into the winter night as if we heard the sound of far-off trumpets
Every year, on the night before Christmas, or sometimes on the last Sunday night before Christmas, the tallest balsam that could be got into the church was erected on the raised platform where the choir ordinarily sat, and it was covered with homemade decorations: looped chains made of colored paper, white popcorn threaded on long strings, tinsel stars, metal clips holding lighted candles, and so on.
We had no electric lights for Christmas trees in those days; we simply used candles with open flames, burning within inches of drying evergreen needles, and the fire hazard must have been considerable.
I should think a few houses would have burned down every year, but it never seemed to happen. Anyway, the church was filled with people.
It was imperfectly lighted, and its interior seemed immense, larger than life, dominated by the great tree that reached up to the shadows just beneath the rafters, its tiny flames all twinkling. Just to be in the place was to partake of a mystery.
The services were extremely simple.
There were carols, prayers, readings of the gospel story of the first Christmas, a few quiet remarks bv the minister, distribution of candy canes and molasses-and-popcorn balls to the small children, and a final hymn: and when the wheezy organ (pumped vigorously by a sweating young man behind a screen) sounded off with “Joy to the World,” and the doors opened to let us out into the winter night, it was as if we heard the sound of far-off trumpets.
From Waiting for the Morning Train by Bruce Catton.
Not sure how old I was, 9 or 10, but one day my grandfather came in the back door of our house asking for me.
It had to be a Friday as it was on Friday night that my Grandpa and Grandma Hendrickson, my Mom’s parents, came to ‘pay a call’ on our family.
Every once in awhile my Dad might try to arrange a date night with my Mom since he knew they were coming, but most often we would just sit and visit and watch TV.
But this night, Grandpa Hendrickson came in asking for me.
He had a book for me.
He said that their church library was throwing out a bunch of books and he rescued one volume that was a book on the Civil War.
He said that he had a grandson who would want that book so they gave it to him.
I was, as I said, about 9 or 10.
Grandpa called for me when they walked in and with some satisfaction handed me a battered copy of Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton.
It was the first Catton book I ever read.
It was the first ‘adult book with chapters’ I ever owned.
I still have it.
The book was most likely over my head at the time and as it started out medias-res it screwed up my timing of the Civil War for years.
But the stories told and the way Catton told them have stayed with me forever.
I have a very solid memory of one summer when late at night, my older brother, Jack, read me the chapter on Crackers and Bullets.
Catton’s words were magic and magically arranged.
I know that my Grandpa’s gift made a big impression on me and maybe shaped my future.
I never ever doubted there was a book I couldn’t read after that.
It also made a big impression on my Mom and she remembered it.
See Bruce Catton grew up in Michigan, up in Benzonia (in Upper Lower Michigan) before he was a world famous Pulitzer prize winning author and Editor the American Heritage magazine of history.
My Mom remembered that Mr. Catton had written that book the her Dad had given to me.
anything man made breaks, will break and once it breaks .. that’s it, game over
Hoffman Kids on the Straits of Mackinac – 1963?
“An oil spill would be catastrophic for all of North America, this place would become a toxic wasteland that would be contaminated for years,” said Whitney Gravelle, an Ojibwe person who is president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “People often can’t even believe there is a pipeline going through the Great Lakes. It seems crazy that we just have this heart attack waiting to happen.
Mr. Milman continues, At the centre of this maelstrom are the native Great Lakes tribes that cherish the Straits of Mackinac, the four mile-wide stretch of water the ageing pipeline bisects, in creation stories as the birthplace of North America itself. They claim Line 5, which cuts through swathes of native land in its 645-mile route, is a “ticking time bomb” that imperils the Great Lakes, which contain a fifth of Earth’s entire surface fresh water, and risks severing deep, existential bonds of cultural connections that stretch back millennia.”
If you grew up in the State of Michigan like I did, at some point in your life your family made a trip to upper lower Michigan, or the Straits, meaning the Straits of Mackinac, the body of water that joined Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.
A body of water spanned by the Mackinac Bridge and the location of Mackinaw City, Michigan.
Or as Clifton Webb pronounced it, talking to his estranged wife Barbara Stanwyck, who was in the process of leaving Mr. Webb in London and taking the children the quickest way possible which was to buy tickets on the RMS Titanic to her home town of, “MACK – EEE – NACK, Michgan” in the 1953 movie Titanic.
There is a park at the top of the Michigan Mitten and you can park at the park and walk under the bridge.
On one side of the bridge is a sign that says, LAKE HURON.
And on the other side is another sign that says, LAKE MICHIGAN.
My Dad would stand there and every time say, “This is the Straits of Mackinac, Lake Michigan is way over there and Lake Huron is way over there past the island.”
All of us kids would nod our heads in agreement and wonder how the State of Michigan could screw up something so simple.
We made the trip to the Straits on what seems a yearly basis.
There were 11 kids in my family and whoever happened to be home at the time would be invited along so anywhere from 6 to 13 people would pile into the car for the trip
The trip involved a long drive that started in the pre dawn and a stop at some roadside park for a picnic breakfast.
My Mom would pack a cooler with milk, juice and those little travel boxes of breakfast cereal.
That was back when those boxes had specific perforations on them so the one side could be opened and then you could tear the wax paper bag carefully and pull it back so that it became a travel bowl that could hold milk.
We marveled at such thoughtful ingenuity on behalf of those folks at Kelloggs.
My Dad had a little propane stove to heat up water for tea or coffee.
This for my Dad, was all the camping he wanted to do.
This view on camping and of what-is-fun has rubbed off on me while the rest of my Family gathers at campgrounds every year.
We would sit at dew damp picnic tables and my Dad would moan that he forgot to bring a towel to wipe off the benches.
He never did bring a towel as he didn’t want a wet towel in the car anyway.
The invention of paper towels was a big day for him.
Breakfast done it was time for a bathroom break and washup.
The bathroom’s at Michigan Roadside stops in those days where small wooden sheds over pit toilets that were one step above an outhouse.
The disinfectant or lime or whatever was dumped into those things had a unique smell or odor all its own and without much trouble I can still smell it.
To wash up, the State of Michigan had installed a standup hand pump over a well.
We stand in line and take turns pumping the pump as someone rinsed their hands or tried to get a drink of what we called, ‘iron water.’
You would pump that handle three or four times and holding the handle you can feel the water coming up and out the pipe to splash on the concrete bed surrounding the pipe.
Breakfast over and back in the car, we would start looking out the front window for the first sign of the towers of the Mackinac Bridge.
We would start looking around Gaylord, Michigan when we were still an hour south of the Straits.
Someone would catch a glimpse of the first white steel tower of the bridge and yell, THERE IT IS, I SEE IT.
I think I would start yelling that whether I saw it or not and then say, there behind the trees.
My Dad knew a small motel that was our destination and we would stop, unload then start our day in Mackinaw City.
We would start at the Fort and the Bridge museums and see all the things we saw every year.
Lunch was always at Tyson’s Cafeteria and, for reasons I never understood, we got the famous Chicken Pot Pie.
Don’t get me wrong as they were good but Swanson’s Frozen Chicken Pies were a Saturday Lunch staple at my house and I didn’t see much of difference.
After lunch was the drive over the bridge and a trip through St. Ignace and maybe all the way up to Castle Rock with the little kids pointing out every souvenir stand and the older kids yelling TOURIST TRAP.
At some point we always, as did EVERYONE, got some fudge.
I would daydream of the day when I was rich and I would be able to buy my own half-pound slab of chocolate and holding it like a sandwich eat it all by myself.
Getting fudge was so much of a rule when visiting the Straits, that in 1976 when President Gerald Ford was on the island and went to Church with the Governor of Michigan, the Secret Service thought they were safe and moved on to the next venue.
After Church, the President and the Governor realized they HAD to get some fudge and went out a different door and the Secret Service lost the President for a while.
Luckily there were on an island.
I remember also as some sort of right-of-passage, when my Parents felt my sister’s reached the right age, that sister and my Parents leave the rest of us at the hotel and they would make a trip to the ‘Strip’ of Mackinaw City and then, that sister would pick out a silver and turquoise ring.
At least that is what is in my memory and it seems to my that my sisters wore those rings for years.
Behind it all, the parks, the restaurants, and the travel, there was this sense that where we were was a pretty special place.
The land and the water and the islands and the beaches and the rocks and the waves were integral to what made Mackinac, Mackinac.
And we knew it.
I feel that my Parents put special emphasis on the view and the beauty of the place though we might not have appreciated it at the time.
Michigan and the Great Lakes were special.
In school in the State of Michigan, 4th graders studied Michigan History.
Back then, the State celebrated Michigan Week and in school, little pamphlets of Michigan Fun Facts were passed out so us students could be ‘Michigan Minutemen’ and spout off all sorts of information about our state.
And we did!
The word Michigan itself comes from the word “mishigami”, which means “large water” or “large lake.”
The first European settlement in Michigan was in 1668.
In 1774, Michigan was within the British Province of Quebec.
By 1920, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the U.S.
The State motto is, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you” with a image of a man on a beach on the State Seal.
Once in a Church board meeting where the task at hand was composing the Church Mission Statement, I suggested, “If you seek a pleasant Church, look about you” and it got some traction until one of my Brothers-in-Law exposed me.
The motto on State License plates used to alternate between Winter Wonderland and Water Wonderland until someone got tired of switching and for a few years we had Winter-Water Wonderland.
The Sunday Magazine Supplement of the Grand Rapids Press was titled, Wonderland Magazine.
One time editor of the GRPress, Gerald Elliott once confided in me that of all the changes made by the GRPress, it was Wonderland the he missed the most when it was stopped.
That was the only place for local writers to be recognized he said to me with regret.
So I read with dismay the sentence, “”It’s little known to the throngs of tourists who gawp at the wonder of the Great Lakes but at the meeting point of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, a combined system that forms the largest lake in the world, there is a 70-year-old pipeline, battered and dented by dropped boat anchors.“
I knew about the pipeline I guess as it has been in the news for years.
But managed to forget it about but reading this article about all I can say it … what else can go wrong?
I remember back in the day when then Gov. Jim Blanchard, when the state was broke, looked into making Michigan a national nuclear waste site.
Someone pointed out that as the center of one of the world’s largest concentrations of freshwater, this wasn’t the best idea.
Maybe we can have that realization again.
As Mr. Milman writes, “The battle over this 70-year-old pipeline may drag on for several more years but the anxiety of the Great Lakes tribes won’t easily abate. At a recent protest event on the banks of Lake Michigan, called the Water is Life festival, banners reading “Protect the Great Lakes” and “We can’t drink oil” fluttered in the breeze of a waning summer as small knots of people gathered around a stage to listen to music and speeches.
“Anything manmade breaks, and that pipeline will break,” said Jannan Cornstalk, an Odawa woman who has organized this festival for the past five years. “And once it breaks, that’s it. Game over.”
PS – BTW the photo is the Mackinac Bridge. When it was built, David B. Steinman was appointed as the design engineer said there is a bridge that will last 100 years! That was in 1958 … tic tic itc
those nice bright colors greens of summers, makes you think world’s a sunny day
Kodachrome They give us those nice bright colors Give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away
From the Paul Simon song, 1973, Kodachrome.
My Dad had a Nikon camera.
The Nikon F series was introduced in the early 1960’s and my Dad had to have one as he got all the new gadgets (including a Heathkit color TV that he built in the basement – it only took a soldiering gun and about 7 months of work).
That Nikon F series was a great camera and really didn’t get left behind until the digital era and it became one the best selling camera’s of all time.
With that camera, my Dad took a lot of pictures or slides as they were called back then.
A few years back one of my Nephew’s digitized all of my Dad’s slides and sent me the files.
Looking through all those photos I came across some snaps my Dad took of our family Labor Day picnic in, what I am thinking was, 1963, but thanks to a note from my cousin, it is 1964.
At least I am hoping it was Labor Day but it could have been the 4th of July.
I could write my Nephew and see if he still has the physical slides and can check the date stamped on the cardboard frame but then I might find out that they aren’t Labor Day and it mess up the writing of this post.
We were the Hoffman’s.
My Dad’s sister had married a Glerum.
And my Mom was a Hendrickson.
My Dad’s snaps show all of us, Hoffman’s, Hendrickson’s and Glerum’s (and it that a Lower in there as well?) gathered together at my family’s Lake Michigan cottage.
It has to be soon after my Dad bought the place as there is no deck yet in front of the place.
All the kids and all the Aunts and Uncles are all gathered in the small yard and short deck that was there in just our first summer.
After that, my Dad added more decks and rooms and then over the years as the Lake moved east, removed those decks and rooms until finally the place had to be moved back away from the lake and almost rebuilt.
We called it the cottage.
It was roughing it as much as my Dad wanted to rough it which meant there was only a stand up shower.
I look at the pictures and I see the all the nice bright colors and greens of summer and I can remember it all.
I can taste the food in the picnic dinner my Mom and my Aunt’s spread out.
It wasn’t so much a family get together as it was mob.
It wasn’t so much of talking and conversation as it was BUZZ and LOUD.
It wasn’t so much a relaxing day at the beach but a day of constant activity
There was something somewhere going on constantly.
Smell the sweet piney smell of the forest around the cottage and feel the spiky-ness of the sparse grass?
I can.
I was three, if the timing on all this works out, maybe 4, I’ll have to ask my brothers and sisters about this pictures.
For the next 20 years, 4th of July and Labor Day meant that everyone was coming to the Lake.
We would wake up early, too excited to sleep and at some point, we would walk down the two track to the road so we could see the cars first and run back yelling THEY’RE HERE, THEY’RE HERE!!
Our Grandparents would arrive and unpack their car and we would carry in various pots and dishes covered with newspaper and tied with string.
The main meal would be thick slices of ham on hamburg buns or something like that and the evening meal would be leftovers with focus being a big pot of my Grandma’s Chili or her hamburger, corn, noodles and tomato hot dish that we called goulash.
All the Aunt’s would bring a hot dish of beans or potatoes along with all sorts of salads.
One of my brothers said to me you know you are getting old when that three bean salad starts looking good.
Then there were the deserts.
My Aunt Wanda’s sweet rolls, which I remember would disappear before desert time as me and my cousins would dare each other to sneak into the kitchen and grab one.
Cakes, and brownies … and pie.
My Mom was known for her pie.
Blueberry, cherry and rhubard.
Blueberries that were purchased from roadside stands on the way from Grand Rapids.
Rhubarb from the Glerum’s garden.
My Uncle Bud Glerum could grow more stuff from less land than anyone we knew and we always shared in the bounty.
It may have been at one of these Labor Day parties that my Grandpa finished a big piece of my Mom’s pie and announced, “Lorraine makes the best pie.”
Family tradition has it that it was long, silent drive home that holiday for my grandparents.
Labor Day.
It was the end of the summer.
It was the real end of the year.
The real new year, not that one in January, would start in a week or so when school started.
Summers were long for us kids.
We got off in June and we knew that July and August were OFF.
And our summer ended on the exclamation point of Labor Day.
meek little wives feel edge of the carving knife and study husbands’ necks
There was a desert wind blowing that night.
It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.
On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.
Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.
Anything can happen.
So starts the short novel or long short story, “Red Wind” in the collection of short novels or long short stories, Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler, (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
How Mr. Chandler took some very simple words and connected them in such a way that lets you feel the heat and dust and see the scene in your mind, the scene with the meek little wife and the knife and the husbands neck, and you can see it as clearly as if it were a scene in a Spielberg movie is beyond me.
A neat trick.
If I knew how Mr. Chandler did that (IE – It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window …) I would do it.
Somehow, deep in my soul, I am sure and reassured that AI or CHATgtp or any computer could NOT write that sentence is just that way.
It has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.
It is the Low Country because it is so low above sea level.
A couple of miles from the Atlantic Coast and, according to my smart phone, 27 feet above sea level, where I am writing from the 3rd floor of our apartment building.
And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.
We are in the whatever day of a prolonged heat advisory.
My wife and I both enjoy the climate here, for the most part.
We don’t miss snow.
We don’t miss extended cold weather.
I claim that I lived a half of a century in West Michigan and my bones have yet to thaw out.
And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.
Just off the coast, it has not been the dry hot of the Santa Anna Wind Mr. Chandler refers to.
Humidity is also off the charts.
I am not sure what that means as humidity is one of those things that cannot be greater than 100%.
100% humidity means rain.
So humidity here hovers around 97%.
The temperature today will peak around 97 degrees.
The same smart phone that tells me the elevation above sea level also says that the temp with the humidity, will feel like 110 degrees.
I am used to windchill.
Reports that with a temperature of 28 degrees and a 15mph wind, it will feel like 8 degrees outside.
Going the other way is new to me.
Cold air, below freezing is crisp and clear.
Hot air, in the 90’s with humidity in the 90’s is thick and visible.
Cold air is a slap in the face.
Hot, humid air, is a big dog that sits on your chest and slowly squeezes the oxygen out of your blood.
Coming inside from cold air, heat embraces you, wraps you up, comforts you.
Coming inside from hot, humid air, the air conditioning attacks you, assaults your senses and leaves you senseless.
And when you come inside, down in here in the low country, during a prolonged head advisory, it is like walking into a meat locker.
You can feel the fingers of cold wrap around your skin.
You remember the scene in the movie, “The Day After” where the helicopter pilot opens the door and the freeze line moves across his face.
They say life in the south would not be possible without air conditioning.
But life at what cost?
Garrison Keillor once wrote something along the line that the seeds of decay of the Western World were in Air Conditioning.
My Dad was one of those people who thought Air Conditioning saved the Western World.
My Dad always held that in a car, the comfort of the driver was supreme therefore the driver (on trips that meant my Dad) set the level of air conditioning.
For my Dad, that meant full blast.
As cold as it get which was determined how long it was on. at full blast.
On long summer trips in a station wagon filled with suitcases and kids, the middle seat was my Mom’s domain and it seems like my sisters also had dibs on the middle row.
For us boys that meant that back of the station wagon which in those days was a flat cargo area.
We would put some cushions back there and some pillows but for the most part you sat cross legged and tried to get comfortable.
Or it was the front seat.
The front seat with Dad.
The front seat with the air conditioning blowing out 34 degrees of cold air at 50mph.
5 minutes you got cold.
10 minutes you were frozen.
15 minutes you were in agony AND you had to use the bathroom so bad you thought you might explode any second.
I remember one family trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when I was around 11 years and I was near tears, I was frozen, my feet were blocks of ice, I couldn’t feel my fingers and I had to go so bad.
My Dad spotted a gas station and pulled in.
There was a RESTROOM sign with an arrow pointing around the side of the building and I was out of the car before it came to stop.
Running as fast I could, I came wide around the corner and saw the two doors for restrooms and I shoved a door open and took care of things.
I sat in there, with the crisis retreating as I warmed up and relief spread through my body in many ways.
As I came back to the conscious world I became aware of my brothers voices.
It came to me that they were in the restroom.
The restroom next door.
I heard one of my brothers say, ‘I wonder where Mike is?’
I noticed the restroom I was in was all done in pink.
Air conditioning curls your hair and makes your nerves jump and your skin itch.
On frozen nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.
Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.
was an actual need bigger, bigger, bigger, best? wasn’t that at all
When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1970’s, fall afternoons meant football.
Michigan football.
University of Michigan football.
It was hard to miss.
My Dad was into what was called Hi-Fi or High Fidelity sound systems and he had wired our whole house and with a click of a button, his sound system would play in any room, or as he liked it, all of the rooms of the house.
Just before noon on Saturday’s he would tune into WUOM Ann Arbor in time to hear the words, “The Wolverines are on the air” and then the deep bass of the voice of Michigan Football (for UOM listeners) Tom Hemingway would welcome us either to Ann Arbor or West Lafayette, Indiana or Champaign, Illinois or wherever Michigan was playing that day and the broadcast of the game would be the backdrop to another fall weekend afternoon.
Every week.
The format of the broadcast more or less got embedded into your subconscious and when game breaks were made, the same breaks used year after year, you could recite them along with the broadcast.
One game break always came at the end of the 3rd quarter.
“Highlight films of todays game” it would start, “will be available this …” and a list of the locations and times across the state where fans could go and watch FILMS … 16mm movies of the latest game.
My memory says that Grand Rapids fans could go the University Club at Noon on Thursdays.
I never knew anyone who went to see these films but that was what fans had to do to WATCH the Wolverines.
Unless, by chance, the game was TV.
Back then there was only one or two college football games on any Saturday.
Televised games were seen as so powerful a recruiting tool that every team was limited to just two appearances a year with an extra game every other year so no team could be on more than 5 times in two years.
If you wanted to see the Wolverines on a weekly basis, it was game films.
It was game films, OR, you went to see the game.
There was time when going to see a Michigan Football game, or any professional athletic team or concert was all about the event.
Over 100,000 people would pack themselves into Michigan Stadium to do one thing.
Watch a football game.
100,000 and everyone, for the most part, focused on what was going down on the field.
Talk about unity.
Talk about one out of many.
Talk about a shared community experience.
One of my college roommate’s was from Ann Arbor and his folks had a set of 4 seasons tickets and in the years after college, I would often get a call and be invited to a game.
One year, due to wedding, my buddy’s folks couldn’t go to a game and the tickets were offered to me and my wife.
It was the 1991 Michigan – Notre Dame game.
As an aside, we got to our seats and I greeted most of the fans sitting around us.
My wife asked, ‘How do you know all these people?’
I told her that these were seats that Scott’s (my roommate) Parents had for 20 years and everyone who sat there knew everyone.
I then added, ” … and they know if you are NOT supposed to sit here.”
A guy in front of us turned around and caught my wife’s eye and with a big smile, nodded a very firm agreement.
This was the game that is known for a 4th quarter touchdown catch that won Desmond Howard the Heisman Trophy.
One play that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?
One play in the first game of the year that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?
YUP!
And I can see it like it was yesterday.
Up 17-14 late in the 4th QTR with 4th down and ONE FOOT at the ND 25, Michigan went for it.
This alone brought 110,000 people to their feet.
Quarterback Elvis Grbac dropped back to pass and looked right, cocked his arm, the crowd held its breath … and pulled his arm down.
The crowd exhaled, thinking the pass play was gone, but maybe maybe maybe, Elvis might fall over and get one foot for the 1st down.
Then Grbac half turned and leaned over so far backwards he almost fell and threw the ball hard and high.
And the crowd again sucked in all the air in Michigan Stadium.
The disappoint of Michigan fans rippled through the crowd like a wave that broke against the jubilation of any ND fan in the crowd.
With the ball in the air going towards no one and no where but the empty corner of the end zone, there was blur along the right sideline.
Like a genie out of a bottle or the sudden appearance of a ghost, teeny tiny #21, Desmond Howard flew and I mean flew, and I mean from the 15 yard line to the corner of the end zone, little Desmond FLEW, parallel to the astro turf surface, flew, never more then 3 feet off the ground.
Now there was no oxygen in that stadium.
Time stopped.
It was like those flashback scenes in a movie where what I saw was like still pictures played in fast succession instead of real life in real time.
The stadium, 110,000 people, for a split second went silent.
The blur that was little Desmond met up the football and he caught the ball with both hands, hugged to his body and fell into the end zone.
And that place exploded!
Everyone as one, focused on that one single second, that moment in time, all part of one collective thought.
Pandemonium, as the papers would report, ensued.
There was no waiting for a review.
There was no need for any other decision by a ref other than TOUCHDOWN.
There was no replay in the stadium.
My memory tells me that is how it happened and that is good enough for me.
The game day experience.
What, really, WHAT could be better than that?
30 Years later, Michigan has the answer.
Bigger, better TV scoreboards in the Stadium.
According to a story in the Detroit Free Press, Michigan is putting the final touches on what will be the 3rd largest scoreboards in the country.
Oh Boy!
According to the story, “This wasn’t ‘how do we spend more money, how do we go bigger, bigger, bigger,’ it wasn’t that at all.”
It was this paragraph that gave me pause.
As for the function of the boards, the plan is to use the additional space to have more in-depth stats available to fans during games, as well as show other games’ scores more consistently, to compete with the at-home experience.
This was done, the giant scoreboards, to compete with the at-home experience.
Big College Sports on the Big Stage in the Biggest Stadium needs the BIGGEST scoreboards to compete with the at-home experience.
The story goes on, “We’re really trying to prioritize what’s done for the fans,” said Jake Stocker, U-M’s director of game presentation and fan experience. “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium, so we’re giving them that experience.”
Michigan has a Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience?
I guess they do and he said “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium.”
Isn’t there anyplace, ANYPLACE on EARTH, where the ability to connect to a cell phone takes the 2nd seat?
Certainly not at a college football game.
To me, for the Leaders and Best, bigger bigger bigger, doesn’t add up to best.
The game I went to in 1991 had over 100,000 focused on one thing.
Today, the Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience wants you to be at Michigan Stadium and fell like you never left home.
Really.
Then why leave home?
To paraphrase George C Scott in the movie Patton, “God, how I hate the 21st Century.“
No Haiku For You 