Upper Peninsula – Author Sarah Angleton

If you drive along the western portion of US Rt. 2 into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan you will, as you approach the Village of Vulcan in the Norway Township, come across a big, big, man. This man carries a pickaxe, wears a yellow raincoat, and stands forty feet tall as he advertises tours of the Iron Mountain Iron Mine.

At forty feet tall, this Big John is slightly bigger than the 6’6″ described in Jimmy Dean’s famous song. I mean that’s tall, but it doesn’t really strike me as legendary.

On my recent visit to the UP, I had the opportunity to experience this tour, which is a pretty cool one that takes visitors 2600 feet through an exploratory tunnel into a large man-made cavity from which much of the mine’s nearly twenty-two million tons of retrieved iron ore were taken.

Along the way, an expert guide, who in our case was an extremely knowledgeable retired high school history teacher, tells the harrowing tale of the many miners who risked, and often lost, their lives during the operation of the mine between its opening in 1877 and its final closure in 1945. The tour includes demonstrations of some of the ingenious but terribly dangerous equipment used in different eras of mining and plenty of stories about the awful conditions in which of men worked over the years to supply the iron needed to build a burgeoning industrial world power.

What the tour does not include is anything about Big John who stands so prominently in the parking lot, is featured on the tee shirts for sale in the gift shop, and about whom the 1961 hit song by Jimmy Dean was written. The song plays on a loop in the visitor’s center, which made me suspect that it might somehow be related to the iron mining industry in the area.

It occurred to me too late that I should have asked our knowledgeable tour guide, so instead I posed the question to the young lady selling tickets for the next tour. Her face grew a little red as she sheepishly admitted that there was absolutely no connection between Iron Mountain, or any iron mine as far as she knew, to Jimmy Dean and his song, or to the legendary figure of Big Bad John. “It just attracts attention,” she said.

It was a disappointing answer, as I thought maybe I had stumbled onto a hidden gem of a story. Still curious, I looked into the background of the song, and discovered that the co-opted folk legend hero of miners everywhere was inspired by a real life man who, as far as I know, may never have set foot in the UP, or in an iron mine, or in any mine at all.

Dean’s Big Bad John sprang instead from the musician’s acquaintance with an obscure, but tall, actor by the name of John Minto. Dean started jokingly calling the man, who was six feet five inches tall, “Big John,” and as the name rolled around in his head a hit song emerged, and a new American folk hero was born.

While Vulcan’s Big Bad John holds the world record as the tallest, you can also find Big Johns in Whitwell, Tennessee and Helper, Utah. The song, and the legendary tale it tells, has no connection to those locations either, but each statue serves to honor the early miners who worked in incredibly dangerous conditions to obtain the materials necessary to build the industrialized world we live in.

In my book that makes this big, big man a gem of a story.

Last week I had the opportunity to squeeze in a quick girls’ trip with my sister and our aunt and cousin to spend a few days exploring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our home base was an adorable rental cottage on Independence Lake near the tiny unincorporated community of Big Bay, MI, about thirty miles northwest of Marquette and a long, cold swim from Canada.

Sock Monkey Steve and I noticed this curious sign on the Lumberjack Tavern before we discovered why it was there. To the right of this sign, you can see part of the image from the movie poster as well.

Though it does have a post office, Big Bay is not large enough to sport a traffic light. It contains around a thousand people during the summer when stunning views of Lake Superior, lots of great hiking trails, waterfalls, and even a good stretch of sandy Great Lake beach attract visitors like us.

In the winter it may host some hardcore snowmobilers and skiers, but most area locals we met said winter in the UP was best spent either hiding inside or living somewhere else. After experiencing a thirty degree temperature shift from one day to the next, I tend to believe them.

But for all the things Big Bay doesn’t have, it features two excellent places to eat, The Lumberjack Tavern, which includes a sign proclaiming it has been “murder free since 1952,” and The Thunder Bay Inn, which was featured in the Academy Award nominated film Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jimmy Stewart.

The Thunder Bay Inn still looks more or less the same as it does in the movie. At least enough to recognize it, both inside and out.

The film, released in 1959, was based on a novel of the same title by Robert Traver. That was the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who in addition to being an avid fly fisherman, served as defense attorney in the case of a murder that occurred at a tavern in the tiny community of Big Bay in 1952.

What made the case such an interesting subject for fiction was the unlikely victory of the defense. An Army lieutenant stood accused of shooting and killing his wife’s alleged rapist. The jury found him not guilty based on a decades old precedent that used a fairly obscure diagnosis of a type of temporary insanity.

It was a good bit of legal acrobatics that translated nicely to the screen under the capable talents of a strong cast and set to a truly excellent Duke Ellington sound track. Since its release, the film has garnered praise from the legal profession as well as accumulated plenty of accolades from the film industry, including a 2012 selection to the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

But the UP really does have a lot more to offer than murder.

Not being a classic film aficionado, I had never seen it, but you don’t vacation on a movie set and not watch the movie. Shortly after arriving back home, I got hold of a copy and I have to say, in my humble opinion, it’s good.

If you want to visit it, just be forewarned that part of its cultural significance is its unflinching use of descriptive words referencing sexual violence that were atypical for a film in its era, words that got it briefly banned in the highly Catholic city of Chicago.

Well, maybe not entirely unflinching. There is an amusing interaction in which the judge calls the counselors to the bench to discuss the possible use of alternative words for panties. After some debate in which one suggests perhaps a French word, they determine there are no better alternatives, and decide to just plow ahead, panties and all.

And while it has nothing to do with why we decided to take our little family girls’ trip to the incredibly beautiful UP, it is why unincorporated Big Bay, Michigan, with a year-round population 256, is evidently kind of famous.