Arts & Humanities

Local author Jerry Harju tells tales of his background, his writing and his heritage
One funny Finn, by Larry Chabot

Phillipsville artist visits Eagle Harbor Fine Art Fair, by Linden W. Dahlstrom

 

One funny Finn
Old proverb: Never saw off the limb you’re sitting on. Jerry Harju did it anyway, quitting his job a week after his first book came out.
“Scary,” he said. “That job was my life! But it’s a Finnish trait: when you decide to do something, it’s done.” He never looked back; a dozen years later and thousands of books sold, he’s a popular, successful humor writer.
Harju is a pure Finn, with all four of his grandparents migrating to the United States from Finland more than 100 years ago. His grandparents were young and looking for something better. At the time, Finland was in economic doldrums under the big Russian thumb. Finns who sailed to America earlier were sending back rosy reports about plenty of jobs, lots of trees and tons of snow and cold weather. Harju’s mother, also born in Finland, was only a child then and lived with her family in a logging camp near Amasa, then settled in Marquette County in one of the new world’s Finnish ghettos.
“My maternal grandmother never spoke English, only Finn,” Harju said. “She was head of the family, ran the whole show.”
From a dairy farm near the present Snyder Drug on US-41 west of Ishpeming, she managed a family milk operation by employing her many children in the milking and home delivery.
Years later, Harju graduated from Republic High School in 1951 with the universal urge of Yooper kids suddenly freed from school: clear out, head for the city, and make big bucks. His parents thought otherwise.
“My older sister had gone to college and had wonderful stories to tell, so they decided I was going, too,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but it was not a subject for debate. I had a strong-willed Finnish mother.”
A scholarship paid his $90-per-semester tuition at the University of Michigan, where the competition was tough.
“Their engineering school didn’t have enough room or faculty to handle a big enrollment, so they set out to get rid of one-third of us,” Harju said. “There was no slack, no breaks. It was the old story: we were told ‘look to your left, then to your right; one of you three will be gone shortly.’”
He soon learned that college was something special, with big challenges.
“I wasn’t born smart, but once I vector in on something, I stick to it, just keep working until I get it,” he said. “What he got was an engineering mechanics degree, which got him work in the aerospace industry in California for the next thirty-five years, doing systems engineering for the Air Force’s space division. Harju rose to middle management while earning a master’s degree at the University of Southern California.”
One fateful day, while jogging with a girlfriend, he ran out of things to say.
“So I started telling her stories about Republic to make her laugh,” he said. “She encouraged me to write them up and sell them, so in 1991 I sat down with pad and pencil and wrote the first story, called the Kloman Inferno, about a chimney fire at our house one January when it was twenty-five below zero.
“I was thirteen then. We had no phone, so I was sent to the fire hall, where the fire chief and I had a crazy time trying to get the fire truck started.”
Harju thinks it’s the funniest story he ever wrote. He wrote another one about apple knockers—non-Yoopers who come north to hunt deer. Copies were passed to friends, coworkers and brought home on trips to Republic.
“People said they were good,” he said. “Finally, Avery Studios in AuTrain suggested I write six more and they’d put out a book. I said, ‘Really?’ So I went back to Los Angeles, borrowed a computer and started banging out stories.”
The book was published in January 1993. A week later, he quit his job, telling his boss he had found something more interesting to do with his life. Subsisting on his early retirement pension and a consulting job, he cranked out more Republic stories.
Fortunately, that first book was a hit: Northern Reflections quickly became a reader favorite and is now in its sixth printing. Two more followed—Northern D’Lights and Northern Passages—containing more humorous stories to tickle the funny bone. With three books in print, he moved back to the U.P. in late 1996, settled in Marquette as a full-time writer, and produced a fourth book, Northern Memories.
It was time to change the system, he thought. He bought the plates and unsold copies of his first four books and began self-publishing with another printer, eventually producing four more volumes. In The Class of ’57, readers laughed through his college years, and in Cold Cash, his first novel, two wacky bumblers rob a bank and escape on snowmobiles (Cold Cash won a Midwest Independent Publishers Association award and is now being marketed as a screenplay).
His last two efforts—Here’s What I Think and Way Back When—are collections of the popular Marquette Mining Journal columns he’s been writing for more than eight years.
His books have sold more than 45,000 copies, mostly in the Midwest, through stores he services personally, wholesalers, signings and Web sites. Craft shows and store signings are his favorite venues.
“Women buy seventy to eighty percent of my books at signings, usually for their men,” he said. “So if your book cover doesn’t appeal to women, forget it.”
He and outdoor writer Ben Mukkala often appear together, usually in places like B. Dalton. One signing led to finding a buddy he hadn’t seen in fifty years.
Summer is his busiest time, with Harju often on the road every day. As a self-publisher, he’s a one-man conglomerate: writer, publisher, promoter, salesman, autographer, sales and inventory clerk, and bookkeeper.
When things ease up in the fall, there’s time to write more stuff, work on an audio tape project, collect art, go out to dinner, and travel the world (he’s made three stabs at reaching the North Pole). He’ll be around at Finn Grand Fest 2005 with a talk and readings on August 10 at Northern Michigan University, plus manning a booth at the tori (marketplace) in the Superior Dome.
Has he been to the homeland? Yes. A 1989 trip found Harju and a buddy in Lapland in the really, truly far north. The ride in from the Helsinki airport to their hotel in a rented car was weird.
“The street signs were in tiny print, like twenty-nine letters long, and tough to read and translate as we kept circling around,” he said.
He admits to getting a ticket in Helsinki for illegal parking, and to not paying it.
“By time I translated the ticket, we were halfway to Lapland,” he said. “I’m probably on the ‘wanted’ list over there.”
He said the Finns have an effective way of punishing drunk drivers: mandatory jail time, no appeals, no exceptions—although miscreants can do the time at their convenience.
No special treatment, either, as one famous Finnish personality discovered when his picture appeared in newspapers showing him in a prison chain gang. Interestingly, penal fines are based on income; one highly-paid corporate executive had to fork over $85,000.
Weighted down with requests to look up or call people while in Finland, he did manage to visit and photograph his mother’s home town of Hyvinkaa, seventy miles north of Helsinki.
But because the Germans had wrecked the place during World War II so that the town had to be rebuilt, his mom looked at the photos and, sadly, didn’t recognize anything.
—Larry Chabot

 

 

Phillipsville artist visits Eagle Harbor Fine Art Fair
With roots that go deep in the Keweenaw, Phillipsville artist Jan Manniko interprets the human spirit residing within the old buildings, landscape and skies of this far-north country through her paintings and drawings.
“Observation reveals nature’s elements to me, yet observation without imagination is not enough for a work to emerge,” Manniko said. “Imagination adds soul...adds life...to a work. Without imagination, then, a work remains static, lifeless and cold.”
Selected as this year’s featured artist by the Copper Country Associated Artists (CCAA), Manniko will be showing her work at the forty-fifth annual Fine Art Fair and Exhibit in Eagle Harbor on August 13 and 14.
Her continuing education includes the University of Miami in Florida, the Chicago Art Institute, participation in shows and workshops, and, at mid-life, earning a bachelor of arts degree from Michigan Tech. Studying not only the visual arts, but language arts in communication and rhetoric—writing, painting, drawing, working with students and customers, Manniko is an artist in all that she does.
“Every subject has life,” she said. “An old mining building, for me, has as much life as a tree, a rock, a clump of grass or an entire wood or a meadow.”
By discovering the forms, shapes and intrinsic colors of the entirety of the subject, Manniko conveys this spirit to the viewer by transferring her concept of the whole, to paper or canvas.
Manniko’s painting is not of just another old building left over from the time when the Keweenaw was all about copper.
Her paintings touch on the spirit of the working human beings once connected to them and of the human spirits still attached to those work places: the Quincy smelter in Ripley where her grandfather worked; the historic Brockway House in Copper Harbor where her parents established a restaurant; an old red building in Phillipsville, where she and her husband Tom operate an antique business and art gallery...all with spirits brought to life again through brush, pen and imagination.
Manniko will show and demonstrate her use of the forms, shapes and intrinsic colors in nature on both days of the Fine Art Fair and Exhibit. This event features recent work by the members of the Copper Country Associated Artists (CCAA) and, by invitation, fine art and fine craft from more than fifty-five artists, both new and long-time regulars. The event will be held in the open air in the churchyard of St. Peter’s by the Sea and the area surrounding the historic Rathbone School in Eagle Harbor.
Of special interest to fine art devotees are the many demonstrations of the technical and philosophic aspects of the work on display. This includes watercolor and oil paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, quilting, fiber, pottery, jewelry, stained glass, silver, iron, copper, stone, wood, bark, computer-assisted prints and other materials.
Each work exhibited is original and presented by the artist who produced it.
The show will be held from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, and noon to 4:00 p.m. on Sunday. A handicap-accessible restroom is available. Several local organizations will offer food and beverage services. All Keweenaw County Historical sites will be open.
Copper Country Associated Artists maintains an art center in Calumet offering workshops and a gallery of member works at 307 Sixth Street. For details, call CCAA president Edith Wiard at 337-5066 or e-mail ewiard@up.net
—Linden W. Dahlstrom