Smurfit-Stone

 Ontonagon, Michigan is a little town of about 1,800 VERY hearty souls resting on Lake Superior.  I think the ice goes out of the harbor sometime in July and returns the next week. We vacationed summers near there when I was in the "under 10" year old range and the big treat was on a day that was too grim to fish, we loaded up the DeSoto (that's a car) and went to town for breakfast.  I can remember the cafe - it had a juke box at the booth and Gogi Grant was on it singing "Wayward Wind".

Ontonagon isn't much of a town as big cities go. Tourists passed through in the summer and it wasn't on the beaten track so to speak - you had to turn right at Matchwood, MI and head north on what was then a dirt road or you could go the roundabout but we never did that.

After breakfast we went to look at the Lake of the Clouds, a tourist attraction and something that sticks in my memory as most of those sightseeing episodes do. We would go back to Ontonagon and mom would shop in the market for the cabin we were staying in was "basic" to be generous and we didn't have enough money to eat out...besides..it was fun.

Ontonagon has run into a rough patch of late.  There was a mill that produced paper products for perhaps a 100 years before it closed down when the latest owner, Smrfit-Stone went chapter 11. Smurfit was in a long line of outside owners who passed the mill along like a cheese platter at the church supper. There is a big, high building in downtown Chicago - the Smurfit-Stone building and the connection between this rather icky monument to self and Ontonagon's Mill, the principal employer is pretty darn stark.

In Chicago we have executives who placed some stock in how they looked to the outside world - what trappings of power they could demonstrate - above some little hick (I'm NOT calling Ontonagin hick - just a figure of speech used commonly in corporate centers) town on Lake Superior that depended on some of its very breath on the existence and continuation of the company. Ontonagin is so out of the way that my guess is it didn't get much of a visit from the corporate brass and the determination to shut the doors was a pretty easy one.

Maybe towns, simple towns, like Ontonagin, Michigan have run their course.  It has a paper, published weekly by the owners of a office supply sundries store with a circulation of about 3,700.  You can read a copy of it here - one free download per visitor - and it is pretty well written.  I suspect Maureen Guzek runs a pretty tight ship.  Probably a labor of love but more a labor of community.

There is a certain optimism in the writing - that somehow things will get better and perhaps that is what living in this place is all about. It has a harsh climate, is at the end of the earth in many respects, and very far removed from things that control its destiny, but it remains upbeat as best it can.

I was lucky to have had the chance to eat there with my family as a kid and listen to Gogi on the juke box and now read about it 50+ years later, see the Lake of the Clouds in a picture we have long since lost or misplaced, and feel the optimism of youth.