ESCANABA, MI – Rosy Cox, owner of Rosy’s Diner deep in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, isn’t your typical restaurant owner.
Her diner was closed for the evening, and she wasn’t yet ready to go back to her log cabin in the 200 acres she owns in the woods.
We were both sitting at the bar last week, not at her place, but at the Stonehouse, Escanaba’s finest restaurant. I was trying to finish half an entrée. She was downing an entire large steak.
“I probably eat here about five days a week,” she said. What about her diner, a bright red fixture downtown since 1932?
“What time do I open? When I feel like getting there, and I close when I feel like leaving,” she said.
The next morning, there she was at her counter, abusing her regular customers in salty language. She remembered me, and complained because I ordered oatmeal and didn’t finish the brown sugar and raisins. What she never mentioned was the two plaques buried on the back wall, one from the prestigious magazine Travel and Leisure, which in 2018 rated Rosy’s the second best diner in the entire nation. The second rated it the best diner in Michigan.
Anyone who’s had her cooking and sampled the atmosphere might find it hard to disagree. Rosy, who is about 60, insists she never cooked at all till after she bought the diner in 1999 and had to learn.
Rosy may not be a typical restaurateur, but she is a definite Upper Peninsula type: “Yoopers” tend to work hard, don’t blow their own horns and don’t care a whole lot what “trolls” – those who live south of (under) the bridge — think of them.
Michigan’s vast Upper Peninsula is a world apart, connected to the rest of the state by that five-mile long bridge. It has nearly a third of the state’s land, and barely three percent of its people.
The UP is a thousand square miles larger than New Jersey and Massachusetts — combined. Those two states have about 15.8 million people. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has perhaps 305,000.
That’s fewer than a century ago. Once, in a two-hour drive in the peninsula’s far west, I saw only one person, who was fishing. Walk down Main Street in Ironwood, the town farthest west, and you end up in Wisconsin. There are cougars in the UP, state wildlife officials finally admit, and also wolves, bears and elk. There’s also the scenery, like the spectacular upper and lower Tahquamenon Falls.
What’s lacking is economic opportunity, namely, jobs. Back in the 19th century, this was first a major source of lumber, then copper and iron. But eventually, the primeval forests had been stripped and all the worthwhile minerals were gone.
Now, the main industry is tourism. Mark Dobias is an independent, irreverent and hard-working attorney who has had a practice in Sault Ste. Marie for more than 30 years, but who has clients scattered around northern Michigan.
Born in Cheboygan, he went to law school in Detroit before returning north. Michigan’s system of term limits have badly hurt the UP, he thinks. “Remember the days of (Dominic) Jacobetti?” a state representative who served nearly 40 years and chaired the Appropriations committee. He and several others like him “insured that the UP would have a fair go in Lansing.”
Now, he said, that’s gone. For decades, the Upper Peninsula was reliably Democratic, its voters conservative on social issues, liberal on economic ones. But that was before the political culture wars.
Today, the Upper Peninsula is mainly Republican, except for Marquette, which resembles a mini-Ann Arbor. Few know that Hillary Clinton won lower Michigan by about 16,000 votes.
The UP cast only about 145,000 votes out of nearly five million statewide – but they were so overwhelmingly for Donald Trump he managed to become the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state in three decades. Last year, in the face of a genuine “blue wave,” in Michigan, Democrats gained two seats in Congress.
But while Democrats had an attractive candidate and high hopes of ousting Jack Bergman, a conservative first-term Republican who represents the UP in Congress, they didn’t come close.
Politics doesn’t seem to be a big topic of discussion in most of the Upper Peninsula. When Dominic Jacobetti was in Lansing, he would occasionally call for the UP to become the 51st state, which he wanted to name Superior. But that never got very far, and the idea fizzled after “King Jake” died in office in 1994.
Even if the rest of the nation agreed, it’s hard to see how the UP, which has barely half the population of Wyoming, could afford the infrastructure needed to run a state.
Today, in attorney Dobias’s opinion, the shots in the UP are being called by “whoever is owned by the Southwest Michigan political gang,” mainly the DeVos family. “They would be better off spending money in the area with capital investments, instead of treating it as a breeding ground for future soldiers and sailors and servants for the tourist industry,” he said.
New investment certainly would be welcome. So would a little respect. Earlier this month, Mountain Dew, the soda pop, launched an ad campaign showing the UP as part of Wisconsin. Yoopers were not, shall we say, amused.
