My Mom: Miss Missaukee at Mackinac

^ date reposted to this blog
2002: originally posted to my website
Jun. 08, 2022: last updated

Michigan's two peninsulas are separated by the four-mile-wide Straits of Mackinac*, which is the body of water that connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. During the 19th century passenger ferries transported people between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas, and in the 1920s, the state implemented car ferries so that people could get their automobiles across the Straits. Immediately there was great demand for this service, and soon there were reports that the lines of cars waiting to board would sometimes be backed up as much as 15 miles! Clearly there was a need for a bridge. This represented a monumental challenge, in terms of both engineering and expense. But in November 1957, the new Mackinac Bridge opened to traffic. At the time it was the costliest stretch of road in the world, and it remains one of the longest suspension bridges in the world.

 
*Pronounced MACK-ih-naw. Some locations spell it more phonetically - such as Mackinaw City - but both spellings are pronounced the same. The word is a French corruption of an Ojibwa name for a division of their tribe, early inhabitants of the area.

The website mackinacbridge.org has lots more information, history, facts, and figures about the Bridge itself... but the focus of this page is the Mackinac Bridge Dedication Festival, which took place the following summer.

The organizers decided that each of Michigan's 83 counties would elect a queen to represent them at the ceremony. My mother, Faye Tacoma, was chosen as "Miss Missaukee County". She did a great job of preserving memories and mementos of this once-in-a-lifetime event. On this page you can see photos, view newspaper clippings, and read about the dedication festivities from Faye's perspective. She saved all of the correspondence in her scrapbook, and interspersed throughout are several interesting examples of things that have changed since the 1950s:

• Graphic design
• Advertising slogans
• Zone codes (precursors to modern-day ZIP codes)
• Telephone exchanges (the first two digits of a seven-digit phone number were displayed as letters).

Here is the article in the local newspaper (Lake City Waterfront) that caught the eye of 16-year-old Faye Tacoma in May of 1958:

That is how it all got started. Here is what Faye said about that in her scrapbook:

She was referring to McBain High School; she actually lived in Falmouth at the time, but that town was not big enough to have its own high school. Following is how she described the contest:

Much of the text in Faye's scrapbook was excerpted from a speech she gave to the hometown crowd after the ceremonies, so a lot of her impressions and feelings were edited out. But she once told me that most of the Missaukee contestants were from towns larger than Falmouth, and there was a sense that the girls from small towns were not expected to win. But as it turned out, that is exactly what happened, and to Faye, that made her victory all the more sweet. The local paper announced the winner thus:

And here is the announcement that appeared in the "big-city" newspaper (the Cadillac News, from a neighboring county):

Next is a followup news article that appeared in the local paper as the festival was drawing nearer:

Thursday morning, June 26, Faye met her escorts - Don and Norma Iverson of Lake City - at the bus station in Cadillac (school was out, and Faye was living with her older sister Carole in Grand Rapids for the summer).

Mom felt pretty special when she saw that; as she told me years later, "We Falmouth people did not have expensive cars!" There was a "send-off" for Faye at the annual flower show in Lake City, and apparently she got to pick the winner in a jackpot drawing there. From there they went up to Petoskey, where they had dinner. Later that evening they toured Mackinaw City, and saw some friends in St. Ignace. Then north again, to the Sou Engineering College campus in Sault Ste. Marie*. Faye and Mrs. Iverson stayed there at Brady Hall; Miss Monroe County (Margaret Steed) and her chaperone shared the room with them (Faye said they were too excited to sleep very well that night). Meanwhile, Mr. Iverson had to go back south to his sleeping quarters at Camp Kinross, where all the convertibles were washed, refueled, and stored in hangars for the night.

*Pronounced "soo saint muh-REE", which I believe is French for "the Falls (or Rapids) of St. Mary".

On Friday morning, June 27, there was to be a parade in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (across the St. Mary's River from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan). At the time, there was no bridge there, and the car ferries had a capacity of 19 vehicles. So 19 of the drivers at Kinross went up to Sault Ste. Marie, where they picked up not only their wives and county queens, but also one other queen and her chaperone (apparently not all the queens had arrived at that point). Faye and Mrs. Iverson rode with Miss Keweenaw County and her entourage. They had breakfast at the Windsor Hotel, where each queen was presented with a souvenir Canadian silver dollar. This image on the cover of the folder shows a ship going through the "Soo Locks", which allow passage between lakes Superior and Huron:

Afterwards they paraded through the city, and went back across to the U.S. side. There they ate lunch and had formal pictures taken on the college campus in Sault Ste. Marie:

Faye said that was a second-hand dress that her sister Carole helped her find in the Grand Rapids newspaper. Here she describes what happened after Sault Ste. Marie:

During these parades, the cars were lined up alphabetically by county. The convertible tops would be down, and the queens would sit on the top part of the back seat, while the chaperone was in the front next to her husband. At the end of each parade route, the drivers would pull over and put the tops up, so the cars could proceed at highway speed to the next venue. Note in the description below (from the official itinerary) how "highway speed" was defined:

(Side note: Interstate 75 was extended through the area within a year or two, and since then all of these old highways have changed. Today US 23 and US 31 both end at interchanges south of Mackinaw City, so neither one actually goes through the town anymore. There is a Michigan highway 27 that still serves Cheboygan, but back in 1958, that was US highway 27. US 27 was truncated at an interchange near Grayling in 1962, and in 2002 the entire designation within Michigan was completely replaced by US 127.) After the parade through Cheboygan, the queens arrived at the Armory for dinner:

Afterwards the motorcade went back up to Sault Ste. Marie, where the drivers once again dropped off the ladies. Faye says they arrived at midnight; she and Miss Monroe washed their wind-blown hair and finally retired for the night at 1:30 am. This time, they slept soundly!

The official itinerary for Saturday, June 28, had the drivers waking up at 5:30 am and departing Kinross for Sault Ste. Marie at 6:00. The queens and chaperones were to awaken at 6:00 and meet the drivers at 6:30; one can imagine how everyone must have felt after about four hours of sleep! Breakfast was at 7:00 in the Knights of Columbus Hall, and the motorcade once again departed for St. Ignace at 8:00. There each car was joined by a Cub Scout from Petoskey. All the queens from Lower Peninsula counties crossed over to the Mackinaw City side, while the Upper Peninsula queens remained on the north side. Then they joined separate military parades that took place on each peninsula.

At 11:00, Miss Michigan and her car led the Upper Peninsula queens down from St. Ignace to the Bridge's north anchor block, where they met the Lower Peninsula queens (who had been led by Mrs. Michigan) coming up from Mackinaw City. Here are some photos of the Bridge which I believe Faye must have snapped from the back seat of her convertible:

(full photo; note the deckle edges)

(detail)

(full photo)

(detail)

After everyone was assembled on the Bridge, two trucks with spools of long green ribbon attached to their side mirrors departed from opposite sides of the Straits. Upon reaching the anchor block, the ends of the ribbons were detached from the trucks and tied to both sides of the speaker's podium. During the formal ceremony (which began at 11:30) these two ribbons were tied together to symbolize the joining of the two peninsulas that had been accomplished with the completion of the Mackinaw Bridge. Later each driver got to cut off a foot-long piece of the ribbon; Mr. Iverson gave his ribbon to Faye, and it is still preserved in her scrapbook.

Several 5- or 10-minute speeches were given by various political, military, and clerical leaders, as well as by leaders of the companies who designed, built, and financed the Bridge. After a nearly two-hour ceremony, the queens walked back to their convertibles, ate a catered box lunch, and were then free to depart the area. The Iversons drove Faye home by way of Traverse City, where they stopped for dinner before finally arriving home around 8 pm. It had been a wonderful experience for her. The rainy weather had paused that weekend, and Faye said "...the Chamber of Commerce couldn't have chosen more congenial folks than Mr. and Mrs. Iverson to accompany me to the Bridge festival."

Not far off was the 4th of July. Faye was invited to be a part of the parade in Lake City, and later at the carnival grounds she spoke to the festival-goers about the Bridge ceremony. I believe much of the text in Faye's scrapbook (some of which is posted on these pages) was from the report that she gave on that day.

Eventually, all the convertibles were returned to local Oldsmobile dealers, who presumably cleaned them up for sale. Sometime after the dedication, the dealer for Missaukee County (Sprik Chevrolet in Lake City) sent Faye the commemorative license plate that had been on her car (the "57" refers to Missaukee's position in an alphabetical list of Michigan's counties):

These were the ending paragraphs of an article that appeared the day after the dedication in "the Herald" (which looks like it was a "big city" newspaper, but I do not know where it was published):

About one year after the Bridge was dedicated, Faye Tacoma graduated from high school, and almost immediately began attending a vocational school where she learned the job of an airline reservations clerk. She worked in Detroit for a few years before transferring to Denver, where she met Dale Sanderson Sr. They were married in 1963, and had two children later that decade (one of whom is me). In 1972 (about 14 years after the Bridge opened), my parents brought us to Michigan to visit Faye's family. My father took the photo below during that trip; the vantage was from Bridge View Park in St. Ignace, looking southward towards Mighty Mac:

Faye was on the right; her parents were on the left, and I was the kid shown there (I'm guessing my little sister was sleeping in the car). Faye lived a beautiful life which came to an end in 2014 (a few more details can be found in her obituary). I returned to that location 50 years after the original photo, where I took this shot from the same vantage point: