Features Rick Coates

We caught up with a few of the headliners of this week’s Traverse City Winter Comedy Arts Festival and got their thoughts on comedy, coming to Traverse City and some of their future projects.

Features Rick Coates For the past 34 years Traverse City has hosted the annual St. Patrick’s Day Pub Crawl attracting not only locals but visitors from as far away as Petoskey. Now residents of Petoskey will have their own Pub Crawl this Friday, March 15 starting at 4 pm at Beards Brewery.

“I started discussing the idea with some of the bars and restaurants in Petoskey and they loved the idea,” said Charlie Ferguson, general manager of Northern Broadcasting.

Features Erin Crowell

Today’s industry trends aren’t lost on Carter Schmidt.

“Selling lemonade? You just don’t make much doing that; and, well, the newspaper boy may have disappeared,” the eight-year-old tells me, a journalist, on the logistics of childhood employment. The third grader at Eastern Elementary School in Traverse City is an entrepreneur, having just completed the milestone of one year in business with his company, Carter’s Compost. The bike-powered, kid-driven kitchen scrap pick-up service has been turning dirt since last April, charging its Traverse City neighborhood customers $5 a month for fresh compost.

Features Patrick Sullivan Just outside of Boyne City, early last century, stood a formidable square building, home to 100 or so wayward boys. Some of them were orphans. Some came from families that got too large, or lost a father to drink or death. Some came to Boyne City because of trouble they’d gotten into on the streets.