A string of famous people had some really bad luck after leaving the Upper Peninsula. Were they jinxed by this place? Something in the water? Lulled by the isolation? Not really. Here are nine tales of woe:

Who shot TR?
When ex-president Theodore Roosevelt (TR) ran as an independent in 1912 to unseat William Howard Taft, his campaign featured a one-day train trip from St. Ignace to Calumet on October 9. Probably 40,000 cheered him, jammed so tightly at some stops that they physically hurt.
But what happened to TR five days after he left the U.P. really hurt. Leaving a Milwaukee hotel for a speaking engagement, he stood up in the open car, waved to the crowd and took a bullet in the chest from would-be assassin John Crank, who yelled that anyone seeking a third term “ought to be shot!” Crank, variously described as a saloon keeper and laundry worker, told police that President William McKinley (assassinated eleven years earlier) ordered him in a dream to shoot TR.
A pocketed copy of his fifty-page speech, combined with his massive chest muscles, kept the bullet from piercing a lung. Despite the shooting, TR delivered the ninety-minute speech, apologizing for his whispery voice by saying he’d just been shot.
Doctors refused to remove the bullet because of its proximity to vital organs, so TR carried it the rest of his life. Meanwhile, he had to drop out of the race, which was won by Woodrow Wilson. Another of TR’s opponents, William Jennings Bryan, lamented the shooting: “The question before the country must be decided by the sane. A maniac cannot be an arbiter in such a crisis.”

President ousted
President William Howard Taft, campaigning for a second term a year before TR did, crossed the Upper Peninsula by train in 1911. After visiting the Soo, he arrived in Marquette late on September 19 with a large entourage, stayed overnight at the Alton Roberts home at 425 East Ohio, sleeping on the second floor—the “Presidential Floor”—while his hosts slept where they could. He admitted that he came to Marquette to keep a promise to his old friend, the late Peter White.
Taft later wrote that he had wanted to visit Marquette for twenty years because “of its scenic beauty and the sterling character of its people. Marquette more than lived up to my expectations.”
Taft ran for a second term to defend himself against Roosevelt’s charge that Taft was abandoning reform. The former friends became bitter opponents, with TR especially angry over Taft’s antitrust policy and his firing of Roosevelt friend Gifford Pinchot, director of the U.S. Forest Service. TR felt Taft’s positions would wreck the Republican Party, so he campaigned for the nomination, then ran on a Bull Moose ticket when that ploy failed.
TR and Taft combined got more votes than Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson had a majority. Taft later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He is one of only two presidents (Kennedy is the other) buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Lost on the Titanic
Major Archibald “Archie” Butt was a military aide to both Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and loyal to both. When the two feuded during Taft’s term, poor Archie was caught in the middle. Several weeks after visiting Marquette with Taft in September 1911, the strain became too much, so he made a long, restful tour of Europe.
The tour over, he left England on April 10, 1912 aboard the largest and finest ship ever built—RMS Titanic, sailing for New York on her maiden voyage. Three days out, Archie Butt, forty-six, and 1,500 passengers slipped beneath the waves after the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. Archie was portrayed in the 1997 movie Titanic, although his name was changed to “Butz.”
Within days of his death, a Cleveland newspaper ran a moving interview with passenger Marie Young, who said old friend Archie Butt put her into a lifeboat and gallantly waved his hat as her boat sailed to safety.
But upon learning that the interview was cited at Butt’s memorial service, a chagrined Miss Young protested that she didn’t know Butt and the interview was a fake. That aside, Butt did perform heroically in loading passengers into lifeboats, calming the hysterical and preventing men from jumping into the first boats.
“Thank God for Archie Butt,” said one survivor.

Cold-blooded killer
Sam Leopold owned several stores and much land in the U.P. In the summer of 1914, now living in Chicago, he visited Ontonagon County to observe mining engineer Tom Wilcox drill for copper on Leopold land. He left his nine-year-old son Nathan (who was born in the U.P.) with the Wilcox family for the summer.
The Wilcoxes had no idea they were hosting a monster. Ten years later, little Nathan, now nineteen and in college, and his friend Richard Loeb planned the perfect crime. On May 21, 1924, they kidnapped fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, tortured and killed him, then stuffed him into a culvert. A ransom note was mailed, demanding $10,000. But the perfect crime unraveled: Nathan’s glasses were found near the culvert, and the ransom note was traced to his typewriter.
This was the original “Crime of the Century.” Defended by the famed Clarence Darrow, they pled guilty and were sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. The dirty deed was “in the interest of science,” they said, “just an experiment, like impaling a bug on a pin.”
Loeb died in prison, but Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died in 1971. Back in Ontonagon County, Tom Wilcox’s mother was appalled at the crime. “That nice little boy,” she said. “I just can’t believe it.”

Bad time in Michigamme
Jean Carpenter was one of hundreds of Kansas City girls who spent summers at Camp Cha-ton-ka in Michigamme. Special trains brought them north; one, in 1926, brought fifteen-year-old Jean. Scarlet fever was prevalent in the area, and soon she had it, too. Her mother caught a train for the U.P., rowed herself across Lake Michigamme to the camp, and took over her daughter’s care. Eventually, she pulled Jean from camp and took her home.
“That camp still remains the worst nightmare of my life,” Jean wrote later. “I don’t know how I lived through it.”
Actually, she didn’t. Now known as Jean Harlow, her stunning beauty, worldwide fame as the Blonde Bombshell, No. 1 status at the box office—she had it all. While filming Saratoga in 1937, Jean was hospitalized with uremic poisoning and kidney failure, a result of the childhood scarlet fever. She died June 7, 1937 at age twenty-six. Her beauty, fame and acting ability made her No. 22 on American Film Institute’s list of greatest women movie stars. A portion of Camp Cha-ton-ka remains as part of Streaked Waters Resort.

Desperado ambushed
In April 1934, bank robber John Dillinger—America’s Public Enemy No. 1—was zig-zagging across the midwest to escape capture. With the Feds on their trail, he and fellow gang member John Hamilton were resting in the living room of Mrs. Anna Steve (Hamilton’s sister) in Sault Ste Marie on April 17.
The next morning, Anna told a boarder, “Guess who was here last night? John Dillinger!” All three—Dillinger, Hamilton and Steve—soon suffered the consequences.
The gangsters, smelling danger, left the Soo for a wild ride across the U.P. into Wisconsin, where the Feds surrounded them in Al Capone’s old hangout in Manitowish Waters. Dillinger escaped a shootout and fled to Chicago, where on July 22 the FBI killed him outside the Biograph Theater (still an active movie house). His career lasted fourteen months.
Hamilton died after a gun battle in Minnesota. A year later, Mrs. Steve—mother of six and a former PTA president—was convicted of harboring fugitives and imprisoned for four months (her good reputation got her a light sentence). She freely admitted hosting the boys, and even gave Dillinger a haircut. She further proved her loyalty to Hamilton by paying for a funeral she couldn’t attend, being incarcerated at the time. None of Hamilton’s other siblings went, either. Anna’s bad luck continued—she was unable to get her car back, the one the boys used for the getaway from her house.

Death in a parking lot
Ethel Milne, never famous herself, produced a megastar. Born in 1883 to a railroad family at 509 West Washington in Marquette, she left the county as a teenager and met and married Frank Gumm, and had three daughters. No. 3 was Frances Ethel Gumm, better known by her stage name of Judy Garland. As Garland’s fame and fortune grew, Milne tagged along, controlling her life and spending her money.
Garland blamed many of her troubles on her mother, who even bugged her in death; Milne was working at an airplane factory when she died in the factory parking lot in 1953. When asked why she let her mother die so shabbily, Garland burst into tears and cut her wrists.
Author Gerald Clarke, who wrote a Garland biography, claims that her husbands, agents, managers and Hollywood bosses all contributed to her unhappy life and vanishing fortune. But the real villain, Clarke said, was Mama Ethel, who started her daughter popping pills at age four. Plagued by a boatload of emotional, physical and marital problems, Garland ended it all in 1959. As a consolation, she’s ranked eighth on the Film Institute’s list of great women stars.

Full house at ShopKo
As governor of Alabama, George Wallace was notorious for barring blacks from the University of Alabama, closing Birmingham schools to avoid integration, telling the New York Times that nothing stops integration like a “few first-class funerals,” and for the campaign slogan “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” No wonder Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. tabbed him “the most dangerous racist in America.”
Wallace ran for president in 1968 and lost, despite drawing nine million votes. When he tried again four years later, his campaign brought him to Marquette on May 11, 1972, where he spoke to about 4,000 spectators in the ShopKo parking lot. Five days later, four bullets from the gun of Arthur Bremer paralyzed Wallace at an outdoor rally in Maryland. He pulled out of the race, eventually apologized for his anti-civil rights stance and began supporting integration. In a later term as Alabama governor, he appointed more blacks to political posts than any other Alabaman ever had.

Union leader disappears
A family camp on Tepee Lake in Iron County made controversial Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa a part-Yooper. The camp was a popular vacation retreat for the Hoffas, where Jimmy hunted and fished, visited neighbors and rowed around the lake enjoying country life.
At the end of each camp season, the neighbors were invited in to help finish off any uneaten food, with each family bringing a dish. “Thanksgiving at the Hoffas!” one of them remembered with glee.
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa disappeared outside a Bloomfield Hills restaurant. The subsequent nationwide hunt led to searching Tepee Lake and surrounding woods. Guesses on his final resting place include the bottom of Lakes St. Clair, Huron and Erie (in addition to Tepee), a backyard in Bloomfield Hills, Elvis Presley’s grave, an old coal mine and under turnpikes, landfills and a football stadium. Or he may have been dissolved in acid, rendered into fat, slipped into a car-crusher or burned in a furnace. Despite the steady stream of clues, the body was never found, and Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982.

The U.P.-side
Not all U.P. visitors had bad luck. Thousands came and went with no ill effects, going on to the next stop—like Babe Ruth. The year after his 1926 exhibition appearance in Iron Mountain, the Babe set a home-run record that lasted thirty-four years, and his New York Yankees won the World Series.
Among others who left with no ill effects were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth and more than a dozen other presidents…so don’t blame us.
—Larry Chabot

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