NEW!

Why I never Hunt Deer

    It was opening day of deer season 1964. I drove out north of Ishpeming where I had my blind built on the edge of a giant cedar swamp. I had just got seated in my blind when the biggest buck I ever saw came waltzing in about 30 yards away from me, I couldn’t have missed if I closed my eyes. So, I slowly took aim and . . . click. What da hey?!! Da buck looks at me briefly and goes back to eatin on the bait pile. I take aim again
and . . . click. Nothing.

    I started examining my gun and the shells thinking it’s probably a bad batch of shells, when I notice the buck walking towards me. Sweating shaking and fumbling, I raise the gun once more and . . . click. Just then I realized what the problem was . . . I forgot to load the gun! I was steaming mad, I grabbed my rifle and ran out screaming, hoping I might get him across the forehead wit it. Just as my rifle was whizzing towards his head, he ducks and I shatter the stock on a tree that was just on the other side of his head. The buck looks at me, shakes his head and jogs off toward the swamp. “Oh no you don’t,” I said and took off after him, flying like da wind.

    The chase kept up steady for 3 or 4 miles through swamp and hills, the buck running just fast enough for me to keep up. Pretty soon, I started huffing and puffing and stumbling on my ass. Completely out of breath, I finally collapsed against a tree. Who did I think I was? Hawkeye? There was no way I was going to get this buck without a gun. So I started hoofing it back to the truck, back through the swamp, over a big maple ridge, through a huge field and into another cedar swamp. Coming into this second swamp, I started realizing that nothing looked familiar, and that maybe I was lost. And so like any good woodsman would do in my position and disregarding everything I learned, I panicked and took off running in any old direction I could. In my disorientation, I was getting tangled in tag elders, slamming into trees, tripping on roots and at one point I fell into an ice cold creek up to my neck!

    The cold water sobered me up a little to take stock of my situation. I figured that first I had to get out of my wet cloths, so I took them off and hung them in a tree, and dug in the pockets for matches to build a fire. That plan was soon extinguished when I found my only matches in the front pocket of my wet overalls completely soaked through. I stood there freezing in my longjohns, shivering like mad with my lips turning blue. I didn’t make it more than a few feet when I jumped over a big old cedar log and on top of a brush pile that had a big nasty bear sleeping under it!

    Up jumps that nasty bugger growling and showing his razor teeth. Well, it didn’t take much more than to get my feet moving the hell out of there! He took off after me like I was his first meal he’d seen in months. It felt like 3 hours went by and that bear was still chasing me, and at one point he was about to take a bite out of my ass, when my saving grace came . . . up ahead sitting on a stump eating a pasty and crying was a “Troll” hunter who was lost as well. That bear must have gotten a whiff of that pasty because the next time I looked back, the bear was tearing off after that “Troll” . . . Relieved, I stood there shivering and starving.

    I checked around the stump to see if that apple knocker dropped any crumbs of pasty, but all I ended up finding was a stump full of frozen mushrooms . . . the kind we always picked in the fall. I figured that since they were frozen that they must still be good, and at that point I was past the point of caring, so I woofed them down in a matter of seconds. It didn’t take but five minutes for my stomach to start turning like a washing machine and the hallucinations to start. By some dumb luck, after wandering around in a psycedelic stupor for another hour, I stumbled onto the main road, about 6 miles from where I had parked the truck.

    By the time I reached the truck, I stood in disbelief at that big old swamp buck standing next to the bed and eating the apples out of the box I had back there. He took one look at me and started laughing at me! I couldn’t take it anymore. I hauled back and threw my rifle as hard as I could at him and it missed and smashed out the tail light. I ran to the truck hoping to get in and run the bugger over, but when I felt for the key I realized that the keys were in my hunting pants hanging on that tree back in the woods. I snapped. I took my rifle and started beating the hell out of my truck.

    When I got out of Bell Hospital a week later, I cut my deer license into million pieces and sent it back to the DNR along with the hospital bill for frost bite and food poisoning. This is why I don’t go deer hunting anymore.

NEW!

The Gunga Dins

I formed the Gunga Dins in 1959 when I was a freshman doing time at ol’ Ishpeming High School. That place was a strick no nonsense, toe the mark, keep your mouth shut school prison system. It was the perfect place for a guy like me with my D average, fool around, rebellious, trouble-making, disrupt the class, clown persona. I was fortunate to be put in classes with 35 year old draft dodgers, thiefs, crooks, hoodlums, screwed up rich kids, and brainless wonders who all had D averages and didn’t give a shit. The jailers that tried to teach us were mean and tough and didn’t think twice about kicking your ass if you got out of line. If you could pull something off on these guys you were treated good by the rest of the convicts in your class and the word spread around that you were an OK dude.
One day, Zorro Zalic told me I should form a resistance group, a secret organization that would resist and disrupt in a more organized level . . . you know like forge hall passes and sick day excuses, doctors appointments and funeral leave. It was a great idea! So a day later, The Gunga Dins were formed. Meetings were held in the library under the guise of the “Ishpeming High School Reading Club.” We had 12 main leaders or Dins as they were called, who were all freshman, and each Din had their own pack from their neighborhoods: Salsbury, Cleveland Location, Lake Bancroft, Tangle Town, Humboldt, Diorite, Junction, Barnum, Nebraska, West end Dago Town, Lake Angeline, Deer Lake, and the 8th Edition. Organized like that, The Gunga Dins accomplished some great feats. Once we carried a VW into the school and put it in the main hall just before first bell. We got up on the roof of the school and bomb barded the teachers with water balloons when they came up to the main door. We hid in the school one night and turned the pool water down to just above freezing. That was a good one because all the guys who swam the next day froze their bums off and their family jewels shrunk up pretty bad.
The warden got wind of our secret organization when some of the guys from the sophomore class got locked in their lockers all day. The little weasels turned in some of our members and told the warden they were Gunga Dins. Shortly after that episode the sophomores formed their own organization called La Mumba Gunks. We always had a sneaking suspicion that these guys were working directly with the warden gathering information because soon after their formation, our meetings of the IHS Reading Club was tossed out of the library for good. Thus began the cold war at IHS. Spies were everywhere. We couldn’t get anything started without one of the jailers coming into the boys’ toilet and breaking up our meetings or tossing us out of the basketball games because someone lit off a stink bomb.
We knew something had to be done about La Mumba Gunks. Most of La Mumba Gunk guys were going with girls from our class, so we played hard ball and invited the toughest women in our class to be honorary members of the Gunga Dins. My girl buddy Fran, who was 6’ 2” and could play frontline for the packers, organized the girls into a dating spy network that kept track of the top leaders of La Mumba Gunks. Through them, we would find out where those guys were at all times so we could blame them for things we did. One time, Fran got a bunch of bloomers from the Salvation Army and decorated the main school hallway with them. She wrote all the top leader’s from La Mumba Gunks names in them and what girls that they took them off. Of course Fran put down all the cheerleaders names and the stuck up babes she hated. Boy did they catch hell for that one. I sure miss Fran. Eh Fran, get a hold me and we’ll go and get all buzzed up on peach and honey again like we used to.
Looking back, I had a lot of fun and laughs with those guys in the Gunga Dins Society. We were misfits and outsiders that didn’t quite fit in . . . the underdogs that gravitated toward each other. Most of them ended up coming back to Ishpeming and stopping in at the Tourist Trap to visit with old Hoolie again: The Butler Brothers, Dick Shorland, Eddy V, Bobby Zalic, Vito, Dave Delongchamp and all the rest of the crazy buggers. I hope things are going good for youse guys. GUNGA DINS FOREVER, EH.
“WHERE DAT DAMN GUNGA DIN WIT DAT WATER?
FETCH ME SOME WATER DIN, I NEED A DRINK
HURRY FAST COZ DOSE CRAZY LA MUMBA GUNKS ARE COMING AT US AGAIN!”
-Din Da Water Boy, IHS 1963

NEW!

Dating in the 50’s and 60’s

    Dating in the 50’s and 60’s
Getting a date in Ishpeming in the 1950’s was bleak. If you tried to date a woman from another location like Champion or Barnum, the guys would show no mercy. If they caught you with one of their women they would either kick your ass or stone you out of their neighborhood. It must have been like that in Negaunee too, because the Negaunee use to come to Ishpeming to burn, pillage, and steal our women. Because of this, we had an unwritten understanding with Negaunee that no one would get their asses kicked if we dated each other’s women. It was a good thing too, coz all of us in my neighborhood were getting sick of every time we had a date, it ending with us running while rock hit us in the back of the head. You see, none of us were fighters so we had to instead learn to run fast, and as a result of this, most of Ishpeming’s best track stars came out of our neighborhood. We never got any dates but boy could we run.
When I think back to those days, it seemed that most of the guys and girls dated people from other towns. It was like it was more exotic to date someone from another town I guess. Hell, I married a women from Palmer. When I was in high school we use to go out and stay at friends camps out in Lake Michigamee and go to the dances up there. Ronnie Neff had a boat so we use to get up real early and hit all the boats parked in front of other camps and steal enough gas to go to those dances. Man, they had some great looking women up there. Lots of guys from Ishpeming ended up marrying women from Michigamee.
When I turned 18, I hit the road with my band that included Ernie Brown, Jim Meyskins, and Wild Bill Morcom. The first place we played back in 1964 was a college joint full of students, bikers, gays, crazies, and the like. Coming out of Ishpeming the boys and I got a real fast education on the ways of the world. I was sitting at the bar between sets when a gorgeous woman called me over to her table. She told me to sit down and talk, so I complied. She told me she really liked drummers and I told her that I liked anyone who liked drummers. Things continued in that vein until soon enough I felt a tap on my shoulder. Standing behind me was this huge behemoth of a biker woman that was built and looked like a man. She told me to get the hell out of her chair, that’s her woman I was talking to. I guess she didn’t like drummers.
We had a hell of a good time playing and the women seemed to come easier when you were in a band. Some of the backwater towns we played in had never seen a live rock band before, so these women were all over us like we were the Beatles or something. We all stayed single though, because back then going steady with someone was like being married and you couldn’t do anything without your woman finding out. If you were dating a Negaunee girl and she found out that you were messing around, she’d call you all kinds of bad names, that would make sailors jealous, and then beat the hell out of you.
In the end though, I was fortunate to marry a great woman from Palmer. She could out drink and out fight any of my buddies so they were really jealous of me. My advice to young guys now-a-days is don’t get married ‘til you find a woman that is a great friend and lots of fun to hang with coz in the long run looks don’t mean a thing.

NEW!

A Yooper Contemplates Marriage

    Dere are certain attributes dat a yooper guy looks for in a woman when he decides to give up da single life and get hitched. Can she rebuild a pickup truck motor? Does she know how to run and maintain a snow blower? When you fart does she give you a high five sign and say good one? Will she help you hoist up your buck on a buck pole without complaining? She can't look like the women on steroids we see in some of dose exercise commercials, but she's gotta have enough muscle to help you on da other end of dat transmission she's puttin' in da pickup for ya.

When you get married, your buddies understand what's up...dey don't laugh at da fact dat your new wife has a mustache. In fact, dey're all envious of you because she can out drink and out fight all of dem!

When I married my wife, she had a better job den I had. I didn't feel lowly because she owned a snow machine and I couldn't afford one. I didn't feel inferior because she had a new pickup with a camper on da back and a trailer wit an 18 foot boat for fishin'. I didn't feel degraded cause she owned two ATV 4 wheelers and I couldn't even afford one. Hell, I married her and boy, were da guys jealous!

She loves da new snow blower I got her for Christmas. Now she dissent have to shovel and scoop dat snow. We're puttin on an extra large garage in back so she can pull maintenance on da vehicles inside instead of freezin her buns off outside. I can live wit da satisfaction dat no one ever said I was a tight ass wit my wife's money.

It was our 40th wedding anniversary Saturday and I thought we should do something romantic for dis one, ...ya know, go out and eat, drink and dance da night away. So we searched Da Mining Journal to see where da biggest wedding reception was. We found one at da Ishpeming Armory. Hell, we walked in bearing a gift for da bride and groom, and dey didn't have a clue as to if we were related to his or her side, dey just shook our hands and smiled. Boy, what a wedding! Free food! Free drinks! A good polka band and lots of fights! What more could a yooper couple ask for on dere anniversary, eh?

So dere ya go...40 years and still cookin'. Take it from Hoolie, dat stuff you do in da back seat of da chevy wit da girlfriend doesn't last long...when you get married, make sure you married one like I did!

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