It still happens at least once a summer, but in the early years of cars, the quiet of the night would often but broken by the screeching of tires, and a loud splash as an old car missed the corner of M-22 in Omena and splashed into Omena Bay. Speeding in Omena is not a new thing. Speeding through town, and the resulting consequences, has happened ever since the early 1900’s. It was against the law then and still is now. But this is Omena.
Other crimes happened as well in this peaceful little hamlet.
Inside Barth’s store, Ernie and a customer, sometime during the 1950s. – Courtesy Omena Historical Society
Saturday nights when the migrants were here for harvests, there often were loud gatherings in their quarters. As the night wore on the sounds increased into fighting and sometimes included knifings. The ‘miscreants’ would appear the next day in front of Ernie Barth, local Justice of the Peace.
Ernie Barth himself was the victim of a crime, an armed robbery, in August of 1958. Two men entered his store, Barth’s Cash Store, and demanded money. One man, who was later identified as Robert Lee Belcher Jr., 19, was wearing a Navy foul weather mask, and carrying a pistol. The other, Ulister Smith, 25, was his accomplice. Both were from Benton Harbor. Ernie resisted, trying to fight them off, but the robbers assaulted him with a pop bottle. Ernie’s son, Wayne, came into the store to see his father being attacked and “leaped in to help his father,” tipping over a heavy scale onto one of the holdup men. The two men ran from the store, escaping in a car that had been stolen from Fred Thomas of Northport.
Wearing a Navy foul-weather Mask, Robert Lee Belcher Jr. (above) with Ulister Smith 25, attempted an armed holdup of Barth’s store. Courtesy Omena Historical Society archives.
This is what happened next, from an article in the Omena Historical Society Archives: “The holdup men ditched the stolen car and drove south on M-22 in their own car. Just south of Suttons Bay they passed a man and his wife walking along the highway. Smith got out of the car and hid in the weeds while Belcher drove on. When the man and wife drew near to the lurking Smith, he leaped out at them with gun in hand and forced the man to walk back toward Suttons Bay while he kept the women with him. The woman was ‘criminally assaulted” (or raped) and left by the side of the road.
The woman’s husband, in the meantime, had flagged down Furrell Crain who had several cherry pickers in his car. Crain and the cherry pickers tried to go to the woman’s aid, but as they approached the hoodlum’s automobile a shot blasted through the front fender of the Crain car, and he returned to Suttons Bay and called State troopers.
In the meantime, the woman was picked up and given shelter by Peter Leabo who has a farm near Suttons Bay. Leabo called the state troopers, who, by this time, having been alerted by the Barths, had established roadblocks, and were combing the area for the men. The robbers successfully evaded the roadblocks but at 5:00 a.m. the following Friday morning, they were apprehended by Kalkaska deputy Woodman who discovered the men asleep in their automobile which was parked in front of a Kalkaska Justice of the Peace office on a Kalkaska street.
The two men, taken into custody by the deputy sheriff and state troopers, readily admitted all the charges against them when they were arraigned before Circuit Court Judge Charles L. Brown at Leland.”
Justice is done, in most cases. But in others, the gentle folk of Omena tend to look the other way.
Queenie’s Resort
One example is Queenie Smith’s “special kind of resort hotel,” a brothel established around 1949 in the prosperous days following World War II. Male visitors would arrive for a week at a time from Chicago or Detroit and were picked up at the train station in Traverse City and driven to their destination on Omena Point. Somehow during their weeklong visits, they never interacted with anyone locally. No one knows what Queenie looked like, how many women she employed, or why she chose Omena for her business. What is known is that Queenie was rather admired for her ingenuity and her discretion, as well as for being a “enterprising working woman.” Cottagers were naturally curious about the enterprise, but they kept a polite distance. Queenie was careful not to call attention to herself and even the police, though aware of her business, “didn’t have the time or energy to bother with her.” (anonymous quote).
Queenie quietly left the area sometime after 1950. It is said some kind of “raucousness occurred.” No one knows what happened, only that she succeeded quite well for a time, “adding a little spice to the Omena scene.”
Moonshine, Mail and Ice Cream
Another time Omena villagers looked the other way was during prohibition. Beginning in 1915, before the Omena Post Office was officially a Post Office, it was an ice cream parlor, and you could pick up your mail there too. Beginning in January of 1920, prohibition went into effect. Around then you also could pick up a jar of Moonshine with your mail if you knew how to do it, according to people I talked to. Here’s how: you take an empty jar or bottle around to the back of the building, you leave it in a little shed, or just inside the back door, (along with some cash which I imagine went into a slot in a box much like our farm stands have today), go away and come back in a couple of hours and the jar would be filled with Moonshine.
Shiver me Timbers
But the most outrageous crime to the people of Omena in the early 1900’s was the pirates who raided Omena and the surrounding area. Here is how Sprague’s History of Grand Traverse and Leelanau Counties described these freshwater pirates in the flowery language of 1903.
Dan Seavey, sometime in the 1920’s. Credit: laststandzombieisland.com
“Boats named “Nighthawk, Dark-cloud, Fly-By-Night, or Dread-Naught came swooping down on the unsuspecting settlers with their tan colored sails shielding them from observation at night…. Wing-in wing they came tearing down into the bay, sailing forth in their swift winged vessels to lawless pillage at their own sweet will. They were known as the Mormon Raiders from Beaver Island.” And they mostly got away with it.
The only man to be formally charged with piracy on the Great Lakes was a man called Roaring Dan Seavey. Finally caught, Seavey was put in irons and brought to Chicago where he was tried. However, charges were dropped when the owner of the ship he pirated did not appear in court and he was set free. Perhaps they were afraid of him. Perhaps it was his fellow pirates who intimidated them all. We will never know.