History in His Blood: Larry Wakefield is the Great Storyteller of Our Past

The past that Larry Wakefield writes about sometimes seems like a dreamlike tale of an empire long ago on a distant shore. But his stories are all real visions of our own past here in northwestern lower Michigan: of a time when Al Capone‘s mob manned a machine gun tower at their hideout near Leland; when forgotten burgs such as Thompsonville and Kingsley were boom towns filled with hundreds of lumberjacks; when the kings of religious cults lived on Lake Michigan‘s islands; and when a boyhood Ernest Hemingway fished his way north along our rivers.
These are just a few of the hundreds of stories Wakefield has rescued from oblivion over his past 30 years as the foremost chronicler of Northern Michgan‘s past: stories of murdered nuns, violent klansmen, lumberjacks, Indians and ghost town residents which may well have marched off into the dust of obscurity were it not for Wakefield‘s careful digging and retrieval.
Wakefield sees himself as more of a storyteller than a historian, yet he‘s preserved the story of our past. Today at age 88, he lives with his wife Lucille just west of Traverse City, working on yet another book compiled from his columns in the Record-Eagle.

NE: How many books have you written through the years?
Wakefield: I‘ve kind of lost track but I think it‘s 18. I also did two or three of them on commission for Elmwood and Garfield townships and for the Traverse City Opera House, but those were pretty slim. It‘s been a couple of years since my last one, “Ernest Hemingway Slept Here,“ which was a collection of what I consider my best short pieces over the last 20 years or so.“

NE: How did you get interested in history?
Wakefield: I‘ve always loved history for as long as I can remember. I didn‘t major in history, I majored in English. I moved here in 1940 and it wasn‘t until the ‘70s that I really got interested in the history of this place. I had read a lot of Al Barnes‘ stuff (in the Record-Eagle) and yet local history was still a wide-open field.
I love good stories -- I‘m really a story-teller and not an academic-style historian.

NE: Yet there‘s obviously a lot of scholarship in the books you‘ve written.
Wakefield: There‘s a lot of research involved. I enjoy doing research and I‘ve probably spent too much time doing it, especially when you can‘t track things down quickly.

NE: Your account of Ernest Hemingway‘s adventures as a teenager walking across Northern Michigan had an amazing amount of detail.
Wakefield: Yes, those kids were only 16 years old when Hemingway and a friend made that trip. I came across a diary that Hemingway kept in 1916 which told about how he and a friend came up from Chicago by boat. They got off at Frankfort and then walked across much of the region to the train at Worden Junction southeast of Kingsley. Then they fished the Rapid River, Big Bear Creek, the Boardman and other rivers all along the way north to Petoskey.
You‘d be surprised to read the thing -- it‘s just a diary with no writerly pretensions, but I was surprised that there was no inkling in its pages as to how Hemingway would develop as a writer.

NE: How did you get interested in writing about Northern Michigan, rather than writing history about bigger topics such as the Civil War or along the lines of Stephen Ambrose?
Wakefield: I was surprised that there were so many good stories here. For its size, this region is amazing for its historical stuff. I began doing articles for the Record-Eagle, but it all had be local, and I was more interested in seeing myself getting published than trying to do books, although I did write several articles for a military history magazine and for an iron foundry company publication.
Some of my books take in the whole state, but most cover the Grand Traverse region, and that‘s a wide area. I have three volumes on Michigan ghost towns and those have been bestsellers. Lucille and I spent five years going around all of the ghost towns in central northern Michigan and the U.P. It was a fun trip -- I‘ve been here since 1940, but didn‘t start that project until 1990 and learned more about Michigan doing that research then I had in the previous 60 years. I contacted local libraries, museums, historical societies and old-timers, although with them you can‘t always trust their recollections -- you know how fallible human memory is.

NE: Have you made a living off your writing?
Wakefield: A writer is a poorly paid profession, so I can‘t say I made a living at it except for the commissioned stuff. I had to do other things to put food on the table.
Years ago, my dad and I talked about starting a mink ranch. We bought property out in Leelanau County and raised mink for 20 years. This area was one of the largest producers of mink pelts in the state. There were 35 or 40 mink ranches up here at one time. I combined my experience to become executive secretary of the Michigan Fur Breeders Association.
In 1960, however, mink reached a saturation point. In 1940, there were 400,000 mink pelts being produced in the entire world, but when the business dropped out in 1960, there were 27 millioni pelts being produced in this country and then a lot of foreign competition too in Scandinavia and even from the Israelis. The industry collapsed. Today, nobody wants to wear furs anymore in America because of the animal (rights) people, but it‘s different in Europe where fur is still popular.

NE: Why is history important?
Wakefield: It‘s of great importance because there‘s an old saying that in order to get an idea of where you‘re going, you have to know where you‘ve been.
I‘ve noticed the biggest difference in how people view history over the past few years. When I first came here, people didn‘t care about history, but as time went by, they grew more interested in how our region developed.
Take those big houses on Sixth Street (in Traverse City), for instance. There was a time not long ago when you could have bought one for $5,000. But then we did a picture book called “Historic Traverse City Houses“ and I think we were influential in getting peoples‘ attention. Shortly after that book came out, people started fixing up the old houses on Sixth; now they‘re all remodeled.
Of course, when you‘re a kid, you don‘t care much about history, but kids don‘t have any history of themselves to think about. But when people get older, they start to wonder where they‘ve been. View On Our Website