Editor’s note: This is the second of a series of supplemental editorial material from UPPAA Spring 2025 keynote speaker Michael Carrier. As in any editorial, opinions are solely those of the contributing commentator. To read part one, see the Summer 2025 newsletter.
When troubled by an issue I was having with a fellow author, a friend whom I hold in high esteem gave me these words of wisdom:
“Every author will be challenged at some point in their career as to why or how they are qualified to write. Tell the UPPAA members—‘this is my story and I invite you to see yourself in it because skeptics abound and it behooves you to prepare in advance.’”
Thanks, my friend, for those words of wisdom.
Okay, let’s take a more critical look at this Michael Carrier guy…who is he anyway, and what makes him think that he is some kind of expert on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?…Well, the truth is that I was neither born nor raised anywhere even close to paradise. So what makes me an expert?…Let me see if i can straighten out the record just a bit about that.
First of all, I am not pretending to be an expert on the UP. I was born and raised in a farming community located just outside of South Haven, Michigan. South Haven is a small town that is located approximately midway between Midway Airport (in Chicago), and Grand Rapids Michigan—all of which are definitely located well south of the UP.
Yes, I do now own a home on Lake Superior—have for nearly eighteen years. It is located by Whitefish Point about a half mile west of the Shipwreck Museum. My wife and I bought it after we sold our security company. But, it is true that I did not grow up in the Upper Peninsula…What then is my connection to the UP? Or do I even have a connection?
I contend that the answer is “YES,” I do have roots in Michigan’s UP. My father, John Carrier, was born in the UP, and grew up in the UP…I learned all about his life through the stories he would share with me when I was a little kid. Hundreds of evenings I would crawl up on his lap and he would tell me about his interesting childhood, and I would always listen intently. His father was named Sherman Carrier, and his mother a Native American named Emma Pierce.
Sherman had serious issues—he was an alcoholic and an anytime/anyplace fist fighter. Although Emma gave it her best for over a decade, she eventually found the pressures too great for her to deal with. So, she took some of the children and moved out, while my dad and one (or more?) of his male siblings remained living with their dad. (As an aside here, I would add that my dad and his mother did remain very close, and eventually he coaxed her into moving in a house he had built for her on our property, and she lived there until she passed.)
My dad told me that the only legitimate trade his father was good at was that as an Upper Peninsula lumberjack. But, there was a problem with that, especially when it came to raising a family. Dad said that he and his brother(s) would have to continually move from lumber camp to lumber camp. Why? Because Sherman would get drunk, get in a fight with someone, get himself arrested, and then get fired. (Or whenever the whiskey still he maintained off camp property would be discovered.) My dad counted thirty different UP schools he was forced to attend during those difficult years before his thirteenth birthday.
I did the math using Dad’s numbers, and it would have meant that my grandpa Sherman must have moved his half of the family to at least three camps every year—on average. Dad told me that it was only after the eighth grade (when he turned 13) that he was legally able to quit school and go out on his own. And so that’s what he did in late June of 1914.
Dad explained to me that whenever a kid had to change schools all the time, he would find that with each new school he would be forced to work his way through the pecking order. Dad was a survivor and he did not like to get pushed around, so this was a very big deal for him. It would mean that for him to endure being the new kid, he would have to continually fight to re-establish a favorable position at the new school…So, my dad also became a fighter, but for a totally different reason than had his father.
On his first day at a new school, Dad said it would be his mission to seek out the toughest kid there, and then beat the snot out of him…And he would have to do that three to four times a year.
So, at his first legal opportunity, he quit school and became a lumberjack. That meant that he was totally on his own when he was thirteen. As the youngest lumberjack in the camp (which I think he told me was near Newberry), he was given his own team of horses to drag the logs from deep in the forest out to where they could be loaded up and transported to a mill.
But, unfortunately for him, when he was only 14 he had a log that he was dragging slide in the snow and crush his foot. He told me that X-rays taken years later in life bore out as fact that the accident had broken several of the bones in his right foot. That meant my dad, as a 14-year-old kid, was laid up with no place to go.
So, to get by he was forced to pick up two new trades—First, he had to learn how to barber. That is, he picked up a pair of scissors and a razor and developed the ability to cut hair and shave faces.
And, the second new job he mastered was the art of making whiskey using his dad’s whiskey still. He did not like the barbering part so much because some of the lumberjacks would be drunk, and they’d threaten to kill him if he ever nicked their faces. So, he majored in the whiskey production part for his actual interim livelihood.
Dad told me about all the fights he witnessed at the camps, and how that he was frequently engaged in one himself. Combat was so much a part of the culture at the camps that conversation in the mess halls was absolutely forbidden.
One of the funny side stories he told me about was how that the cooks would form the butter into balls and store them in the icebox with the meat so that it would be difficult to knife any off. That would make the butter, which was expensive, last longer.
He told me all about how big a job it was to pack up the moonshine still when the camp moved. He described how that when his younger brother turned 13, he declared adulthood as well and joined up with my dad, and together they would cut timber…Of course, all the while they ran the whiskey business on the side.
Among his favorite stories was about the time they got careless and boiled the mash down too far, pushing some of the solids through the coil. So, they had to run the whole batch through the mechanism a second time. He said it came out in the end at almost 200 proof—and that his customers nearly buzzed out with a single shot.
He continued to work in the camps even after he met and married my mom. He was 23 when they tied that knot. For several years they lived in “tarpaper shanties” in or near the lumber camps, and the two brothers continued to make the whiskey and cut the logs…His brother also got married and had his own one-room tarpaper house in the woods, and that the two of them were considered quite successful at boiling the hooch down and marketing it.
While still a teenager my dad became the enforcer at the camp. That came about largely because he was fair minded, didn’t drink, and he carried a long-barreled .45 everywhere he went—his description of the pistol made it sound a lot like the Buntline Special that Wyatt Earp was reputed to have carried. In addition to the oversized pistol, he also carried another interesting tool of the enforcement trade—a rust-proof set of brass knuckles.
Dad told me that his least favorite part of the whole experience was in being forced to deal with collecting money from a lot of alcoholic lumberjacks—it sounded to me sort of like what the drug dealers of today do now. Men would run out of booze and come to his door in the middle of the night wanting to get more. But, he knew that by that late hour they wouldn’t have money to pay for it. So he would tell them to get away from his house and go away, or there would be another bullet hole through his door…He always had a reputation for not mincing words, so even the drunkest of the lumberjacks knew better than to question his resolve—at least most of the time.
Dad didn’t tell me this next part of the story—it was my mother who shared this with me. And she, like my dad, never lied to me. She explained it like this: Once, in the middle of the night, Dad came home covered with blood. He told my mom to “pack up — we gotta get out of here.” And that’s what they did. That very night! (My guess is that the blood was more likely produced by the .45 than the brass knuckles, because Dad discarded the pistol early on, but kept the other implement well into my youth. I have no idea where either of them is today.)
Mom told me that my dad never explained to her what had happened that night in the woods, and she never asked. She obviously knew that whatever he might tell her could be used against him should it ever have gone to court. Her account of their actions that night was that they, their two kids, along with my dad’s brother (with the brother’s wife and kids) all immediately left and headed to Deadwood, South Dakota.
They stayed in South Dakota for an undetermined amount of time, and then they all moved back to Michigan—but this time to the Lower Peninsula. They temporarily settled in Muskegon before moving on to other parts of the state.
I never had the guts to ask my dad about what happened that last night in the UP. He was a very gentle man with me, but I knew not to push him…And, interestingly, even though he manufactured and marketed illicit booze for many years, he never drank alcohol — not when he was making it, and not later in life.
As far as I know, Dad never ran a still in the Lower Peninsula. However, when I was in the 8th grade I did secretly try to make my own whiskey still. But, dad found it and chopped it up with an axe (much like the Feds did in the ‘20s). I didn’t ask him about that either, but he later told me that had anyone consumed the moonshine my still might have produced, it could have proved fatal. Apparently I had used some brass (instead of copper) in its construction. You can’t do that.
From the first that I can remember, at our house just outside of South Haven, my dad owned and operated a sizeable sawmill. He would purchase large plots of nearby forest and we would lumber them off. Yes, I learned to handle a crosscut saw—not well, but well enough not to get fired. We were, to my knowledge, the largest manufacturer of field crates in western Michigan.
Interestingly, because one of the plots of land we lumbered had a good-sized stream of water (Black River) flowing through it, our family engineered one of the last log drives in the Lower Peninsula. Were it not for his many years of experience in logging the UP, Dad would never have been able to develop that business as he did.
Anyway, it was my incredibly close relationship with my wonderful father and mother that formed the basis for my initial attraction to the UP. And that is in part what led me to buy the Lake Superior house overlooking the burial grounds of the Edmund Fitzgerald (which is located 15 miles directly north of my house), and the Ora Endress, which is thought to be the name of the wreckage resting barely beneath the waves only a couple hundred feet from my deck. In fact, when the water level in Superior is down, parts of it can be seen peeking out at me from between the waves. I be forever thanking my dad and mom for all the wonderful UP memories they shared with me.
Several years ago I was surprised to learn that a plaque in honor of my father and his family had been hung at the Tahquamenon Logging Museum in Newberry. I suspect it was my equally proud brother who initiated the effort that brought this honor about.
So, to tie a bow on this part of my history, while I do not claim to be an expert on the Upper Peninsula, I have relished the opportunity to introduce Jack (my main character Jack Handler) to some of the glorious heritage afforded to all of us who have been given the opportunity to experience it firsthand.
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After submitting “Part One” of this series of notes (to the UPPAA Quarterly Newsletter), questions were raised as to the reasoning behind my bringing up the whole matter at this time. So, I will explain:
After giving it some heavy thought, I concluded that the best thing I could do to be helpful at the conference would be to change my talk topic from The TRAX System of Writing Memoirs, to one that would encourage members to be supportive of fellow members. That was the sole reason for my having taken the altered approach.
Whenever I think about such matters I am reminded of a line in Woody Allen’s historical fantasy movie Midnight in Paris (2011). That’s the one where aspiring writer Gil Pender asks Hemingway if he would mind taking a look at a novel he (Gil) was writing and giving him his honest opinion.
Hemingway’s response was quick and concise: “My opinion is I hate it!” Gil protests: “You (Hemingway) haven’t even read it yet, so how could you hate it?” Hemingway then explained that he’d hate it whether it was bad or good, because he hated bad writing, and he’d be envious if it were good.
And, don’t we all just know that it’s best not to argue with Ernest (or even with Woody, for that matter)?
Watch for Part Three of my “UPPAA Confidential” series in the Winter 2026 issue, which will be: “The Educational Part of the Process that Led me to Produce My 18 Hardboiled Thrillers.”
