Thursday, January 17, 2019

The Northwoods Reader by Cully Gage (1977)

Professor Van Riper here at Western Michigan University wrote a series of books as Cully Gage about northern Michigan or the Upper Peninsula, where he grew up. I checked out the book from the library with the cover you see here, and as far as I can tell, this 1977 edition is the first edition. I was hoping to put these stories into our institutional repository, but it turns out that new editions of this and his other volumes are still selling today.

Though fictionalized, you can tell this characters were based on real people he met in his childhood and is such a wonderful storyteller. He treats all with respect, be it an enthusiastic young English teacher that tries to bring culture to the town or the town drunk. You see the hard life led by people who had to contend with long winters. You see the variety of settlers - Finns, Danes, Irish, French, Native Americans, etc. The introduction of one of his stories explains a lot:

"It always seemed that our town had more than its share of assorted nuts, eccentrics and madmen, but perhaps the impression stemmed only from their greater visibility. In our little village, everyone knew everyone else and everything about everyone else and about everything that had ever happened to them back through at least three generations."

Just so I don't forget, the stories were about:
  • Big Finn farmer Jaako who falls in love and courts French store clerk Josette, who dreams of something more than hard work on a farm
  • Chivaree - a custom of people greeting a newlywed couple's first night with a lot of noise and the man has to pay to make it stop - this is what they did to an older couple that got together.
  • Flame Symphony - Quiet Elly and bright Carl both did not fit in, but found each other. He created flame symphonies out of different types of wood
  • Whitewater Pete - an old logger that befriended our author as a kid
  • Reformation of Billy Bones - the town drunk that stayed sober for a while
  • Bats - this was funny, as I read this about a day after we found a bat in our office and it scared a few of my colleagues enough to have them huddle in a closed office. All the myths about bats came out in this story.
  • Mrs. Murphy Gets a Bath - another crazy inhabitant never bathed and lived with her livestock. Cully's dad is a doctor and gets her to a hospital to be washed up while the town fixes and cleans her house.
  • U.P. Bakkaball - a winter game with no rules
  • Civilization Comes to Our Town - this it the story about the schoolteacher who tried to bring culture to the town
  • Redhanded - no one local ever stole, but an outsider did start stealing from them and how they dealt with him
  • Old Napoleon - this is about a huge buck that Cully's dad promises to get every hunting season. This is the only story that comes out of Cully's childhood and has him bring his own son out to hunt and has his dad get to 94 years
  • The Paddygog - the blacksmith who celebrated St. Patrick's Day
  • The Prophet - Pierre was French Canadian and huge, so that some called him Paul Bunyan. He was good at predicting weather and other things. One year he promised a long hard winter into June. It started hard, then got nice ane everybody planted their gardens just to have them killed in the June snows.
  • King of the Poachers - Laf poached animals way beyond the allotted limits, but he provided a lot of people with food too
  • Valentine's Day- how Cully gets two shy people together
  • Grampa - Grampa was Cully's friend and taught him a lot of things, especially to enjoy life - he just turned meek when back with the family where mean Grandma bossed him around
  • Old Blue Balls - There were two sides of town and the kids always fought. Old Man Donegal was a strict superintendent that seemed to always be able to get the best of the kids, but one time they got him, but also ended the feud between the uptown and downtown kids
  • Ominum Aurem - great story about a hermit miner that would come to town a couple of times a year. He got along with Cully's dad, as they both loved Latin.

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