Marquette Monthly—the early years
Late September, 1987
Musak, if memory serves me well, was playing in the Marquette Mall’s auburn foyer outside Angeli’s Super Valu. I was sitting on a bench conducting market research, watching shoppers and window shoppers walk by the stand piled high with hot-off-the-press premiere editions of Marquette Monthly.
Couples and singles, groups of teens and families with tots and grandparents dawdled through. How could they not see the newsstand with this perky new magazine that you didn’t even need a quarter to read?
A man, about fifty, stopped, adjusted his glasses and leaned over the stand. He cocked his head at the cover, drawn by my sister Sandra, featuring the facades of the Delft (Snow White and Dragnet were playing), Donckers and Superior View and a corner of the Nordic marquee. It was a warm tribute to the downtown we had walked to many times from our house on Second Street.
On one of those walks in the ’70s, I found E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful at the Peter White Public Library. Even though I would go on to not do very well in my Econ classes at the University of Michigan, Schumacher had jibed with and enlightened my general outlook on such matters, and his economic theory eventually would provide the cornerstone on which Marquette Monthly was built.
The man left with only his sack of groceries. More people walked by oblivious to the Fun, Informative and Free offerings just begging to be taken. I mean, look at the cover! No ads! No bad news! No sad news! Not even a teaser to junk it up.
Maybe people wanted to be teased, I thought as more people shuffled past. Should I have plastered, “Hot Pumpkin Carving Tips!” on the cover?
No. People would get it. I just knew.
A mother with children—one in the cart, one holding her hand and one imitating an airplane—exited the grocery store, where she stopped abruptly mid-stride, craning her neck at the stack of papers. The hand-holder kept tugging her toward the door, there was a bit of whining, but she kept looking. Then she stepped back and flipped it open to the Table of Contents, which listed 20 pages of stuff. It was agony, but she left with a paper tucked under her arm. Score!

Rupert and Me
People get into publishing for all sorts of reasons. My motivation was to get back to the U.P., hot from a job at a glossy rag and, before that, an Ann Arbor ad agency. My daughter Eleanor was three years old. My then-husband, the drummer Mr. Largebeat, was skeptical, but willing. (He would return to Ann Arbor a couple of years later.)
While doing page layout for the glossy rag, Automobile, I’d flown monthly with the managing editor to New York to check page proofs. One night at an expense-account dinner, during which we sipped a good cab and savored the foie grass melting in our mouths, I asked her about the budget.
“Don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve never seen one.”
The story goes that Aussie Murdoch, the magazine’s publisher, fancied this American foray and was funding it to whatever level it took to succeed. The magazine featured nice, mostly really nice, automobiles and the culture that surrounded them.
If Automobile was the 24 Hours of LeMans of magazines, then Marquette Monthly was the Kick the Can of magazines. It’s a beautiful game in which one must rely on one’s own resources, be nimble and patient, appreciate nuance and then, when the time is perfect, run like hell.

Super Backers
Sister Sandra was immensely important in the months preceding and proceeding the first issue, offering her splendid drawings, editorial insight and atta-girl encouragement. She brought a fine aesthetic to the page layout and she bought the filing cabinet.
My friend Paul Onstad, who’d introduced me to Mac computers on Thanksgiving Day, 1984, donated his Mac 512, on which the early issues were typeset. Babette Welch generously offered the laser printer I used to run off text and ads.
The magazine was produced in the family home. My folks had retired and were spending winters in Florida and summers at the homestead farm in the Keweenaw, so the den was available.

Advertisers
With a page mock-up and rate card in hand, I set out one bright morning for a walk down Third Street on the make-or-break ad sales trip. The Cat’s Meow, Scandinavian Gifts and White’s Party Store were quickly aboard. The list goes on, and in this issue, you’ll find them. Bless them.

Writers and Artists
One thing Sandra and I were sure of as we mulled the magazine’s prospects in her suburban Detroit living room during the winter of 1986, was the talent in Marquette County.
MM always has relied on freelancers such as photographer Tom Buchkoe and writer Leonard Heldreth who appeared in the first issue and are still with the magazine today. Dick Armstrong, the distribution muscle, also has been a trooper.
While never, of course, being paid their true worth, contributors were paid fairly—in fact, twenty years later, those rates are comparable in real dollars to other present-day magazines. Many good writers and artists submit work, and I hope they have enjoyed seeing it published in these pages as much as have the readers.
Full-time paid staff consisted of me and an assistant, and in my later years, an ad salesperson.

Paste-Up
When the editorial and advertising content was ready, production sprang into action. Our tools—from my first issue in 1987 to my last issue in 1992—were X-Acto knives, Sharpies, masking tape, transparency paper, a hot waxer and a burnisher. Columns of type and the ads were waxed to paste-up board, then boxed up with an envelope of photos and sent to the Soo for printing.
Although the production was old school, the music we played during those intense hours was contemporary, and vital, as music, coffee and Diet Coke were our fuel.
I remember playing The Eurhythmics, Sonic Youth and Big Audio Dynamite. Mari Fleet, the NMU graphic art graduate who responded to an ad calling for a “Marquette Monthly Slave,” e-mailed me her paste-up/boom-box recollections:
“Braindead Sound Machine, Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby, got the wax flowing. The Pretenders’ Greatest Hits. My Life with Thrill Kill Cult. Brian Eno and John Cale’s Wrong Way Up. The Cramps. Laibach. And always, as I remember it, in the wee hours of the morning (but not until there was an end in sight and we could relax a bit), The Art of Noise’s The Ambient Collection played repeatedly until the damned thing was taped safely in its box. At which point the sun was generally rising over the Lower Harbor.”
After so many years, Fleet, a.k.a. “Smudge,” still rolls out the paste-up attitude.

Crime and Curto
I’m not sure which is more notorious. When the Crime Map, with its scattering of circles, squares and stars first appeared, I got calls. Some people thought it would give the wrong impression to tourists. I replied that most tourists would look at that map and marvel at how low our city’s crime was.
The first time I heard the words “calling my attorney” was after Don Curto poked fun at the name of a muffin. Don signed on to do the food column after we ran into each other in the Frame Factory. I knew him as the Bagel & Ladle guy, and he asked me whether I was the person publishing Marquette Monthly. I nodded. Then he said, “Love it. But the food column is terrible.”
“Why don’t you write it?” was my reply. This taught me to be very careful about making similar offers in the future.

MM Miscellanea
Within a year after debuting, the magazine’s vibe was progressively good and a tad irreverent; its circulation and ad sales were increasing seemingly under its own power.
The office was moved from the house to the second floor of the Wattsson & Wattsson building, where one afternoon while Babette and I were chatting, a woman walked in. Dressed smartly in a tweed cape and a red beret with matching gloves and lipstick, she said, “I read your magazine.” (Here I sort of remember her adding, “enjoy it,” but that may be fantasy.) She handed me a copy, saying, “you misspelled a word.”
Then she turned around and left. I opened it to find the word circled in red ink and, believe me, I’ve never dropped a raccoon’s consonant since.
It was in that office where late one evening I was startled to notice a man outside the window. He waved to me from his cherry picker and I took a break to watch him move down Washington Street, stringing Christmas lights.
A few years later, MM found itself in the middle of new Marquette tradition. With expanded offices now on the third floor, Smudge was doing paste-up during the first UP200.
There weren’t many people downtown when the last few teams crossed the finish line, so when a racer’s name was announced, she’d throw the window open and yell congratulations.
In the mix of this, I fell in love with Jeff Eaton, who happened to be city editor for the Mining Journal. Not long after, he enrolled in Northern’s English graduate program, as well as becoming a contributor to MM. One night near the end of his studies, he came home and said he’d been offered a chance to participate in an exchange program between NMU and a Chinese teacher’s college. Did I want to go? I said yes, and in August 1992, the magazine was sold to Pat Ryan-O’Day shortly before Jeff, Ellie and I left for a year in Chengdu, Sichuan, PRC. Jeff’s parting “Arts in These Parts” column was about township participation in library funding.

MM and NC
For me, the story of MM will forever be tied to that of New Coke. With much ballyhoo, in 1985 Coca-Cola, Inc. abandoned its formula for something that tasted like Pepsi. In the buzz of millions of dollars invested in market research and advertising, New Coke failed spectacularly and was pulled from the shelves three months after its debut.
Whereas MM, that nimble Kick the Can of a magazine, with zero spent on market research (well, $1 on market research—while in Ann Arbor, I had written to area media asking them for rate cards) and the same on advertising, has grown into a trusted community friend. I take this twenty-year-anniversary as proof of Schumacher’s theory.

Copper Country Visit
Jeff and I recently made a trip to the Kinnunen family gravesite in Nisula, where my father, Reino, and frequent MM contributor, mother Sylvia, are buried. Although best known for her historical columns, early on, mom created the crossword puzzles.
She drew them on yellow legal paper and then I’d painstakingly Press-Type every ‘answer’ letter in a grid I’d run off on the computer. I remember us marveling at the elegance of the crossword software program I’d finally tracked down.
From Nisula, Jeff and I drove to Hancock for a pasty lunch and a stop in the Keweenaw Co-op. Ever the champion, I told the deli clerk, “Saw your ad in Marquette Monthly.”
He smiled. How sweet it is.
—Mary Kinnunen

Editor’s Note: Mary Kinnunen is the founding editor and publisher of MM. Mary and Jeff live in Rhinelander (Wisconsin).

Historic downtown building to change hands
By 10:00 a.m. on a weekday, it’s business as usual in downtown Marquette. Cars zip down Washington Street on a quest for a good parking spot; pedestrians window shop, deciding where their travels will take them that day, and members of the workforce look out the window at Lake Superior and daydream.
A little ways down on Baraga Avenue, laughter emanates from inside Cleary Boat and Motor as it has for the past thirty-six years. Inside, motor repairman Bill Cleary, eighty-four, shares a pot of java with his daily “coffee clutch”—friends Jack Brugman, Sue Johnson and whoever else happens to pop in throughout the morning.
Coffee cans full of small tools and Cool Whip containers brimming with spare motor parts fill the store and lend evidence to the hundreds of motors and projects that have come through Cleary’s throughout the years. But within the next month, Cleary is closing up shop for good.
“It’s a sad time for me,” he said. “I’ve been working all these years and all of a sudden I’m shutting it down.”
The history of Cleary’s begins forty-three years ago in Harvey. He began the business with his brother, Barry.
“My brother wanted to fix things, but he didn’t know how to fix anything,” said Cleary, laughing. “I could fix anything because I had the ability.”
When the Cleary brothers first opened for business, they sold boat motors, snow blowers, lawn tractors, trucks and cars, he said. They also served as a distributor for Mirrocraft, a company that produces and develops aluminum and pleasure boats.
After a fire burned both the business and the attached house, the Clearys moved their venture near the old Lawrence Furniture store in Marquette, which burned down shortly after and heavily damaged the Clearys’ new store.
“At that point, I figured I’d better get the hell out of there,” Cleary said, and in 1971 he purchased the building where Cleary’s now stands at 130 West Baraga.
“This building is 154 years old,” he said, looking nostalgically around his shop.
Barry Cleary left the boat motor business in 1973 to pursue a career in real estate. Since then, in an age where big business prevails, Cleary has made it a point to keep his shop modest and relatively unchanged.
“I’ve kept it pretty level and just stayed with what I could afford,” he said.
Watching Cleary spray a can of air into a motor under repair, Johnson said Cleary’s knowledge of his craft has amazed her countless times.
“Bill can identify the make of a motor just by its color,” she said. “Or it’ll be something they haven’t been able to fix for years, and he will go right to a box and pull out the part they need.”
The future of the building lies in the hands of Kim Smith-Potts and her husband, Mike. Smith-Potts owns Garden Bouquet and Design and plans to move her business into the Cleary building.
“My ethic philosophy with business and personal life is seeing the beauty in old things and trying to resurrect and bring forth the beauty in old things,” she said. “For me, moving my business into that building is honoring its history, and I think it’s a perfect match.”
As to what businesses were housed there before Cleary’s, Smith-Potts said she’s heard it was everything from a saloon to a brothel.
“The way you go into the basement, it looks like it was set up to take horses and carriages,” she said.
Garden Bouquet and Design is a full-service florist that specializes in organic flowers and custom designed arrangements, Smith-Potts said.
“In terms of being a florist, we approach it more as an art form,” she said. “We want each design to have an element of surprise and be something that people don’t normally see.”
She and Mike grow the organic flowers themselves at their Skandia farm and are anticipating moving into Marquette to find a broader market for them.
“Part of my hope and vision is increasing my volume and allowing people to purchase them wholesale as well as being able to offer them year-round,” she said.
Smith-Potts has owned her business for almost three years and said part of the reason she is interested in the Cleary building is because of its humble size.
“It’s the same square-footage of where I am now,” she said. “I like it. I don’t want to be huge.”
In terms of the moving process, Smith-Potts added that they’ve finished phase one of the environmental assessment of the building and are starting phase two.
“We’re looking to see if any clean-up is needed since it was a repair shop,” she said. “From a liability standpoint, we’re making sure there’s no environmental hazard.”
She said the purchase agreement has been signed and the land contract is in the works, with full ownership turnover expected this month.
“We’re excited,” she said. “We’ve got a key!”
Becoming a part of downtown Marquette is not just about business for Smith-Potts. She said she and her husband are also impressed with its overall architecture and culture.
“Marquette’s done a really nice job capturing and enhancing the older stone buildings; I like complimentary and contrasting kind of architecture,” she said. “The combination of natural beauty and a live culture with music is really interesting to us.”
In the meantime, Cleary and his entourage are content to sip steaming coffee while swapping memories.
“I used to have a charter boat on Lake Superior in the ’70s, but it ruined fishing for me. There are so many people who don’t know how to fish,” Cleary said, sharing a story with Johnson and Brugman. “The only people who know how to fish are the women and children; the women get their money’s worth and the children just love to do it.”
“What were the men doing?” asked Johnson, preparing to return to her job writing parking tickets for the Marquette Police Department.
“Drinking beer,” Cleary said.
Cleary was born in Marquette, but his family relocated to Detroit after his father, a tool and dye maker, returned to the States after World War I.
“My mom loved it here and wanted to stay here, but there were no jobs here,” he said.
The course of Cleary’s life began at a young age after he met a man named Bernie Olson.
“He took me under his wing and taught me how to fix stuff,” he said.
Now that he’s retiring, Cleary said he isn’t sure what’s next for him.
“I’m sure people will still call (to have their motors fixed), but after this, I won’t have the room anymore,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what I will do when this goes.”
“He’s got a rocking chair at home and the TV’s right there (in front of it),” Brugman said.
—Becky Korpi

Network helps residents lend a hand
The people of the Upper Peninsula are known for lending a hand where needed. However, oftentimes residents who want to volunteer don’t know where to offer their services. Likewise, many community organizations need help, but don’t know where to find volunteers.
Sue Belanger, volunteer coordinator at the Alger-Marquette Community Action Board (AMCAB) and coordinator of Lake Superior Youth and Family Center programs of Child and Family Services of the U.P., has experienced this dilemma.
“We always need volunteers at both organizations, but more than once, I’ve heard people say they would have helped a lot sooner, if they would have known about the need,” Belanger said.
Enter the U.P. Volunteer Network, a new initiative that brings volunteers and organizations across the U.P. together. Now when someone asks “How can I help?” there’s an answer. And when an organization says “We need help!” there’s an easy way to get the word out.
The U.P. Volunteer Network is a new variation on a tried and true concept—a volunteer center. Like its name implies, the network is a collaborative effort. It expands on the work of the two existing “brick and mortar” volunteer centers in the U.P., the Volunteer Center and Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) of the Dickinson Iron Community Services Agency, and the United Way Volunteer Center of Chippewa County.
These centers will continue to serve their communities, and as members of a core group of partners that make up the U.P. Volunteer Network, they will help serve the entire U.P.
“The U.P. Volunteer Network will strengthen volunteer efforts across the region by building a stronger sense of community and camaraderie amongst our residents,” said Kristina Beamish, director of the United Way Volunteer Center of Chippewa County. “Nearly all of our citizens hold strongly to serving their neighbor, and this will help us celebrate it by building awareness of the opportunities.”
Other core partners in the network include the Great Lakes Center for Youth Development, which is the lead agency and fiscal agent, U.P. 2-1-1, RSVP of Delta, Menominee, Schoolcraft and Marinette counties, and RSVP of Marquette County.
Like volunteer centers across the nation, the U.P. Volunteer Network strives to meet three essential services:
• A Web-based searchable volunteer-matching system that allows individuals and organizations to access and promote volunteer opportunities
• Volunteer management training for organizations
• A program or event that heightens awareness of volunteering in the community and recognizes community volunteers
The cornerstone of the network is the Web and phone-based 1-800-Volunteer system, which helps match volunteers with the needs of organizations.
By logging onto 1-800-Volunteer.org organizations can post and update their volunteer opportunities. Volunteers are able to review and respond to those opportunities.
Organizations are able to manage volunteer schedules and communicate automatically with their volunteers through custom e-mails, reminders and thank you notes. They can verify hours of volunteer service and run reports on volunteer activity to show the effect the organization has on addressing and solving the needs of their community and how volunteers contribute to those results.
Volunteers can receive e-mail notifications of opportunities that match their interests or availability, manage their personal volunteer schedule and record their volunteer service hours.
1-800-Volunteer.org is available twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year and is free to organizations and volunteers. It is a service of the Points of Light Foundation and the Volunteer Center National Network made available in the U.P. through subscription by the Chippewa and Dickinson Iron volunteer centers and the U.P. Volunteer Network.
Volunteers who prefer using the phone to find out about volunteer opportunities can call 1-800-Volunteer and speak directly to a representative who can tell them what opportunities are available and help them find ones that match their qualifications, interests and availability.
If a volunteer calls 1-800-Volunteer from Dickinson, Iron, Chippewa, Luce or Mackinac counties, they will be connected with a representative from the corresponding volunteer center. From anywhere else in the U.P., they will be connected with the U.P. 2-1-1 Call Center in Escanaba.
The mission of U.P. 2-1-1, part of U.P. Commission for Area Progress (UPCAP), is to provide easily accessible, responsive and professional information and assistance to U.P. citizens and families in need of human, health and supportive services.
Terry Thomma, 2-1-1 Call Center project coordinator, says that 2-1-1 and 1-800-Volunteer are a natural fit.
“There are many individuals in the Upper Peninsula who are interested in volunteering their time to assist children, adults, senior citizens and families in need,” Thomma said. “Providing easy access is critically important in linking volunteers to volunteer opportunities. We believe U.P. 2-1-1 will provide that immediate and easy access.”
To help the U.P. Volunteer Network get off the ground, U.P. 2-1-1 has used its extensive data base of U.P. organizations to help “populate” the 1-800-Volunteer data base. 2-1-1 has sent out U.P. Volunteer Network registration forms and volunteer opportunity description forms to organizations throughout the U.P. for inclusion in 1-800-Volunteer.org
Upon receiving the completed forms, 2-1-1 will enter the information into 1-800-Volunteer.org for the organizations.
If an organization has not received the forms, but would like to, they can contact Thomma at 786-4701.
Using 1-800-Volunteer.org is easy, but to help organizations realize the service’s full potential, the U.P. Volunteer Network is hosting regional training sessions. The first training will be offered during the U.P. Nonprofit Conference on October 19 at Northern Michigan University. Information about the conference and a registration form can be found at www.glcyd.org
Belanger looks forward to using 1-800-Volunteer.org
“It looks like it will be very useful in recruiting and managing our volunteers,” Belanger said. “What a great way to let volunteers know what we have available. The reporting aspect will be very beneficial when it comes to grant proposal writing. The automated reminders to volunteers will come in handy too.”
The idea of a U.P.-wide volunteer network took root, interestingly enough, during a meeting in Indiana.
Judy Watson Olson, president of the Great Lakes Center for Youth Development, was with a Michigan contingent at an America’s Promise conference in Indianapolis including Diana Rodriguez Algra, director of the Volunteer Centers of Michigan and Kyle Caldwell, then CEO and President of ConnectMichigan Alliance. The mission of the Alliance is to promote and strengthen a lifelong ethic of service and civic engagement through the support of community building initiatives. The group began talking about how better to serve U.P. volunteer needs.
“We started brainstorming about how to create a model that would serve the entire U.P.,” Watson Olson said. “We knew there was funding that was becoming available for Michigan volunteer center start-up projects. So we convened a meeting of community leaders back in the U.P., and they generated great ideas and enthusiasm.”
The U.P. Volunteer Network is funded in part with a grant from the Volunteer Centers of Michigan-Volunteer Investment Grants Volunteer Center Start-Up Program, part of ConnectMichigan Alliance. Additional funding comes from the Community Foundation of the U.P. and the George W. Romney Endowment Fund overseen by the Marquette Community Foundation and United Way of Marquette County.
“The U.P. Volunteer Network is a cutting-edge solution to the challenges of today’s volunteer recruitment issue,” said Caldwell, now CEO and president of Michigan Nonprofit Association, which includes the Volunteer Centers of Michigan as an affiliate. “The network is working to get the information and resources for volunteer engagement as close to the volunteer as possible utilizing existing networks, common meeting places, libraries for example, and the World Wide Web.  It is a great mix of old and new technologies to solve a critical community need—citizen engagement for community problem solving.”
Gary LaPlant, executive director of the Community Foundation of the U.P., said his organization is pleased to be a financial partner in the network.
“All nonprofits in the U.P. rely on volunteers to conduct their important work in each community,” LaPlant said. “This network will be an important tool for nonprofits as they recruit volunteers for their organizations.”
Additional partners in the U.P. Volunteer Network include Northern Michigan University, Superiorland Library Cooperative, Peter White Public Library and the Western U.P. RSVP.

Volunteering: Good for the community ...and the volunteer
Volunteering means different things to different people, but there’s no question that it’s beneficial to the community and to the volunteers themselves.
“Volunteers are essential in any community, but especially in more rural areas like the U.P.,” said Kristin Sommerfeld, communications director with the Dickinson-Iron Volunteer Center and RSVP. “We hear over and over again from organizations in our area about how they depend on volunteers and would not be able to offer their services without them.
“We also need to remember the value of volunteering to the volunteer,” Sommerfeld said. “Doing good for others is a great way to do good for yourself. Our senior volunteers especially report that they feel better physically and emotionally when they are busy volunteering.”
The U.P. Volunteer Network currently is exploring ideas for peninsula-wide recognition of volunteers and is open to suggestions from the community.
“This network is a great example of people working together to make everyone stronger,” said Todd Essendrup, volunteer services director of the Dickinson-Iron Volunteer Center and RSVP. “Members of the network can share information and best practices and everyone will benefit… the staff, the volunteers, the organizations looking for volunteers and the people those organizations are helping in each community.”
Watson Olson said the hope with the network is to provide a web of support and resources so even the smallest communities will have increased access to volunteer opportunities.
“If we can do this, we’ll have hit a home run,” she said.
For more information about the U.P. Volunteer Network, or to offer suggestions, call 228-8919, ext. 26 or e-mail lremsburg@glcyd.org
—Linda Remsburg

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