows six young Indian women in the 2005 pageant, focusing on a young woman named Crystal.