Weird

Make your reservations now for a glass or flight of wine on our beautiful east terrace or west lawn, each overlooking picturesque vineyards, backdropped by Grand Traverse Bay!

Reservations are available online now at shop.chateauchantal.com/reservation-events

Family Values

You let your grown son, his girlfriend and their child move into your house, and what thanks do you get in return? For a 43-year-old Lone Rock, Wisconsin, woman, “Happy Mother’s Day” was expressed with a shock to the neck from a Taser wielded by her 22-year-old son, Andrew Peterson. According to The Smoking Gun, Peterson became upset on May 9 because he couldn’t find his phone, so he stunned his mother, then left her home with 20-year-old Colleen Parker and their child. Peterson was arrested for the shocking assault; Parker also was arrested for allegedly punching Peterson’s mom in the face earlier in the week.

Awesome!

Four-year-old Noah of Brooklyn, New York, knows nautical nonsense when he sees it, so he went all-in on SpongeBob SquarePants Popsicles, ordering 918 of them from Amazon in April without his mom knowing. When 51 cases arrived at his aunt’s home, his mom panicked: Jennifer Bryant is a social work graduate student at NYU and has two other boys, The Washington Post reported. She couldn’t pay the $2,618.85 bill, and Amazon wouldn’t take the frozen confections back. A family friend set up a GoFundMe page, raising more than $11,000, which Noah’s mom said will go toward his education. Noah is on the autism spectrum, and his mom hopes to send him to a special school. Amazon is working with the family to donate to a private charity of their choice, and as for the treats? They’ve mostly melted.

Government in Action

Since 1989, Mauro Morandi, now 81, has been the caretaker of Budelli, an otherwise uninhabited island in the Mediterranean Sea off Sardinia. He stumbled into the job when his catamaran broke down near the island and he learned that its caretaker was getting ready to retire, The Guardian reported. Now known as Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, Morandi lives in a former World War II shelter and keeps things tidy on the island, clearing paths and keeping beaches clean for day-trippers who visit. But ownership of the island has passed to La Maddalena national park authorities, who are evicting Morandi and turning the small isle into an environmental education destination. “I have given up the fight,” Morandi said. “I’ll be living in the outskirts of the main town (on neighboring island La Maddalena), so will just go there for shopping and the rest of the time keep myself to myself. ... I’ll still see the sea.”

Weird Science

Angie Yen, 27, of Brisbane, Australia, had her tonsils removed on April 19, a simple surgery that went smoothly, News. com reported. But on April 28, as she got ready for work, she started singing in the shower and noticed something unusual about her voice. “I was singing in a different sound and also talking words in a funny accent,” Yen said. She called a friend, who agreed that her accent suddenly sounded Irish and told her about FAS, foreign accent syndrome. Yen went to the hospital, but doctors told her to go home and see if the new accent would disappear in a few days. Nearly two weeks later, the brogue remains, and Yen is scheduled for an MRI and a visit with a neurologist. “I’m very lucky to have very supportive friends and family,” she said. “If they find something hopefully there is a cure or treatment for it.”

Lost and Found

Parker Hanson, a pitcher at Augustana College in Illinois,] was born without a left hand, but he adapted over the years so that he could still play his favorite game. On May 3, Hanson realized that the backpack he had left in his car, which contained his prosthetic arm and some of its attachments, had been stolen. Hanson told the Argus Leader that he had lost hope of finding the expensive prosthetic and had started to focus on fundraising for a new one when he received a text on May 11. Nate Riddle and Tim Kachel, who work at Millennium Recycling Inc. in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, found the arm as they sorted recycling materials. “I recognized it instantly,” said Kachel, who had heard about the theft on the news. “I was jumping up and down screaming ‘Stop!’” While Hanson is happy to have it back, he said the arm is “pretty banged up” and unusable. Shriners Children’s Twin Cities has stepped up to provide Hanson with a new arm free of charge, and his fundraising money will be donated to help other amputees get their own prosthetics. “If I can help impact some kid’s life for a positive, then that’s what I’ll take out of this whole experience,” Hanson said.

Smile for the Camera

The Colonial Pipeline shutdown and subsequent gas shortage has produced its fair share of hysteria-fueled incidents in the Southeast, but Jesse Smith, 25, of Griffin, Georgia, may have set the bar. Police there were able to track down and arrest the wouldbe thief after he attempted to steal gas from a U-Haul truck on May 12 by drilling holes in its tank, resulting in a huge hazardous materials mess ... and no looted gas. WSBTV reported that Smith was long gone by the time his handiwork was discovered, but security cameras in the U-Haul lot caught Smith walking around the trucks, and a camera trained on the area behind the KFC where Smith parked his own truck caught his hopeful arrival and the walk of shame that followed his failed gas heist.

Meanwhile in Florida

It wasn’t a desire to relive her glory days that led 28-year-old Audrey Nicole Francisquini to pose as a student and trespass at American Senior High School in Hialeah, Florida, on May 10; it was the yen for Instagram followers. The Miami-Dade Schools Police Department reported that Francisquini arrived at the school around 8:30 a.m. and blended in with the students by wearing a backpack and carrying a skateboard and a painting. According to Click Orlando, the wannabe social media mogul said she was looking for the registration office when confronted by security, but she was later found outside a classroom handing out flyers with her Instagram handle printed on them. This time Francisquini fled, but police used her flyers and footage from the school’s security cameras to identify and arrest her on charges of felony trespassing, interfering at an educational institution and resisting an officer without violence.

For acclaimed author Mary Doria Russell, moral dilemma is a must when it comes to good writing. “I like gray areas,” she said, “and characters who do the right thing, and then find out it wasn’t as simple as they thought.”

In her newest novel, “The Women of the Copper Country,” that “gray area” is the name of the game. Set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the mining industry-boom of the 1910s, “The Women of the Copper Country” surrounds the infamous Annie Klobuchar-Clemenc and her year-long crusade against corporate injustice.

“People always ask writers, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’” Russell said. “All of my books are different, so the story of how I come to write each one is different.” In the case of “The Women of the Copper Country,” the idea came “out of left field,” so to speak. “One afternoon, I sat down at three o’clock to wait for a four o’clock ballgame,” said Russell, “and while I was waiting, I started flipping through the channels. That’s when I came across the PBS documentary “Red Metal,” which is about the 1913 miner’s strike in the copper country of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”

At the center of that strike was Annie Clemenc.

Hailed as the U.P.’s own “Joan of Arc,” Clemenc was a walking contradiction of the era’s expectations. She was 25 when the strike began, and although she was married, she had yet to bear children — an anomaly among most women of her age. She also happened to be 6 feet, 3 inches tall. Add to that the lines of male miners she led in the fight against their employers, and “Big Annie” Clemenc was hard to miss.

“[She stood] head and shoulders above the crowd,” said Russell. “And I thought, ‘A miner’s strike with a woman out front? How did that work?’”

In a nutshell, Clemenc — and likely the rest of the copper country’s less vocal women — had simply had enough. “I think she was tired of the funerals,” saidRussell. At the time of the strike, an average of one miner per week was killed on the clock. “That’s killed,” she added. “Not merely crippled and discarded.”

But the real straw that broke Clemenc’s back, suspects Russell, was the death of a miner named Solomon Kivisto, a non-union worker and the last man to die in the mines prior to the protest. “Given the timing of Solomon Kivisto’s death, I believe that when Annie Clemenc heard about his accident, something snapped in her,” said Russell. “I think [she was] tired of waiting to find out who would be widowed this week and destitute the next.”

So, in July of 1913, Clemenc, accompanied by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners Local 15, set out to do what their men could not: incite a general strike against the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, the largest and most powerful copper mining company in the world.

“[As] I’m sitting there in my living room, waiting for the ballgame,” said Russell, “my first inkling that I was being drawn in was when I thought, ‘Whoa! I’ve got a heroine!’” But a proper protagonist must have an opponent.

Enter James MacNaughton. Also known as the Czar of the Copper Country, MacNaughton was the third and lastknown president of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. He also shared in the then commonly held attitude that too many immigrants might undermine American values and, as such, took it upon himself to “civilize” his predominantly immigrant workforce.

“He acknowledged their effort, but did not trust them,” said Russell. “He was very concerned that they would be susceptible to outside agitators who were attempting to organize the mine workers, and he vowed that grass would grow in the streets of Calumet before he recognized their union.”

“Benevolent” dictator that he was, MacNaughton was also a man of his word. “[He] never gave an inch to the employment of Calumet and Hecla,” said Russell, “and during the strike he did whatever he could to kill the union.” Several months and an army of strikebreakers later, MacNaughton ultimately overwhelmed Clemenc’s revolt. “He beat the union,” said Russell, “and he shrugged off the price that women and children paid for his triumph.”

As for “Big Annie”? When the strike finally ended in 1914, Annie Clemenc’s name was seemingly cast away alongside her efforts; and she never spoke a word of her part in the protest. So when the headlines about her and her role as a labor activist were replaced by those promoting preparation for the war, Clemenc, “like so many other powerhouse women of the early labor movement,” said Russell, “was largely forgotten.”

Her story, however, certainly wasn’t, and neither were those of the women who marched alongside her. “The literary gods don’t drop a story like that into a writer’s lap unless it needs to be told,” saidRussell. “This novel is a celebration of their legacy and a vow to carry on their work.”

Still, the past all too often sets future precedent, and The Women of the Copper Country is no exception. “People often dismiss the past by saying, ‘That’s history,’” said Russell. “But one of the things that a book like “The Women of the Copper Country” can do is demonstrate that some things never change.” Fast forward a full century, and we still face much of the same injustice — xenophobia, for example, and financial inequity — that the women of the copper country rebelled against to abolish.

“But we can learn from the women and the men and children who marched,” saidRussell. “It is our turn now to know our place in history to stand up for what’s right the way the ordinary women of the copper country did in 1913. Now it’s our turn to carry the flag.”

Disappear into the U.P.’s Copper Mines this Summer

CRISP LAGERS AND SUNNY DAYS

Ahead of her May 26 conversation with local audiences, author Maria Doria Russell takes readers back in time with one of Michigan’s foremost (and forgotten) labor leaders, Big Annie Clemenc

Meet the Interviewer: Kendra Carr

Broadcast and performing artist Kendra Carr is the host of Interlochen Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Our Global Neighborhood.” Carr, a graduate of Cottey College’s Theatre Arts program, has appeared on countless stages, both in West Michigan and Traverse City, including the Old Town Playhouse. Carr also holds an undergraduate degree in Special Education from Western Michigan University, and prior to pursuing a broadcast career, worked with Oceana’s Home Partnership, focusing on emergency re-housing. She transitioned to radio in 2016, where she began her broadcast career with Bayview Broadcasting in Ludington. She’s been with IPR since 2019.

Experience the Event

Critically acclaimed author Mary Doria Russell will join the National Writers Series for a free, virtual event at 7pm Wednesday, May 26, to discuss her seventh novel, “The Women of the Copper Country.” The book was originally published in April 2019 and is available for preorder at Horizon Books (with a 20 percent NWS discount). Guest host for the event is IPR host and performance artist, Kendra Carr. Register free at: nationalwritersseries.org (231) 252-3552 439 E Eighth St. Traverse City

112 North Main Street • Leland MI 49654 • (231) 256-7747

follow us: facebook.com/tampicolelandmi

get in touch with your inner cowgirl!

Vintage Reconditioned Cowboy Boots

(mostly 38 to 78 bucks)