“My Marquette” makes front page of Sunday’s “The Mining Journal”

I was recently interviewed by the Mining Journal. The story ran on Sunday, November 14, 2010. Here it is:

Then and now

New book examines Marquette’s history

November 14, 2010 – By CHRISTOPHER DIEM Journal Staff Writer

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MARQUETTE – How many people can walk through Marquette and see their ancestors in the architecture?

Tyler Tichelaar, a seventh-generation Marquette native, is one of those people. His grandfather helped build the U.S. Federal Building and his grandparents were engaged at the Marquette Opera House located where the Masonic Center is now.

Tichelaar can trace his ancestry back to Basil Bishop, who arrived in Marquette in 1850. That connection to Marquette inspired Tichelaar to write a series of historical novels about Marquette featuring both real and fictional people and events.

In his new book, “My Marquette,” Tichelaar sticks with the real stories of the people and places in the city.

“The book stores told me what they really needed was a history of Marquette. Nobody had written one for many years. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do that at first but then I had several book clubs that read my books who wanted me to then give walking tours of Marquette,” he said.

The book is set up sort of like a walking tour. Marquette is broken up into geographic locations such as south Marquette, downtown, north Marquette and the Third Street area, among others. There are also sections on the city’s historical homes, Lakeshore Boulevard and Presque Isle and locations on the way to Big Bay.

Tichelaar did a lot of research while writing his novels so had most of the information for his new book already on hand. He gleaned facts from old Mining Journal clippings, the J.M. Longyear Research Library, the Peter White Public Library, various museums and old census records.

“A lot of it is family stories, information that older relatives gave me, especially my grandpa and my great-aunts and uncles. And a lot of it is more personal memories,” Tichelaar said. “For instance, I talk about the Bavarian Inn that used to be over by K-Mart. My grandparents were friends with the owner of the Bavarian Inn. So a lot of that is based on memories and family photographs.”

He said the section about the historical homes grew larger than he had anticipated and he didn’t even include all the homes he could have.

“I just wanted to know who the people were that lived in all of these houses. … I found lots of stories about people who I had never heard of,” he said. “We always hear about Peter White or the Longyears, but there were a lot of other families that lived in that historical district or other places in Marquette that were significant but have been forgotten over the years.”

Tichelaar is still finding interesting personal connections to the past. His ancestor Basil Bishop came to Marquette intending to build a forge but instead worked with Amos Harlow at Harlow’s forge. Last year, there was an estate sale at the Harlow House. Tichelaar went “mainly because I wanted to see what the house looked like.”

But what he found shocked him.

“I picked up a book and my fourth-great aunt’s name was in the book. It had been her hymnal from the 1840s and they had known the Harlow family, so somehow it got into the Harlow family’s hands,” he said.

Tichelaar’s book is available at area book stores, including Snowbound Books, Book World, Northern Michigan University Book Store as well as Peter White Public Library and Superior View. For more information and a list of places around the Upper Peninsula where the book is sold, go to www.marquettefiction.com.

Christopher Diem can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242. His e-mail address is cdiem@miningjournal.net

The Bavarian Inn – Best Pancakes in Marquette

The following is from My Marquette – a perfect time to post it when October is in its golden height, so I offer it as an Oktoberfest tribute to Mrs. Latour who was from Germany. Note that in My Marquette, there are also pictures of the Bavarian Inn.

My Marquette - On Sale Now

            Bonanza was John’s favorite place to eat supper, but the Bavarian Inn was the best place in Marquette for breakfast. Even if there were a wait to be seated, it was well worth it. John would have waited an hour for those pancakes, just a bit thicker than crepes and topped with whipping cream and a choice of apples, peaches, or blueberries. He and Chad never had anything else. Let the grownups settle for eggs and coffee. Pancakes with whipping cream and fruit and hot chocolate with more whipping cream was his idea of a German cultural experience.

            The Bavarian Inn itself was very German. Four dining rooms were darkly paneled as if the wood itself had come from the Black Forest, while red trim, Alpine decorations, and pictures of Bavarian villages decorated the rooms. The dining rooms were separated by walls containing shadow boxes made to resemble windows looking out upon German landscapes; the windows had ornate red shutters with hearts carved into them for an Alpine flavor. Arranged along the windowsills of the boxes were several little Hummel figures for added effect.

            Presiding over this Bavarian world transplanted to Marquette was Ernestine LaTour. She had immigrated to the United States from Germany, and now that her husband, who had helped found the restaurant and its motel, was deceased, she had rented out the restaurant for others to manage, but a day never passed that she was not there, making sure all was well. Her husband had hired Henry to do some carpentry work when the hotel was first built, and since then, the families had been friendly. Many times she had been included in family parties at the Whitmans’ house when John was younger, but now he was at an age when her friendliness embarrassed him.

            After saying hello to everyone, Mrs. LaTour asked, “John, do you remember that time you wanted to play hairdresser and I let you comb my hair?”

            John smiled and nodded his head politely. He had not played hairdresser since he was five, and he could not imagine what had possessed him then.

            The adults laughed, while Mrs. LaTour pulled up a chair, lit a cigarette, and visited with the family. Henry and Beth invited her for a Sunday drive that afternoon. Then she went to ensure her other guests were content while the waitress brought those delicious pancakes. — Superior Heritage

What I wouldn’t do to go back one more time to the Bavarian Inn to have the pancakes, rolled up almost like crepes, complete with loads of whipping cream and fruit topping!

But far more than the food made the Bavarian Inn special.

This German looking restaurant and motel was owned by Sherman and Ernestine LaTour. The Bavarian Inn was built in 1965, and while I don’t know all the details, my Great-Uncle Jolly was among those who helped to build it, and the LaTours were so happy with his work that on the front of the building when they painted the German boy and girl in traditional costume, Uncle Jolly (without a drop of German blood in him) was the model for the boy.

Then in 1976, the Bavarian Inn Restaurant was built in front of the motel. My grandfather was hired to do much of the restaurant’s fancy interior woodwork. The restaurant had shadow boxes in the walls separating the four different dining rooms, and these boxes contained pictures of Bavaria; to make the boxes look like windows with views of Germany, Grandpa made shutters with hearts carved into them. He would use the same heart pattern to make the shutters for my parents’ house. Grandpa also designed the wooden porch awning that ran inside the restaurant. The result was one of the most distinctive and beautiful restaurants in Marquette.

The Bavarian Inn Restaurant featured such German foods when it opened as weinerschnitzel, sauerbraten, and rostbraten. Eventually, however, the restaurant made a shift and became instead famous for its breakfasts and was renamed the Alpine Pancake House until 1986 when management changed and it became The Chalet Restaurant. In either case, throughout the 1980s it was always packed on Sundays for breakfast and remained open through the 1990s.

Because my grandparents became good friends with the LaTours, they always attended our family parties. Mr. LaTour was a short little man who was content to sit on a stool that was almost like a high chair at the kitchen table. He died in 1981 when I was only ten, so I barely remember him, but Mrs. LaTour I knew well. She had been born in Germany and retained her German accent. My grandparents would take her for Sunday drives after her husband died, and she was frequently at their house. One day when I wasn’t much more than five, she came over and let me play hairdresser with her hair. That was a mistake on my part. She never let me forget it. For years after that, she would always ask me whether I wanted to play hairdresser.

After my grandparents died, we did not see Mrs. LaTour very often. In the summer of 1998, when I came home from downstate to visit, I went with a friend to the Bavarian Inn for lunch. Mrs. LaTour was in a wheelchair by then and sitting on the other end of the restaurant. I was too embarrassed to go over and say hello to her from fear she would embarrass me in front of my friend by asking the usual hairdresser question.

Later, I felt guilty that I had not made a point of speaking to her. She died only about a month later. Her daughter who lived in Germany—we had no idea she had a daughter—came for the funeral, but since she lived in Germany, the Bavarian Inn was sold. It was soon after torn down. Today a Citgo gas station occupies where once it stood on the other side of Werner Street across from the Westwood Mall’s parking lot.

            But I can still taste those pancakes with whipped cream and peaches on them—they really were that good.

Read more about Marquette’s history in My Marquette, available from www.MarquetteFiction.com and in bookstores throughout Marquette County.

Why I Write About Marquette

The following essay is the preface to My Marquette, to be released this week.

My Marquette - released Oct 1, 2010

WHY I WRITE ABOUT MARQUETTE

 

            Where do you come up with your ideas? What made you decide to write about Marquette? Ever since Iron Pioneers was first published, my readers continually ask me these questions.

            My answer is that having been born and raised in Marquette, and being so enculturated into the city’s history and its people, as an author I simply cannot not write about it. The best advice a writer is given is “Write what you know” and if I know any place, it is my hometown, where I and generations of my ancestors have lived. I am unable to remember the first time I saw St. Peter’s Cathedral, the Old Savings Bank, or Presque Isle Park. They have always been there, always been a part of my conscious world—always actively influenced my imagination.

            My earliest memories include my grandfather telling me about Marquette’s past, stories I never forgot that made me wonder what it was like to grow up in this town in the early twentieth century, when automobiles were still a novelty, long before television, in days when my grandpa would get a quarter to scrub the kitchen floor, and he would use that quarter to treat himself and a friend to a silent movie at the Delft Theatre and still have change left over for snacks.

            Since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to write stories, and growing up in a town where my family had lived so long, hearing story after story about the past, I wanted to write down those stories and make the past come alive for people. While in college, I became interested in family history. I learned then that the earliest branch of my family came to Marquette in 1849, the year the village was founded, and my family has lived in Marquette ever since. As I learned more about my ancestors and Marquette’s history, I could not help but imagine what it would have been like for a person to come by schooner across Lake Superior in 1849, to see only a wilderness where a village was to be built, and what it was like after two decades of struggling to build that town, to see it destroyed by fire in 1868, only to spring up again, grander than before. And what of the winters? Feet and feet of snow, and no snowblowers or modern snowplows. What an amazing courage and determination the pioneers had to carry on each day in the nineteenth century. In my novels, I tried to recreate the early settlers’ experiences so readers would understand and appreciate their courage and draw their own strength from the examples of those mighty pioneers.

            The scene in Iron Pioneers that I feel best demonstrates The Marquette Trilogy’s themes of courage and survival is when Molly and Patrick talk about why they left Ireland to come to America. Their discussion reflects the tales of many immigrants who came to Marquette—some like Patrick to escape religious or political oppression—some like Molly, to avoid poverty and suffering. Molly’s daughter, Kathy, after overhearing her mother relate how her ancestors had starved during the Irish potato famine, and knowing that others around the world are far from as fortunate as her, asks her future husband what the past and her ancestors should mean to her.

            “How can we live in America, knowing that others are suffering?” Kathy asked.

            “By appreciating our good fortune and being happy.”

            “Happy?” she asked, feeling it impossible after years of living under her stepfather’s oppression, after the suffering her mother had known. She feared to be happy from fear it would not last.

            “Yes, happy,” said Patrick. “All those people who suffered would want us to be happy, to live and marry and have children who will not know such pain. We are the extensions of our parents and grandparents and all those brave people; we’re a continuation of their spirits, and our happiness helps to validate their struggles, to give meaning to their lives.”

            He only understood this truth as he spoke it, as he suddenly believed the world could be a wonderful place; that everything could work out for the best. He felt like an old Celtic bard who foresaw a hopeful future capable of washing away past grief. 

 

            I wrote my trilogy as a tribute to those pioneers who built Marquette, and those like them in every community who built this nation despite the difficulties they faced. Whether a person has ever visited Marquette should not determine whether they find enjoyment or inspiration from the history of this fine city. The story of Marquette is the story of the American Dream, of dreams for a better future and the struggles to achieve that dream, the hopes and fears of countless American generations of immigrants seeking a better world, and how some achieved it, some failed, and some persevered without giving up. Based on the pioneers’ examples, my novels have hopefully inspired readers with the courage to endure their own trials and overcome them. To give people that courage, and to hear how much my novels have resonated with them, has made the many lonely hours of writing all worthwhile.

            In writing about Marquette, I knew I wanted to capture the magic of one particular place and allow readers to travel there and come to know it as well as I did. I have lived in Marquette all my life except six years when I foolishly thought I would find a better life elsewhere, only to feel exiled. While I was away, Marquette celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1999, and that same year, I, homesick, decided to write about its history.

            I had written other novels, but never satisfied with them, I had left them unpublished. When I began writing Iron Pioneers and its sequels, although I knew the task would be monumental, I finally felt I had found my voice, the books I was actually born to write.

            I wrote about the outdoors—the wild, thick forests, the temperate, green-leaved splendid summers of blueberry picking and daring to enter Lake Superior’s cool waters, the roar of the winter wind, the blizzards that leave behind snowbanks that must be shoveled, and ultimately, the sense of peace one feels among so much natural beauty. I wrote about Marquette’s history, for I could not imagine a more inspiring story than the American Dream played out in a quest to build an industrial empire along Lake Superior, of an iron discovery that produced more wealth than the California Gold Rush, of a mined product that helped to win major wars and change the world. And I wrote about the change and decline of that iron industry, how it affected the people who lived in Marquette, sometimes fulfilling, often destroying their dreams.

            Mostly, however, I wrote about life in a small town, of the relationships between people in a community. Many people think small towns are quiet and dull because they lack the fast-paced lifestyle of metropolitan areas. But small towns have a greater and more personal drama. Willa Cather, author of O Pioneers and one of my greatest influences—my title Iron Pioneers is partly a tribute to her—best described the relationships in small towns in a passage I used as the front quote for Narrow Lives:

 In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning and go on. It is a close shave. Out in the world the escapes are not so narrow. — Lucy Gayheart

 Relationships are complex in small towns, the layers of social networks dizzying; in the intertwining family trees and the friendships of my characters, I tried to capture this reality. A love affair or a conflict between friends can be of mammoth proportions in the history of a small town—as important to its inhabitants as a world war is on a national or international scale. It was that personal connection to each person and place that one feels living in a small town that I wanted to capture in my fiction.

            I have felt lonely in large cities, walking down streets where not a face is familiar, where no one notices you. In Marquette, although it has grown to where I can go into a store without seeing a familiar face, I know if I stop to speak to any stranger for a minute and name a few friends or acquaintances, the stranger and I will know someone in common. We are only separated by a degree or two in our little city of twenty thousand people.

            Living your entire life in the same place breeds familiarity. Even if I see no one I know when I walk about Marquette, the city is rich with memories and history for me. It is an indescribable comfort to enter the downtown post office and recall that my grandfather helped to build it during the Great Depression. I can walk down Washington Street and see the stone in the sidewalk marking where the Marquette Opera House once stood, where my grandfather proposed to my grandmother before it burned down in the great fire and blizzard of 1938. The First Methodist Church has a stained glass memorial window to honor my ancestral aunt and uncle, Delivan and Pamelia Bishop, who were among its founders in the 1850s. I look out onto Iron Bay and imagine what my ancestors must have felt when they first arrived on its shore. My readers tell me, because of my novels, they now walk about Marquette, equally imagining what life was like here for the generations before them—to me, that is the ultimate compliment to my work—that it has made my readers imaginative and interested in history and especially their own family stories.

            A timelessness settles over a person who grows older while living in the same place. You talk about Cliffs Ridge, the ski hill whose name was changed to Marquette Mountain twenty years ago, yet your old friends know exactly where you mean and do not correct you—it is still Cliffs Ridge in their memories too. As you drive into South Marquette on County Road 553, you turn your head out of habit to look at the old red brick house of the Brookridge Estate, which you have always admired, only to realize it is 2010 now, not 1982, and the house was torn down nearly twenty years ago to build the new assisted living facility, Brookridge Heights.

Moments of joy from your past keep you connected to people. Thirty years ago, the Marquette Mall had a fountain with colored lights—so many people have told me they had forgotten about it, and they were glad when I reminded them of its beauty in Superior Heritage. Every place I step, I remember a dozen moments from my own past—I stop to get gas at a station where once stood the Bavarian Inn where I had breakfast dozens of time. I go to the remodeled Delft Theatre and can still remember the first movie I saw there when I was three years old—memories layer themselves on top of each other. The past never dies—we can travel back to it in our minds, and reading a book is the opportunity to enter another world or an author’s mind and experience another person’s experiences.

Tyler R. Tichelaar

            I imagine such nostalgia and family connections are why people enjoy my books, why some of my readers stay in Marquette despite the possibility of better lives elsewhere, or why many of my readers, exiled from Upper Michigan, find comfort for their homesickness by revisiting Marquette through my words. Books and memories allow you to go home again.

            This deep abiding connection, this sense of place, of belonging, of knowing I am home and knowing how much that is to be valued—that is why I write about Marquette.