MARQUETTE MAY BE Hockeyville USA 2016, but our selection of hockey stores here has just shrunk in 2017.
Perani’s Hockey World has up and left its location on Third Street and apparently has no plans to relocate anywhere else in Marquette.
The problem was, Johnson’s Superior Shoes, which owned the building, recently sold it to Jim’s Music, and Perani’s had nowhere else to go. The store’s former manager says they looked for another location in town with adequate space at a reasonable price, but couldn’t find anything.
So the popular store, part of a chain, packed up and left a few days ago.
That leaves Superior Hockey, a much smaller store at Lakeview Arena, as the only true hockey store in town.
ANYBODY LOOKING TO get into the fast food business?
The three Beef-A-Roo restaurants in the U.P.–in Marquette, Negaunee and Iron River–are all up for sale. You can buy all three or any of the three.
The family owning and operating the restaurants for nearly the last half century is looking to move on to a different and less demanding business and lifestyle in the years ahead.
We’ve seen this change throughout Marquette over the last few years–the older generation of businessmen and women giving way to younger folks with energy, enthusiasm, and new ideas.
It’s a healthy, and necessary, trend. It’ll ensure that Marquette remains vibrant and forward-thinking.
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WEIRD WEATHER THIS winter.
Last month’s thaw forced cancellation of the Rail Jam downtown for the second year in a row, along with the alteration of the Noquemanon ski race course. Not enough snow, and it was too warm.
So, Mr. Karl Bohnak, weather guru…what about the UP 200 sled dog race later this month?
Shouldn’t be a problem, he says. The next couple of weeks should be reasonably cold and may be bring us snow from time to time. Enough to run the dogs and their sleds.
That’s reassuring news because last month was 5 degrees above average, and snowfall this winter so far is about 2 1/2 feet below average. Generally speaking, Bohnak says, snowfall has been down in Marquette since the early 2000s, after experiencing very heavy snowfalls in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
And how about this for unpredictability? Back in the early 40s, Marquette went through two winters with less than 50 inches of snow.
No Rail Jams those years either.
THE MAN WHO brought the UP outdoors to our TV screens for 30 years has hit upon some hard times.
Buck Levasseur, who created and produced Discovering on TV 6, retired a few years ago because of severe back problems but recently in Arizona, he ran into something more serious.
An infection in his foot. A longtime problem he’d been ignoring suddenly got much worse in November. He went into septic shock. His kidneys shut down. Doctors wondered if they might have to pull the plug on him.
But no. He pulled through, though with a partially amputated left leg.
And now after being transferred from one hospital to another to another, he’s recovering in a medical care facility, and learning how to walk with a prosthesis. And with the help of his son Colin, he’s trying to raise money to offset medical costs. They’ve set up a gofundme site.
At last count, they’d raised about $3000 of the $20,000 they were requesting.
Not many of us create something out of nothing. But Buck did with Discovering, and for 30 years, he was the voice and face of hunting, fishing and trapping here. A one man operation.
He gave us a lot. Might be time to give something back.
THERE’S ANOTHER, VERY different gofundme campaign out of TV 6. This one to help pay medical costs for anchor Sophie Erber’s Persian cat Java.
Sophie discovered a soft tissue sarcoma on Java almost two months ago. Potentially deadly.
Vets said treatment would best be handled by specialists at UW-Madison but it would be expensive. Up to $10,000.
Sophie’s looking for help. At last count, the site had raised $780.
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IT WAS ONE of those classic Marquette moments.
You walk into the Zephyr wine bar one evening and sit down, and who should be there to serve you? Music composer Griffin Candey, the guy whose symphony you saw premiered at Kaufman Auditorium just a few weeks before.
Candey’s not your everyday waiter.
He’s composed not only the symphony Dagidaabi Neyaashi (Ojibwa for “a good place to set a line”) but also operas and chamber music that are performed all over the country.
He’s based in Marquette because he likes it here but he travels to New York, Detroit, Cleveland and Fort Worth for performances of his compositions.
The man’s 28 years old. He’ll be serving us Cabernets and Chardonnays for a while longer, but it’s a good bet that music will soon be his full-time, full-paying job.
You got news? Email me at briancabell@gmail.com.