Chapter 17

One Day in March 1933

Every one of us has a story—a story of that one incident, that most exciting event in our lives. It is the story we tell and retell through the years and somehow becomes its own entity. It becomes “Dad's story” or “Uncle Joe's story,” guaranteed to be heard at gatherings of old friends, or family reunions, or just over any late-night cup of coffee.

The event that was to become Vern Frechette's story, a story he has told countless times during the past seventy years, had its subtle birth on what looked to be a pretty fair morning for fishing in early March 1933.

Frechette is ninety-three years old now and lives in an apartment in Washburn, the small town directly across Chequamegon Bay from Ashland. He can't get around as he used to, or as he'd like to. His knees bother him, and he can't drive anymore. The years have robbed him of much of his hearing. He misses the outdoors—the hunting and the fishing that took him to every quiet corner of the Bayfield Peninsula. Born and raised on Chequamegon Bay, he knew it better than most. He also knew the offshore waters and the sometimes-calm, sometimes-angry waters between the Apostles—Long Island, Madeline, Michigan—waters fished heavily by Frechette and other locals and today often plied by tourists in big boats.

The morning of March 9 looked like a pretty good morning to get out on the ice, and Vern, his brother George, and friend Oscar Holman navigated a Model T to the ice between the northeast end of Madeline Island and Michigan Island. About ten other men from Washburn and a handful from Ashland were also on the ice that day.

The men were after big lake trout, the heavy fish that could feed a family or be sold over at Cornucopia sometimes for twenty-three cents a pound. Lake trout run deep, and fishing for them in the 1930s meant using a big bobbing hook and heavy “tarred” line.

“What we did was take shoemaker's twine and twist two or three strands together, and then we stretched it out and tarred it,” Frechette told me. “It held up pretty good, but you had to check on it pretty often.”1

Store-bought hooks were rare back then. The hooks were sometimes fashioned from the tines of a pitchfork. “Those hooks didn't have eyelets on them like today,” Frechette said. “We attached the line to the hook by wrapping the end with thread and then sealing it with nail polish.” He continued, “We tied on a heavy lead sinker shaped like a cone and used cut bait—cut up herring and such—for bait.”

Trout fishing on Lake Superior ice in early March was serious business. But the threat of a storm coming up from the southwest was big business, too, and when the wind began to blow across the ice the Frechette brothers knew just what to do—pack up and get to land as fast as possible.

As they drove the Model T toward Long Island, the storm intensified surprisingly, with temperatures plunging and a driving snow developing.

“Driving back we could suddenly see an open stretch of water running south from Madeline Island, and it was steadily growing wider,” said Frechette.

The Frechette brothers and the twenty-seven other fisherman out on the ice that day had become trapped on an ice floe that was being blown out to the open lake by the intensifying storm. Their lives were in jeopardy, and everyone knew it.

“We didn't have time to be scared,” said Frechette. “We just had to get off the ice somehow.”

Stopped at the edge of the floe and looking toward the island that now seemed so far away, the three men saw a vision through the storm. A man was rowing a fourteen-foot-long flat-bottomed boat through the waves.

The man was Bancroft Bufe, a fisherman from Grand Marais, Michigan, and he was rowing for all he was worth. Bufe had just rescued Oscar Anderson of Ashland and Lester Lindblad of Washburn, but when he saw the Frechette brothers and Oscar Holman, he turned course and returned to the floe to add three more souls to the small boat.²

On the shore of Madeline Island people were watching the rescue unfold. “The waves were getting higher, and we'd go up and down on them. Each time we dropped from sight, the people on shore thought we had gone down,” said Frechette.

The wind was fierce, and the men's clothes were freezing to their skin. Chunks of ice were punching holes in the small boat, and while Bufe rowed, the others bailed out water with a wooden box. Oscar Holman tried to relieve Bufe, but “he almost lost it,” and Bufe, experienced with his boat, took back control and continued the slow movement toward shore.

“We had reached the edge of the ice floe at about 9:00 or 10:00 a.m.,” said Frechette. “It must have been about noon when we reached the beach at Long Island.”

With frozen clothes the six men walked along the beach toward Madeline Island and finally reached the shack of Billy Bryan. “My clothes were frozen so stiff that I had to stand by the stove for an hour before I could bend my arms,” said Frechette.

Similar feats of rescue and escape were repeated across the ice floe. Ole Sandstrom and George LaRock of Madeline Island saved themselves by walking in an easterly direction all day on the ice floe until they could get to shore near Saxon Harbor.3 Amazingly, all twenty-nine people who had been caught on the ice floe that day were rescued or escaped unharmed, although several cars, abandoned by their owners, forever became property of Lake Superior.

The Ashland Daily Press reported:

Tales of heroism and miraculous rescue in rough water, and reports of men still adrift on the ice floes east of Long Island including one man who was last seen kneeling in prayer as he was lost from sight by eight others who had been rescued, were collected throughout the night last night by the Daily Press as the aftermath of the breaking off of a huge ice cake which threatened the lives of many residents of the Chequamegon region.⁴

All the survivors became a part of an incredible story that for years was the staple of local barbershops and taverns around Chequamegon Bay. Today, Vern Frechette is the sole keeper of the story, the last one who can say he was there.

Not many people ask about that day in March 1933 anymore, but Vern's memories of the day are as sharp as ever. “Oh, we took some awful chances out there,” he told me, as he described how he and the other fishermen would lay planks across the cracks in the ice as bridges to get the vehicles across.

With a grin on his face and shining eyes, he summed up that day on the ice simply. “Oh, it throws a scare into you,” he said.