Isn’t that peculiar?
The beloved philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra, former New York Yankee star, is as well-known for his malapropisms as he is for his Hall-of-Fame baseball credentials. A personal favorite, which I still puzzle over, is: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” He later explained that the statement is not as dumb as it appears; he was giving directions to his house, which he said could be reached by going either way at a fork in the road.
However, it was another of Mr. Berra’s lopsided theories—the ever-popular, “you can observe a lot by watching”—that was chosen as the honorary theme of this article. Watch we did, through the years. From thousands of oddball experiences that were observed, heard or overheard, read or lived through, are gleaned the following highlights.

Auto antics
What people do with their vehicles is endlessly fascinating and sometimes frightening. Did you see the recent letter in the Mining Journal about the woman who was driving with a cell phone in each ear, which forced her to steer with her elbows? It reminded me of a driver I was following east in Marquette’s Trowbridge Park. Her right hand held a cell phone to her ear and her left hand was out the window flicking ashes off her cigarette, leaving zero hands available for car-aiming. So she sort of steered around the corner onto another street using her knees. The car wobbled frightfully before righting itself. The safety gods had been defied.
Here’s another one: I was pulling into Holiday Cleaners’ lot at Lincoln and Washington when a car came whistling downhill on Lincoln, turned right through the cleaners’ parking lot in order to avoid the traffic light, missing me by inches, then roared onto Washington and out of sight. As I was sharing this with the clerk inside the store, another car coming down Washington approached the light from the other direction, but swung left through the lot onto Lincoln, then disappeared up the hill. If these two had zipped into the parking lot at the same time, they would have collided right in front of the door. The clerk and I looked at each other. “Happens all the time,” she said.
One wintry day, I backed slowly out of a driveway with snow banks that towered above my car. As I inched my way into the street, a car hit my back bumper, nudging me back into the driveway. “Why didn’t you toot your horn and warn me?” I asked the driver. “The banks are so high I couldn’t possibly see you.” He said he wasn’t able to toot, and it was then I noticed that he was steering with his left hand while his right hand was pulling on a length of rope to keep the passenger side door shut. There were no hands available to do any tooting. Besides, he said, the horn didn’t work anyway.
I love this one. While I was stopped for traffic at an intersection, the driver of a pickup in front of me suddenly threw up his arms, unbuckled his seatbelt, and leapt wildly out of the cab. I thought he had found a snake or rabid animal in his cab, but then he removed a shoe and hopped frantically in the busy street while massaging his foot. He saw me watching him, pointed to the foot, and mouthed the word “cramp.” We both laughed.
This past winter, a snow-covered car came toward me. A young face peered out through a scraped, but still frosty hole no bigger than a dinner plate. The rest of the windshield, all the other windows, and the front and back lights were totally covered with snow. Except for the peephole, it looked like an igloo with wheels. And it’s not unusual to see a dozen or more cars like this over an average winter.
Another car story: While waiting for the light to change near Marquette Senior High School, I noticed a car approaching the intersection from my right. It was moving at a high rate of speed, certainly too fast for a school intersection. The driver’s head was bobbing—a few seconds looking ahead, a few seconds down reading a book she was holding between the door and steering wheel. As she neared the intersection, she made sure the light was green, then resumed reading the book as she whizzed past our cross-street. Maybe she was hurrying to the library to avoid a fine. Or maybe she wasn’t.
This driver wasn’t alone in multitasking. A recent study by Yahoo News showed that more than eight percent of drivers admit to deliberate, self-induced distractions while motoring, like changing seats with other passengers while the car continued moving, watching movies, painting toenails, nursing babies, inserting contact lenses, donning makeup and even shaving. One was spotted slurping a bowl of soup. What’s more, thirty-eight percent of those surveyed admitted driving long distances with no recollection of having done so. They literally didn’t remember how they got there. Maybe they were reading...

Unnerving headlines
Many veterans of the news business love to save interesting, unusual or shocking headlines. The following example is one of the most storied headlines ever, clipped and saved in the scrapbooks of newshounds everywhere as an example of in-your-face journalism. The deed has been attributed to various papers and editors, but a popular version credits the Chicago Times in 1875 when it chronicled the hanging of four men who had been overheard making religious comments before the traps were sprung. The historic headline read, “Jerked to Jesus.” What can you add to that?
Another startling headline—in retrospect, anyway—appeared in the February 23, 1933 issue of the Marquette Mining Journal, which was shortly after Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany, “Hitler is Friend of Disarmament.” We all know how that turned out. Two months later, the same paper ran this banner after a drunken, partially-clad man was found trying to make lunch for himself in someone else’s kitchen in Menominee, “Arrest Man in Undies.”
Another Mining Journal headline from September 9, 1934 announced that “End of the World May Come Today.” Wilbur Voliva, member of an Illinois religious sect which was busy preparing for the hereafter, hedged his bet by allowing that he may have mistaken the end of the world for “the start of a long winter.” He was pretty sure he had the right date, but might have misspoke about the year. Just to be safe, he told a reporter he had ordered a winter’s supply of coal. A few days later, he announced that the real date was 1942, which also came and went. Need more coal, I guess.

Oddities of note
In the mid-1950s, a group of U.P. residents arrived at a hearing in Milwaukee to protest a proposal to end railroad passenger service to their town. After everyone was seated comfortably, the hearing examiner began the session by inquiring how the delegation got to Milwaukee, and they replied innocently, “We drove down.” Oh no, wrong thing to say. The remainder of the hearing was meaningless, and the little town lost its passenger train.
On my first airplane ride from Milwaukee to Washington, D.C., I was nervous enough without any hitches. But there was one: as the plane reached the takeoff runway, the pilot announced that we would be returning to the gate. As the plane turned around, the passengers could see a long line of luggage stretching many hundreds of feet.
A small Michigan hospital I’m familiar with was ordered by the state to line its basement incinerator room with concrete so as not to set the building on fire when they lit the incinerator, even though the cement-block room was bare. They complied. But another branch of the same government ordered the hospital to install sprinklers in the cement-block, concrete-lined room. “Won’t that put out the fire and defeat the purpose of the incinerator?” they asked. “Do it anyway,” they were told. So they did, and sure enough it dowsed the incinerator fires.
A lot of people don’t get this: in order to safeguard the health of its residents and visitors, the City of Marquette has been commended for its proactive work in banning smoking in public buildings and spaces. Yet the same city reacted with excitement when downtown businesses were allowed to apply for a windfall of new liquor licenses.
Old ways are best? Legendary country singer Hank Williams often went from town to town sleeping in the back seat of a vehicle driven by one of his buddies. His guitar and suitcase were in the trunk. In fact, he died on such a trip, in the backseat of a Cadillac on New Year’s Day 1953. In stark contrast to Hank’s travel arrangements, a modern country singer (also a solo act) recently told Parade magazine that it takes five buses and eight semitrucks to haul his people and equipment from city to city. When ol’ Hank sang, you could hear every word, clear as a bell. When this new guy sings, I can’t understand the lyrics because his soft voice is drowned out by the noise from five busloads and eight truckloads of people and equipment.

Shocking news items
In 1933, in the last year of Prohibition, a drunken driver hit a parked car somewhere in the Upper Peninsula, pulled out a gun and accused the other car owner of running into him. “Do you know who I am?” the drunk demanded. Oh, yes, everyone did. They knew he was head of the U.P. Alcohol Prohibition office, that’s who he was. In spite of his lofty position and fine standing in the community, he was convicted of driving under the influence of liquor and fined. I don’t know if he kept his job.
This one goes back to 1926, but it’s still stupefying—“Former L’Anse Girl Married in Wisconsin,” said the headline, as reprinted in a recent issue of the L’Anse Sentinel. The story, which began with the provocative phrase “In the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Crandon...” described the marriage of a local girl to a Wisconsin man. Then it got worse: “The bride wore a Klan robe and carried white roses. She was attended by...who also wore a Klan robe and carried pink roses.” But, if you want to get technical about it, the bride did wear white.
The final tale is an all-time favorite, because it deals with the “history of flight,” so to speak. An undated Ontonagon Herald clipping—from about twenty-five years ago—is slightly truncated here to protect the identities of the participants, which I am sure they will appreciate.
“A [downstate] woman was injured when she flew off a moving vehicle over the weekend, according to the Michigan State Police. She suffered multiple lacerations, but apparently no serious injuries in the mishap on M-28 east of [Bergland]. Grand View Hospital listed her condition Monday morning as ‘improving.’ According to reports, the woman and her husband were trying to transport a piece of plywood on their vehicle. The wood was apparently large, so the couple placed it on the hood of the vehicle and the woman sat on it to keep it from falling off. A large gust of wind blew both the wood and the woman off the vehicle and onto the roadway. Her husband was cited for reckless driving.”
Flying plywood with passenger parasailing down M-28? Only in the U.P.
—Larry Chabot

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