Dead Lock (3 page)

Shortly after eight a.m., I stood on a pier at the tip of the Michigan mitten, peering out four miles across the Straits to the Upper Peninsula, waiting for the car ferry to come and transport me, Mick and my Ford to the far side. I had left my car parked in the middle of a grid of a hundred or so others, poised and waiting to drive onto the deck of the ferry.

A strong wind blew from the north, slapping cold against my face and raising white caps on the water in front of me. Waves lapped against the foundation of the pier and billowing white clouds slipped across a bright blue sky, their dark shadows racing over the waves. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with air so clean you’d swear it came straight from the breath of God Herself.

The car ferry had just left St. Ignace on the far shore and appeared as a white dot out on the water, so I had plenty of time for a phone call to my uncle. I headed for the big gray terminal. I found the public telephone on the wall and pumped in twenty cents after giving the operator the number of the
Soo Morning News
. I made the call station-to-station; my uncle would be at his desk in spite of the early hour. He hadn’t missed a day of work since my Aunt Susan died twelve years ago.

As I listened to the phone ring at the other end of the line, snapshots of my uncle developed inside my head. Standing an inch or so taller than me, he had flashing blue eyes, a thin straight nose and much more hair than most men in their mid-sixties. It was pure white and combed straight back. He looked younger than his age, due to good genes and an active lifestyle that included plenty of trout fishing and ten-hour days at the paper.

Those mental photographs wound further back in time and I pictured him holding me up to pick apples from the tree in his backyard, and standing behind me at his old gas stove as we popped popcorn.

In another mental image he sat at a desk, editing a story I had written the year I worked at the
Morning News.
It was the year I had moved
–
unexpectedly I might add - to Sault Ste. Marie for my senior year in high school.

I had grown up in Detroit and as a young girl I led a life most young boys dream of. I literally grew up with the Detroit Tigers.

My father was sports editor and columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Maybe you’ve heard of him: Harold “Buck” Brennan? During home stands at Navin Field our house served as a second home for the likes of Harry Heilmann, Topper Rigney and even the legendary Georgia Peach, Ty Cobb.

As you might imagine, my house was also very popular with the kids in school. Boys would just “happen” to drop by whenever they saw a strange car in the driveway on the chance it might belong to a Detroit Tiger.

When the team went on the road, Dad went with them, logging more rail miles than Casey Jones. That became a sore point between him and his second wife Rose until she threatened to leave him and move back to Denver, where her parents lived.

Dad refused to take her seriously until one day at the start of the Tigers’ swing to the east coast, Rose put me on a train to Sault Ste. Marie and took one herself, west to Colorado.

Just after filing for divorce.

She had called my uncle, of course, to make sure I had a place to stay in the Soo. G.P. was familiar with the strains a newspaper career could put on a marriage, his own having survived nearly forty years before my Aunt Susan passed away.

After my senior year of high school, I accepted a journalism scholarship to Columbia University. Dad would visit whenever the Tigers played the Yankees, but sadly he died during my junior year of college. That left me an orphan; my real mother had been killed in a car accident when I was barely three years old.

A voice on the phone jarred me back to the present.

8

“Soo Morning News.” The woman sounded very business-like.

“G. P. Brennan, please.”

“One moment.”

Another wait. I watched two small boys play catch on the far side of the huge waiting room. They dressed alike in red shorts, white shirts and blue caps, a reflection of the patriotism that had swept the country after that shocking December day nearly two years ago. I couldn’t help hoping this damn war would be over before they and other kids like them would be called to serve in some foxhole on the other side of the world. The soldiers doing the fighting and dying now had tossed baseballs just a few years ago.

“Brennan.”

“G. P., it’s Kate.” I had called him G. P. instead of “Uncle George” since childhood. “G. P.” was his nickname, and much easier for a three-year-old to say.

“Kate! It’s grand to hear from you. Say, you sound like you’re next door.” His voice sounded full of the warmth I remembered so well.

“I am, practically. I’m in Mackinaw City.”

“Mackinaw? Why, what in blazes are you doing there?”

“Coming to visit you.”

There came a pause at the other end, then, “Oh?” Strange. My beloved Uncle George didn’t sound overjoyed to hear I had come to see him.

“What’s wrong, G. P.? You always said I had a job with your paper anytime I wanted it.”

Another pause. “It’s not the job, Kate; it’s finding you a place to stay.”

“How about where I always stay...the upper flat in your house?”

“Why, it’s rented out. Jack Crawford, my new managing editor, is living there until his house is built.”

“I’ll find a room somewhere in town.”

“Impossible. There are no rooms. The War Department has stationed seven thousand troops here to guard the locks. Soldiers are everywhere. Fort Brady can’t house them all and people are renting out their basements and garages.”

I felt as though one of those huge rolling white caps out in the Straits had knocked me over. I knew the strategic importance of the Soo Locks, but I hadn’t counted on this.

The iron ore from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Minnesota’s Mesabi Range was critically vital to the Allied war plants. Every lake freighter carrying ore to the steel mills in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania passed through one of four locks in the St. Marys River. If anything happened to those locks, every factory in America making tanks, munitions or anything else vital to the war effort, would shut down.

“Kate...” G. P.’s voice came from somewhere in the distance. “Kate, are you there?”

“I’m here. G. P.”

“Take my advice and turn around for home. The Soo is no place for you right now.”

“Neither is Detroit, I’m afraid.” Blow by blow I recounted my latest experience. I started with the articles on the gas ration stamp counterfeiters and the punk holding the gun to my head in the doorway of my home, and ended with Wells Mayburn’s polite request to get the hell out of town.

“So you see, G. P.,” I concluded, “I don’t have much choice.”

This time the pause stretched so long I thought the line had gone dead. A deep sigh from G.P. finally broke the silence. “Oh, all right. Come ahead. I’ll find something for you.”

As I hung the phone back on the hook and walked to my car I saw the ferry approaching the pier. The wind blew stronger now and the clouds had turned black. But they weren’t the only darkness on the horizon. All the way across the strait I couldn’t help thinking that a lack of space wasn’t the real reason my uncle didn’t want me in Sault Sainte Marie.

9

Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan lies at the source of the St. Marys River, where waters from Lake Superior flow through Whitefish Bay and then into the River on their journey to the lower Great Lakes. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the American Soo’s sister city, is just across the water. People traveling from one town to the other use a car ferry to negotiate the river.

There, between the two towns, the water level of the St. Marys drops 21 feet, creating a once insurmountable barrier for shipping. The first lock, built in the middle of the nineteenth century changed all that.

Hours after driving off the ferry, I crested a hill on Highway 2 and started down into the St. Marys River Basin and Sault Ste. Marie. Founded by French missionaries in 1668, the “Soo” is Michigan’s oldest city, and the country’s third oldest town west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The sun had poked out again and the scene below reminded me of Detroit’s annual J. L. Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade. There were a myriad of giant gray balloons floating a thousand feet or so above the town. The closer I got, the larger the balloons became. Like those in the Detroit department store’s holiday parade, they were some thirty feet long; but instead of bright fairy tale figures, they appeared drab in color and oval in form, like dirigibles.

We drove into town, car windows down, Mick with his head stuck out in the wind, taking in the sights.

On a day when the stifling heat forces you to drive with the windows down, it’s hard to imagine these streets bordered on either side by snow drifts ten feet high. But U.P. weather is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Each November Mr. Hyde comes riding in over Whitefish Bay on dark, black-bottomed clouds that drop flakes of snow the size of quarters. The quarters pile up on streets and sidewalks and make travel by foot or automobile not only difficult, but treacherous. There’s so much snow that there is no place to put it and merchants pay men with carts to haul it away and dump piles of white slush beyond the city limits.

But today it was difficult to fathom anyone making a living hauling snow.

I drove down Ashmun Street and through Sault Ste. Marie, barely noticing the shops, restaurants and taverns. My focus remained on the balloons ahead. I had to lean forward and look straight up to see them at the very top of my windshield.

As her car slid through town, Kate Brennan couldn’t have noticed Claus Krueger as she passed where he stood on the sidewalk outside Cowan’s Department Store. He, too, found the giant balloons interesting, but for a far different reason.

Born in Germany, Claus Krueger had admired the United States even as a young boy. Shortly after he began to talk in his native tongue, his father had coached him in speaking Americanized English. The family planned to move to America and his father wanted him to fit in immediately. But his father’s death when Claus was twelve changed those plans. That was 1924, and like many Germans, young Claus was drawn to the charismatic personality of the man known as Adolph Hitler. Hitler had been sentenced to five years in the Landsberg Prison earlier in the year, but was pardoned and released after serving only nine months.

Claus could still feel the excitement of the rallies that marked the beginning of the Nazification of Germany. The patriotic songs continued to echo in his mind, and when the United States declared war on his native land on December 8, 1941, he vowed to do whatever was asked of him to serve the Third Reich.

He joined the German Army where his intellect and his aptitude for weapons and hand-to-hand combat impressed his superiors. They were even more impressed by his command of American English. As a result, he drew what many of his countrymen considered one of the most important assignments of the war.

He was in Sault Ste. Marie to see America’s precious Soo Locks destroyed and its military manufacturing brought to a dead halt.

10

I turned left onto Portage Avenue, and found myself almost directly under a group of those gigantic balloons. They were tethered on what appeared to be steel wires anchored around the four locks. The area looked dramatically different from the way I remembered it just two years or so ago. I pulled to the side of the road and took in the sight.

As teenagers, we’d swim in the south canal just above the old Weitzel Lock. A couple of the boys rigged a plank off the deck of a barge moored there, and we used it as a diving board.

You could walk up close to the locks in those days. A huge southbound freighter fresh from Lake Superior would sail into the tight space, with feet to spare on either side. The gate behind the freighter would close and water would rush out of the lock, lowering the boat twenty-one feet to the level of the waters of the St. Marys River. Then the gate at the opposite end would open and the huge boat would resume its journey south, carrying iron ore to Detroit, Cleveland or Pittsburgh.

The War had changed the locks as it had affected everything else in America. It had made the cargo of the freighters that passed through them even more precious. A tall metal fence now ringed the perimeter of the grassy park between the street and the locks themselves. Civilian guards stood outside the fence, while MPs walked the grounds inside. From the road, the four locks looked like long, narrow cement swimming pools with giant wooden gates at either end. A dozen or so of the huge balloons I noticed when I first entered town floated above.