FTV: Cha Cha Changes – Part 2
In Part 1 of Cha Cha Changes (again, my apologies to David Bowie for borrowing his song title), we began running down what Ontonagon was like in 1975 when I first arrived as the new Junior High Geography/Earth Science teacher in the Ontonagon Area Schools. This article was begun as a presentation made at the April 2023 Historical Society dinner held at the Holy Family Catholic Church. It was never intended to be a two part article but I heard so many interesting stories and comments after the original presentation, I had no choice but to expand it into a two parter. Part One covered many of the businesses that were operating back in 1975 in comparison to the ones that occupy the downtown district today. We went through a long list of restaurants and bars, so it only seems right to continue here with a bit about the local houses of worship. As I mentioned in Part One, this is not meant to be a comprehensive history, just my musings about what I remember about the village when I arrived in these parts.
I cannot say if Ontonagon ever had as many churches as saloons, but there have been a fair number of both over the years. Long established houses of worship still in operation include Holy Family Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, the Assembly of God (now affiliated with the North Iron Church in Negaunee), Siloa Lutheran, St. Paul’s Lutheran, and Redeemer Free Lutheran. The last church occupies the former Presbyterian Church building on the corner of US45 and M38. After the Episcopil Church on Houghton Street closed, it was remodeled as a private residence. The Little Pasty Shoppe was found in the basement of the former Baptist church turned Apostolic Lutheran Church (while the main floor is essentially an empty shell). The Holy Family Catholic Church on the corner of Michigan and Pine was well established by the time I came to town. The original iteration of this Catholic Church was located at the corner of Greenland Road and Parker Avenue.
Each of the active churches have longer histories than can be related here. Bruce Johanson did expansive histories of these churches in the Herald early this summer so you can check them out for more details. I am fascinated how the Holy Family church received its name. According to Johanson, the original church stood at the corner of Parker Avenue and Greenland Road. This building replaced the first Catholic in town, St. Patrick’s in the Sand church When the new church at Parker Avenue and Greenland Road was constructed in 1894, there was some kerfuffle about what the new name should be. With the large Irish population among the early residents, the St. Patrick’s name was in keeping with their heritage. By 1894, a sizable Polish population had moved to the area and there was a spirited debate about what to call the new church. Those of Polish origin wanted something Polish-sounding such as St. Stanislaus. The Bishop in Marquette interceded and reminded everyone that they were, after all, part of one big Holy Family. The name was carried over when the new church at Pine and Michigan was built. The Kingdom Hall and new Baptist Church on the Greenland Road were built not all that many years ago so the number of churches in town hasn’t decreased nearly as much as the number of saloons and eating establishments.
There was a slight renaissance period when the village began to expand to the east along the Greenland Road / M38 entry into town. First came the large IGA grocery store which also housed the Village Pharmacy (which had been established on River Street by Lou Pappas before the move). As I remembered it, the store was associated with the same Holiday corporation that runs the Holiday Station Stores across the midwest. The more people I asked, the less I was convinced my memory was correct until my wife finally discovered one of the woman she quilts with each week actually worked there. When she confirmed what I had suspected, the red and blue decorative band of ‘Holiday company colors’ that encircles the building made sense. It jogged my memory further as I recalled running into the former manager of the grocery store working at the Holiday Station store at the five corners. When I asked him why he was there, he had told me they grocery was changing to an IGA so he had transferred to the gas station rather than be uprooted to another location.
After giving the folks from the Historical Society my take on the new store by the courthouse,
Deb Kallunki gave me a version of the story I had tossed around earlier but had not used in my notes because I could not find anyone else who remembered it this way. According to Deb, her father Gordy Kallunki was the manager of the Fraki’s store downtown. She told me that it was a new Fraki’s store that was constructed by the courthouse. Her father was the manager until it was bought out by the above-mentioned Lou Pappas. Deb said, “Don’t feel bad – there have been at least two other authors who have written about the store and they both stated it was started by Lou Pappas even when I told them, ‘I know where my father worked!’” That is one of the great things about history – everyone remembers bits and pieces and sometimes the truth doesn’t come forth until multiple people share what they know. I can’t thank Deb enough for giving me enough information to keep me from thinking I had made the whole thing up in my head.
Even though the rest of the information Deb sent me happened twenty years before my arrival, I think it is detailed enough to share here with her permission: “The Quality Food Market was part of a chain of six stores across the Copper country, co-owned by Jack Lepisto and Ben Fraki. My dad [Gordon Kallunk] became the manager of the Ontonagon store in 1955. He left that job in 1980, when he bought the former Davison’s Corner Store on Mercury Street. In 1973, the partners split up, each taking three stores. Ben Fraki got the one in Ontonagon and changed the name to Fraki’s Finer Foods. In 1998, Fraki built the new store out by the courthouse. Later, Lou Pappas bought out Fraki and (I think) it became Festival Foods (my note: I am not sure if that name was used for the period of time when the store was associated with the Holiday corporation). Again, a big thank you to Deb for setting the record straight.
So the new grocery store actually underwent three transformations to become an IGA. Part of this very large grocery store was later remodeled and The Family Dollar store occupied about one quarter of the structure for many years. Eventually the Pat’s Supermarket chain out of Houghton took over the operation. More recently the Family Dollar store moved into a new facility across the highway and that part of the Pat’s Foods building has not been repurposed. The Campioni family (owners of a large chain of stores including Pat’s Foods) also operates the Ace/U-Save Hardware store downtown.
I had kind of lost track of the fact that at one time we had two competing IGA stores in town serviced by different IGA warehouses. Florian Mohar built the new IGA store on River Street that operated as a Jubilee Foods IGA. They even did promotions with a real live clown mascot known as Jubil the Clown on hand to pass out balloons and other trinkets. The ‘dueling IGA’ phase ended when the downtown store was first converted to a hardware/grocery and then later converted to a hardware only store. Having operated as a True Value and now as an ACE affiliated store, it has had almost as many corporate lives as the IGA up the road by the courthouse..
Family Dollar surprised many when they did not purchase the vacant Pamida building right next door to its new location on the edge of town. It was a great disappointment to many when Pamida closed after a short but successful run in Ontonagon, but it is a moot point. The parent corporation, ShopKo, eventually folded completely and all of their remaining stores went dark so the Pamida store would have had a short history anyway. The Ontonagon Pamida now serves as an indoor storage facility (the L’Anse store was converted into a church).
The new kid on the block, so to speak, would be the Dollar General store which was built on the approach to the new bridge. Rumor has it the brothers that own Family Dollar and Dollar General are feuding and as a ‘take that’ kind of corporate game plan, DG suddenly expanded and built many stores all over the place. Again, that is the only rumor I have heard on the subject so take it with a grain of salt.
We are still scratching our heads: Pamida plus Family Dollar plus Dollar General minus the now defunct Pamida chain equals two discount stores remaining in little Ontonagon. Then Family Dollar mysteriously closed due to some structural problem leaving only one discount store, the late coming Dollar General. One almost needs a scorecard to keep up with who is still in the game. As for if and when the Family Dollar store will reopen its doors, one only needs to check social media to find a dozen variations about what is going on. The latest version has the Family Dollar structure being razed and replaced with a completely new building that will operate as a Dollar Tree store.
There have been other changes in Ontonagon that have affected the local economy. The first was the final closure of the White Pine Mine in 1997. With the July 2021 purchase of the White Pine North copper project from Copper Range Company, there is a glimmer of hope for the revival of commercial mining in our county. The second major loss was the closure of the Smurfit-Stone paper mill on December 31, 2009. There were a few red herrings tossed about that S-S would entertain offers to sell the mill but all the while this ‘discussion’ was taking place, the mill was being torn down and sold for scrap. When it was announced the old mill site was being considered as a location for a biofuel production plant, hopes were raised but as of this writing, no ‘boots on the ground’ activity has been observed at the now vacant mill site.
Besides the obvious loss of employment for mine, mill, and woods workers, these events had another impact that is still echoing through White Pine and Ontonagon. When the new regional water system was built to make use of the water treatment facilities at the mine, cost projections included the two largest water users on the system – the mine and the paper mill. Without the income from those large consumers, the rest of us have been left to bear the burden of paying for the system. Saying the water bills in our area are high is more than a bit of an understatement.
Another hard to miss structure one sees driving toward the lake on River Street is the Lakeshore Fabricating plant. I returned to Northern Michigan University during the 1979-80 school year to complete my Master’s Degree. As the school population dropped, there were some staff reductions and I was first pink slipped at the end of the 1978-79 school year, and then offered a piecemeal schedule of leftover classes to keep me on staff. An agreement was reached for me to take a voluntary leave to finish my degree while leaving the door open for me to return for the 1980-81 year ‘if the picture improved’.
Formed in May of 1979, the Upper Peninsula Shipbuilding Company (UPSCO) was formed as a privately operated firm to build commercial tug/barge units. The influx of new people associated with this company proved to be just the ‘improvement’ my situation needed to boost the sagging school numbers. When my wife and I returned to Ontonagon in the summer of 1980, we were told, “Everyone is so excited about the shipyard and Ontonagon is going to see a lot of changes. We will be dealing with a whole different class of people who will be coming to town to run UPSCO.” I often thought about these statements when the scandal concerning some of the higher ups broke, leading to corporation name changes, reorganization, and the eventual folding of the entire operation. The bump in student numbers put me back into my normal teaching load if 7th and 8th grade Geography/Earth Science. Over the next three decades, I ended up adding Physical Science 9 (for 19 years) and later Science 6 to my duties but as short lived as the company may have been, I have UPSCO to thank for getting me back into my normal teaching duties in 1980-81. It is also good to now see Lakeshore doing more and more business at the end of River Street.
What I knew about the paper mill was summed up by the folks who responded to any complaints about the occasional odor that wafted across town. They simply said, “It is the smell of money.” Compared to the Celotex plant in L’Anse, which for a time emitted a noxious smell that required one to roll up their car windows when driving by on US41), I never gave the Ontonagon Mill much thought. The constant upgrading of the environmental controls on the plant stack emissions made it less and less noticeable as time went on. When we began taking the seventh graders on a yearly tour to see where some of their family members made their living, the kids were given the royal treatment by the mill operators who arranged the tours. Knowing what they did, how profitable the business was, and how environmentally responsible the mill was operated over the years, it is a crying shame it was shut down. It isn’t the first time the area has had the rug pulled out from under it, economically speaking, but reliving history (ie: having our fortunes dictated in some distant company boardroom) really does get old!
As long as we started with my employment at the Ontonagon Area Schools, that would be a fitting place to wrap up. When I arrived for my job interview, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the old three story high school turned junior high building and my former JH. The building I attended in Marquette was larger with a 7th and 8th grade population of around 1000 students. The layout of the three floors, however, was so similar it felt like going back in time. I wandered in the door and the first person I encountered was the late LeRoy Rogers who gave me a warm welcome to town and a quickie tour of the building. Principal Jim Ollila was my next introduction and we hit it off right from the get go. At the time, I did not know he had roots in Ramsey (between Wakefield and Bessemer) so perhaps my folk’s roots in Gogebic County was a plus.
In 1975, there were 1,700 students spread across the K – 6 schools in Mass / Greenland, Rockland, and the Ontonagon Elementary school that was attached to the JH (where I would be assigned) and the new high school building. The high school was just down Parker Avenue toward the golf course which was home to the 9-12 students and played host to the JH students for a couple of hours each day (classes like home ec, woodshop, and so forth). With the mine and mill booming, who could foresee that forty years later the district would shrink to less than 300 students and be consolidated into the one building on Parker Avenue? The Mass//Greenland and Rockland schools have been repurposed for community use. The old JH/elementary building in Ontonagon is now in the hands of the Village of Ontonagon with some miles to go before it, too, can be repurposed.
As for the future, I would love nothing more than to see an uptick in the local economy. What a wonderful problem it would be if the school district had to remodel again, this time to ease the overcrowding even a small surge in population could bring to the area!
Top Piece Video – Not Bowie, but certainly another great song about ‘Them Changes’ . . . the only problem? You will have to scroll ahead to the 14 minute mark to here the definitive Buddy Miles live version from ‘In Concert’ – the Band of Gypsies version is great, but I am not finding good video!