Loraine Anderson: Late great TC hero

Loraine Anderson

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Loraine Anderson

January 17, 2011

Ezra Winter created murals across U.S.

By LORAINE ANDERSON Local columnist The Record Eagle Mon Jan 17, 2011, 07:05 AM EST

Move over, Harold Titus. Make room for Ezra Winter.

Ezra is my newest "Late Great Traverse City Hero." Late Great is the name I give to important people in area history that time forgot and a look back uncovers.

We can never have too many heroes and heroines in today's world. That's also true for regions, cities and towns in a world gone global.

Local heroes who have passed on are like wonderful, old architecturally significant buildings. They give a sense of place to a community, as well as character and integrity. They remind us of our community's origin stories.

We shouldn't forget or lose them.

That's why I've nominated Titus and Winter to my personal hall of fame.

Harold Titus, a novelist, conservation columnist and editor, was a lifelong advocate for reforestation of northern Michigan from the 1920s-1950s. His novel, "Timber," published in 1922, reportedly helped sway public opinion on the importance of reforestation. In 1954, he was the sixth recipient of the Aldo Leopold Medal named for the famous Wisconsin forester and early environmentalist often called the father of wildlife ecology.

Ezra Winter, born in Manistee and raised near Traverse City after his father died of typhoid fever in 1886, was the grandson of German immigrant farmers once called a "gaunt farm boy" by one of his earliest art teachers. He became a well-known and respected American muralist from the 1920s through the 1940s. His big break came when he won a three-year scholarship to the American Academy of Rome in 1911. His best-known mural in the state is a three-story map of Michigan in the Guardian Building in downtown Detroit, now a national landmark. He also has murals in Radio City Music Hall, the Library of Congress, and many other public libraries, government buildings, early skyscrapers.

Both northern Michigan native sons left enduring and beautiful marks on the world.

And who knows? Perhaps this place — landscape, ecosystem and people who lived here — left indelible marks on their senses and creativity.

Heroes, living or passed on, are important in sustaining community. They can be any age, any race, any nationality from all walks of life, but they do pretty much the same things: Enrich, inspire, sustain and energize people and communities.

Titus and Winter probably knew each other. Both were born in the late 1880s just as the lumber era peaked and Teddy Roosevelt galloped onto the American political scene. Both graduated from Traverse City High School in the first decade of the 1900s. Titus left for the University of Michigan in 1907, the same year Winter left to study engineering at Olivet College, where someone discovered his talent for art and helped him get to the Chicago Academy of Art.

The rest is history. Or is it?

I think Traverse City will do better over the long-term remembering them instead of losing their legacy.