Article: Embattled Straits' ferry is reprieved

From the Battle Creek Enquirer. Gannett News Service. By Jane Garrick.

December 9, 1980

ST. IGNACE. Heading downhill towards St. Ignace, round the curve and suddenly you're facing her.

The 300 foot Chief Wawatam fills the entrance to the shallow cove, and sits so comfortably that it looks as though Providence placed her in the picture when it fashioned the Straits of Mackinac.

To many people of St. Ignace, the idea might not seem far-fetched. Their lives and those of their families have been intimately bound to the ship since it began ferrying the Straits in 1911.

Their fierce loyalty to the blackened, coal–belching relic, has made it a political cause celebrate and doomed any number of attempts to retire her.

Now, it looks as though she may be saved one more time, as politicians worked to retain the public subsidies to keep her running through the current period of state budget cutbacks

It costs the state $1.6 million to operate her last year. Most of the freight that she currently handles is out of state lumber, and if the Michigan Department of Transportation has its way, the traffic eventually will be rerouted over Lake Michigan, leaving so little freight crossing the Straits that some supporters worry her career will again be in jeopardy.

State transportation officials said Monday that the aging, coal burning rail ferry probably will return to service this week and get at least a $1.1 million state subsidy this fiscal year, according to the Associated Press.

James Kellogg, deputy director of the state transportation department, told lawmakers at a special meeting that the U.S. Coast Guard has cleared the Wawatam for a return to duty.

At least $1.1 million will be available in the state budget to subsidize the ferry for the rest of the fiscal year which started October 1, Kellogg said.

The ferry's state subsidy was $2.2 million in the 1979-80 year.

Kellogg said bids have been sent out to several railroad companies to see which one can run the Wawatam the least expensively.

A spokesman for the railroad currently running the state owned ferry, the Detroit and Mackinac Railway Company, said his firm would not make a bid.

Michael Biber, general counsel for the Detroit and Mackinac, said the state should consider replacing the ferry, built in 1901, with a target-barge system in which barges can be interchanged and pushed across water by a tugboat.

Depending on which side you favor, for embattled status is either a symbol of the indifference that Upper Peninsula residents attribute to those in lower Michigan, or a flagrant example of government waste.

But to look at her, puffing small clouds of white smoke into an evening sky, it is hard to believe she is center of a long smoldering controversy.

She was built just before war World War I - a time still poised between the Victorian era and the 20th century – and she bears characteristics of each.

Enter the great black maw of her lower deck. Walk along the twisting steel railroad tracks on its deck and you sense the industrial muscle that propelled this country to world dominance.

Climb the upper deck, walk into the snug wood cabins with their hand fashioned windows and delicate brass work, and you step back into the security of the 19th century.

Capt. Roderick Graham Is a man who moves comfortably through both worlds.

"We can carry 16 to 18 freight cars, depending on their size," he said, pacing the four tracks that run the length of the lower deck.

In the captain's office, the original built in drawers and bookcases line the walls, and there are pictures of the North and South American retired Great Lakes passenger vessels on which Graham was first mate from 1949 to 1967. He has been Wawatam captain since February 1974.

A gentle rocking of the boat is the only physical evidence of the elements. A car backs slowly down the long pier, where the railroad tracks run out to meet the ferry. Alfred Thibault, the 77-year old night watchman, gets out, unloads a television set and a bunch of newspapers.

"It's going to be a long night," Trainor jokes.

"He started work in 1912 as second assistant engineer, and he was paid $.86 a day – in gold," Graham said.

It is a familiar sort of story in St. Ignace. Frequently two, even three generations of the same family will have members that have worked on the Chief.

The boarded up motels and empty swimming pools in the summer resort town attest to that.

Many of the crew members of the Wawatam live in St. Ignace and feeling for the boat runs high here.

And there is one argument that reaches even the harshest critics of the boat.

"If you shut that sucker off, what happens when the bridge goes out?" asked Bill Hepler, vice president of the passenger ferry. "That's our big concern if something happens to the bridge, God forbid."

Source: [BCE-1980-1209]