Ron Dzwonkowski: Opera revisits history, uplifts town

July 15, 2001

Ron Dzwonkowski CALUMET -- A grim piece of Copper Country history came back to life this week, and Davey Holmbo was among those who took it personally. Not in a bad way, but maybe a sad way.

"It's a part of this place, this whole area, part of my family," Holmbo said Wednesday night, standing outside the Calumet Theater after the premiere production of "Children of the Keweenaw," an opera based on the 1913 Italian Hall disaster that happened just a block away.

Holmbo is the technical director of the 101-year-old theater and one of many people in the cast, crew or audience for the opera with a direct connection to the tragedy on which it is based. He is also among those who had little interest in opera before it touched their lives and forever framed their community's history in words and music.

"I've heard the story my whole life," said the 42-year-old Redford native who recently moved to the Keweenaw Peninsula, where his family roots run as deep as the veins of copper in the hard rock underground.

The disaster occurred on Christmas Eve 1924 during a long miners' strike. About 700 people, most of them the children of strikers, gathered in a second-floor hall for a holiday party. At the height of party activity, witnesses said a man ran in yelling "Fire!" There was no fire, but there was a panic. Children jammed into the only exit, a narrow stairway with doors at the bottom that opened inward. There was a suffocating pileup. By the time the bodies were pulled out from the top of the stairway, 74 people were dead -- 37 girls, 21 boys, 11 women and five men.

According to Holmbo family lore, which has gotten a little hazy in years of retelling, Holmbo's great-grandfather took his three daughters to the party. When the stampede began, he threw one to safety -- she would become Holmbo's grandmother -- but another perished in the stairwell. The third was among the children taken to a makeshift morgue, where the bodies were sprayed with cold water.

The shock evidently revived a child who was unconscious, not dead.

"She reached up and pulled a lady's skirt to tell people she was alive," said Holmbo's mother, Betty, who was in Wednesday's audience. "So they warmed her up and allowed her to go home."

Betty Holmbo, 70, said her mother, Minda, the sister who was thrown to safety, "always said she remembered the man who yelled fire because he was standing behind her. She said he had a short beard and a moustache."

That would track with other descriptions of the culprit, but not all. Nobody was ever caught. The strikers accused a citizens group that supported the mining companies of trying to disrupt the party. The citizens group suggested the miners were seeking scapegoats for a plot that went horribly awry. The opera raises questions about whether anyone ever yelled anything at all or, as one character asks, if only "the children themselves are to blame."

"It's not so much a work about finding answers," said librettist Kathleen Masterson. "It's really about the questions that were left."

It's about the arts, too, and how something as unlikely as this opera can visibly lift the spirits of the hardscrabble community where it is set. "Children of the Keweenaw" may never put Calumet on the map the way the Barber did for Seville, but there was a lot of local pride in this production, and plenty of local talent, too, in the orchestra and supporting roles -- all first-rate. Calumet is not counting on opera for an economic revival, but public enthusiasm for the production can only benefit the community's ongoing effort to use its storied Copper Country past to build a future as a National Park Heritage Area.

The opera was commissioned by the Pine Mountain Music Festival, a decade-old effort to deliver a variety of classical music experiences to the people of the western Upper Peninsula. "Children of the Keweenaw" was financed in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts. It is scheduled for four performances during this year's festival and then, who knows?

Composer Paul Seitz says a typical new opera -- not one of the classics -- might be produced only a few times. He's hopeful, however, that "Children" will find audiences outside the UP, perhaps next year at some downstate venues or even the Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit. Near as anyone knows, this is the first opera ever produced with a Michigan setting, based on Michigan events.

Certainly there are plenty of people like the Holmbos with copper-clad family histories who will find the story fascinating, if somber, and enjoy learning something about opera in the process.

"I didn't know what I was hearing at first," said Davey Holmbo, who has a long background in the production of gospel music shows. "I had to learn to listen to it. I really enjoyed it. I really feel part of it."

Like the copper that has been so much a part of the history of the Keweenaw Peninsula, "this story is imbedded in this community," Holmbo said. "And these children will always be alive here. They will live through this opera and in this theater. They are a part of us all."

RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page. You can call him at 313-222-6635, or write him in care of the Free Press editorial page, or via e-mail at dzwonk@freepress.com.

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