Cowboys, music & remembrances at Empire Museum: Where everything old is new again

By Writefish
Sun staff writer
“Over here is our new music box,” says volunteer Dave Taghon as he steps to a table in front of the bar, just inside the front door of the Empire Area Museum. Dave is one of many volunteers who have dedicated his “free” time to keeping history alive at the museum since Empire Heritage Group members Jo Bolton and Julia Dickinson acquired the first exhibit in 1971.

Running a hand over the cover’s smooth surface, he explains that this is a Mira, the Rolls Royce of music boxes. “The top was in rough shape with dings and scratches so I restored it, but the rest is original.” The beautiful deep, red tones of the wood lead him to believe it’s made of mahogany, although another volunteer offers that it could be made of cherry wood, a natural assumption from a resident of a land that boasts sweet Montmorencys, Queen Annes and tart Balatons. This box is a gift from Charles and Ellen Johnson who, Dave says, probably picked it up in Florida. (Charles’ brother, Jimmy, owned the Case Tractor building where the State Savings Bank sits today, across LaCore Road from the museum.)
An 18-1/2” metal disk labeled “Narcissus Song,” one of 21 such disks that came with the box, is queued up and ready to play. Dave cranks the handle, sets the pin and steps back as a beautiful melody churns from a cabinet the size of four desktop printers. According to Dave, this Mira was probably manufactured sometime around the turn of the century, between 1895-1900. The mechanism inside the box weighs 80 pounds, and many of the music boxes were sturdy floor models built with a storage area for disks beneath the player.
We’re touring the museum today to uncover the latest acquisitions, and Dave is so enthusiastic while telling his stories that even my shorthand writing becomes abbreviated. I find it hard to believe he’d been resting in a hammock just a few moments earlier, a sign of his early retirement from Taghon’s Corner, the family’s service station business they sold earlier this year.
Dave hustles over to an exhibit on the opposite side of the room and stops in front of a display of catalogue covers retrieved from Baker’s Western Wear in Cadillac. The sign at the top of the board reads “Chuck DeHaan,” and the action scenes on the covers (taken from his paintings) are so vivid that you can almost smell the leather and sweat of the Old West. In one scene, a cowboy lassos his cattle against a backdrop of red mesas and desert floor. In another, the cowboy’s steed rears when an angry bear emerges from its rocky den. The brave cowboy holds on to the reigns with one hand, while swinging a lasso above his head with the other.
DeHaan, who resides in Texas, is well known for his action paintings and limited edition prints of cowboys, Indians and horses and, more recently, for his sculptures. Not as widely known, however, is his two-year stint here in Empire as a horse trainer for Lloyd and Vera Baker at the site of Golden Valley Woods Ranch on M-72. Dave heard that DeHaan built the rodeo arena at the ranch sometime in the 50s and “broke” some colts for Lloyd. He also heard a tale of the time that DeHaan traded one of his paintings for a truck.
“That was probably my Uncle Ivan’s truck,” says Empire Township resident Ron Fisher, grandson of Lloyd and Vera. Lloyd’s brother Ivan owned Baker’s Western Wear. Fisher summered at the ranch for years, tending to 38 “school” horses and taking people on trail rides. As he grew older he lived there year-round, working and riding with DeHaan while attending school. He remembers that DeHaan did a lot of good training with the horses and that DeHaan’s favorites were the quarter horses, which he also loved to paint.
“I spent a lot of time with him,” Fisher said, remembering how DeHaan loved to draw and paint. “He was a free spirit and never had many anchors anywhere. He was really great. Very talented.” When asked to describe what DeHaan looked like, Fisher says he was “blonde, tall and heavyset… and was always in western attire… all the ladies liked him.”
One local lady in particular remembers the cowboy artist. “I used to help Vera Baker exercise horses in the winter time,” says Grace Dickinson, owner of Dickinson’s Photo Gallery and daughter of Julia Dickinson, one of the founders of the museum. “Chuck and his young wife had a brand new baby; he was a young man then. When I would go into his house, his hat was thrown back on his head, his legs were slightly bowed, and his spurs would jingle when he walked… he was outgoing and handsome… just such a cowboy!”
Dickinson’s voice gives her away. As a horse lover and fellow artist, young Grace was clearly moonstruck by the charismatic cowboy painter.
“He lived in that little house near M-72 at the ranch. Whenever I went over there, he was always painting and had paintings around him. He was just launching a career and was outstanding (as a painter)… He pursued his love of horses through his paintings.”
Grace remembers the murals he painted on the walls of what were once the cook’s kitchen (or “grub shack,” as Fisher calls it, using his cowboy lingo). The kitchen later became a garage that was torn down this year… but the murals were saved and are on display in the Billy Beeman barn on the museum grounds.
Speaking of the Beeman barn, Dave says there’s a certain curtain taken from the Glen Arbor Township Hall that I simply must see, but it’s hanging in the barn behind the main building of the museum. He leads us downstairs and we pause in the cool air, but not for long, to check out the first snowmobile ever purchased in Empire, a 1967 SnoJet on “indefinite loan” from Dave’s brother-in-law, Ron Novak. To one side of the sled is the Taghon collection of gas pumps and office replica, removed from the service station before it was sold. On display are Dave’s “Spinning Crown” pump, circa 1924; a Tokheim, ca. 1937; a Bennett, ca. 1948, and a 1905 fuel dispenser… a one-gallon can beneath a spigot on a drum. Things were more sophisticated in 1912, as evidenced by a one-gallon pump with nozzle on a pedestal stand.
Dave and I are on a mission, so we don’t tarry. Outside, under the shade of maples in the backyard of the museum, sits the Billy Beeman barn. Dave raises the door to reveal several old wagons. He points to the north wall. A colorful curtain hangs from the rafters, stretches past the northeast and northwest corners of the barn’s interior. It’s easily 12’ x 26’ and painted on the canvas, in greens and blues and yellows and browns, is a panorama of the Dune Climb, Alligator Hill and the forested hills beyond Glen Lake.
According to Len Thoreson, who pulled it from the basement of the Glen Arbor Township Hall this spring, the curtain was raised and lowered on a rope and often stored rolled up. When he retrieved it, the painted canvas had been folded into a four-foot square for almost 40 years. “I was surprised. I thought all the paint would fall off (when it was unfolded). It’s in good shape,” he said. Dave says he fell in love with it as soon as he saw it.
Rich Quick of Glen Arbor remembers the curtain from his school days in the early 50s, when students from the schoolhouse (now the Old School Hardware building) would march across the street to present their spring play for parents and grandparents, under the direction of the Principal and English teacher. Asked if he remembers any play in particular, Quick quips that his only “starring role” was at graduation when the salutatorian couldn’t give the required speech and Rich had to “stand in”. He also recalled the curtain being rolled up for those times when the town hall was used for basketball games and funerals.
Beneath the curtain’s panoramic painting is an advertising section with 29 business names. The Daly brothers, who were in their mid-thirties and living in Glen Arbor at the time, reportedly spent hours and hours painting the canvas back in 1950. Township people solicited ads for the curtain from area businesses, at a cost of $15 or $20, which was a lot of money in those days. Quick recalls that the curtain was taken down sometime in the sixties when business names began to change and new businesses moved to town… and there wasn’t room on the curtain to list their names. The township board made the decision to replace it with more traditional draperies.
A few years younger than Quick, Carol Bumgardner (“Moon” to her friends) remembers the curtain quite well. “My first memory of it was when I was in the second grade. I always loved that curtain.” She recalls that the town hall was used for basketball games, roller-skating (when skates had wooden wheels), proms, graduations, feather parties, variety shows and the high school play. When she was in seventh grade she played the part of a half-deaf, old woman in a “hillbilly play, like the Hatfields and McCoys,” and remembers other roles played by Earl Leman, Ed Schmidt, Jean Basch, Eva Elmer and… Rich Quick.
Around the first of November, when the men were “probably off hunting” leaving behind only wives and kids, the town hall was the scene of “feather parties,” a local pseudonym for illegal bingo games, raffles of turkeys and chickens and fundraisers for school trips. “I remember Duane Richardson, he was real little then, maybe six or seven, he won three or four turkeys, and that’s when we started thinking, ‘Hey, maybe this thing is rigged,’” Bumgardner says, laughing.
What she loved best, though, were the Glen Arbor variety shows, usually held in February or March when the snow was deep and people felt a need to “break up the winter.” The shows included beauty pageants, music and skits. She remembers when Beaner Egeler (Martin Egeler, Jr.), Bennie Barszak, Major William Olson (commander of the Air Force Base in Empire) and her uncle Bill Day donned women’s dresses with grapefruit and oranges underneath, high heels and wigs. Beaner, dressed as a French waitress, sang songs, and Major Olson was crowned Miss Empire Air Base.
“We had jumping music, too: Bill Smith, Donny Petroskey with his accordion and Ward Craven on his Les Paul guitar… lots of people came to our shows.” There was the time her brother, George, dressed up as Elvis… and Marion Harriger fell instantly in love with him. (Since Marion’s last name is Harriger and not Bumgardner, we can only assume that her love for the Elvis look-alike faded along with the town hall curtain.)
The curtain, DeHaan display, music box and other interesting historical items can be seen daily in the summer, from 1-4 p.m., (the museum is closed on Wednesdays), at the corner of M-22 and LaCore, near the State Savings Bank in Empire. An annual Heritage Day (to be held Oct. 12 this year) features volunteers dressed as pioneers making apple butter, cider and syrup. Call the museum at 326-5568.