Loraine Anderson: Magazine a page-turner

Loraine Anderson

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Loraine Anderson

September 27, 2010

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist The Record Eagle Mon Sep 27, 2010, 07:22 AM EDT

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," American author William Faulkner once wrote.

I have to agree.

History is alive and well, and living in northern Michigan, thanks to local historians, history writers, museums and historical societies.

The new kid on the block is the Record-Eagle's year-old quarterly magazine, "Reflections By the Bays." It is the offspring of the Record-Eagle's popular 150th anniversary history series in 2008-2009, is entering its second year and is maturing into a fine stand-alone, glossy magazine — thanks to its editor Garret Leiva, design editor Brian Steele and many others.

The fall edition is scheduled to arrive on area newsstands and in subscribers' mailboxes early next week. Once again, it offers a mix of stories and photographs that showcase northern Michigan history and contemporary life. Check it out — I think you'll like it.

The cover story chronicles the World War II saga of the late Fred Atkinson, of Leland, a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany's famed Stalag Luft III camp that was immortalized in the popular 1963 movie "The Great Escape." Fred rarely talked about his harrowing experiences, but his mother's yellowing scrapbook shows and tells the heart-rending story of the camp and the family at home.

Another story provides gripping details of the sensational Kaleva bank robbery, murder and three-day manhunt in January 1933. It also reveals how a brand-new "wireless" Michigan State Police radio dispatch system, among the first in the nation, helped troopers and "vigilante posses" capture four Indiana desperados, and details the demise of the "Gangster Era" of the 1920s and early 1930s.

The fall issue takes readers back to Oct. 8-9, 1871, when fire raged across the Great Lakes region. Forest fires all but destroyed Manistee and Glen Haven, incinerated the Thumb, and devastated many other Michigan and Wisconsin towns. These infernos always have lived in the shadow of the Great Chicago Fire that same weekend. Record-Eagle photo technician Pat Putney has put together a great map of the Manistee fire, with some assistance from Steve Harold, director of the Manistee County Historical Museum.

Have you ever wondered about the stone cairn pyramid along Cairn Highway north of Kewadin? Richard Fidler, a retired Traverse City biology teacher turned historian, fills us all in.

Former Record-Eagle features editor and current columnist Kathy Gibbons also savors the historical significance of church dinners in a fun piece called "Church Chow." And Carol South retells a story of a double murder at Aral — a mill town along Otter Creek Beach near what today is Esch Road in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

You even can take a vicarious glide down the slopes of Hickory Hills Ski Area in the early 1950s. The ski hill will turn 60 next year, and two Traverse City high school juniors, Ryan Ness and Molly Tompkins, now are researching, interviewing and writing Hickory's history for a pictorial book scheduled to come out later next year.