Calumet confronts its past: An opera about the 1913 Italian Hall tragedy forces a Copper Country secret into the open

July 9, 2001

BY DAVID LYMAN
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

CALUMET -- They tried to forget.

For 88 years, the people of Calumet treated the Italian Hall tragedy like an enormous secret. Schools didn't teach it. Friends rarely discussed it. And if it came up among family members at all, it was spoken about briefly and quickly dropped.

'The Children of the Keweenaw'

Pine Mountain Music Festival 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and July 20, Calumet Theatre, Calumet. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Kingsford High School Auditorium, Kingsford. 7:30 p.m. July 17, Forest Roberts Theater, Marquette. $18-$36; 877-746-3999, 8-5 weekdays, noon-5 Saturday.

Then along came composer Paul Seitz.

Inquisitive, fascinated and perplexed by the story of the 74 panicked people -- most of them children -- who who died escaping a nonexistent fire at a Christmas Eve party in 1913, he wrote an opera about the disaster. Now, the memories, recollections and accusations that have been hidden away for so very long are being dragged onto the stage for all the world to share.

To some in this village of just more than 800, the opera, which premieres Wednesday, is a waste of time, an exercise by outsiders to capitalize on emotions and events that have nothing to do with them. To others, it is an integral part of an effort to use the town's troubled past to buy itself a future.

Seitz, a 49-year-old composer from Madison, Wis., wasn't looking to write an opera when he came to Calumet.

For most of the past decade, he and his wife, Christine, have spent much of their summers working at the Pine Mountain Music Festival, in nearby Houghton. In his spare time, Seitz explored the small towns that a century earlier had been the heart of the world's copper trade: Lake Linden, Osceola, Wolverine, Laurium, Kearsarge, Red Jacket, Calumet.

He'd read about the bitter nine-month miners strike that had gripped the area in July 1913. He'd seen the remarkable pictures of black-suited strikers parading quietly down the then-crowded streets of Calumet in protest. He'd heard tales of the woman who became the personification of the strike, 6-foot Ana Clemenc -- Big Annie -- hoisting a flag and daring the militia to attack her.

He also knew about the Italian Hall party for 600 strikers' children, where dozens suffocated when they were trapped in a narrow stairwell after they thought they heard someone cry "fire."

The death toll was shocking. But in the years since, many people have imbued the Italian Hall tragedy with even more significance. Some see it as the turning point in the strike or even the beginning of the end of the area's now-defunct copper industry.

"When I realized it was Annie who had organized the party, I was thunderstruck," says Seitz. "With her, there was a connection among all of this history. There was a sense of discovery of something special, something really compelling. Something operatic."

This was new territory for Seitz. He'd composed dozens of pieces of music: string quartets, choral works and orchestral pieces. But he'd never tackled a dramatic work of this scope.

Now, more than four years after that revelation, the opera he envisioned is landing on the stage. On Saturday it will be performed in Kingsford and on July 17 in Marquette. But it is Wednesday's opening night performance, in the 710-seat Calumet Theatre, just a block from the Italian Hall site, that is most eagerly awaited.

"It's still such a sensitive issue here," says Steve DeLong, landscape architect for the Calumet-based Keweenaw National Historical Park. "They'll all want to be there to see how it's handled."

There were plenty of sources for Seitz to turn to when he began searching for the story's roots. Michigan Technological University has an extensive archive of documents from mining's heyday. There are local historical societies filled with newspapers of the day and the records of the mines.

But Seitz understood that if he was going to turn this into a story that resonated on a human level, he couldn't rely on company reports or screaming headlines. They could document the incident, but not the emotional toll it took on the community. Seitz needed stories that were more intimate, stories about real people. What he needed were the reminiscences of the very people who had spent much of their lives not talking about the Italian Hall.

Many people in the Keweenaw Peninsula have a great distrust of outsiders. There is a widespread belief that people from beyond this little spit of land have no understanding of what their lives are like.

And perhaps that's true.

The vast majority of visitors come between July 1 and Labor Day. What they see is lush greenery and pristine vistas overlooking the greatest of the Great Lakes, Superior.

But for most of the year, the climate here is unforgiving. Winters are beastly long, days are incredibly short and it's not uncommon to have more than 20 feet of snow before spring arrives.

Perhaps it was nature's way of testing the people who moved here; in order to reap the untold riches of the copper that lay under the ground, they would have to endure the cruelties that lay above it.

Making Seitz's job even more difficult was the bitter divisiveness that lingers from the events of 1913.

"There are people who will still tell you that deputies held the doors shut so people couldn't get out," says Jean Ellis, 59, whose great-grandfather was the coroner who investigated the disaster. Like so many in the community, Ellis is impassioned when she talks about it. It's as if she had been there. "They didn't hold them shut. The doors weren't even closed."

But others are just as passionate about other theories.

"Someone yelled 'fire' and everyone ran," says 26-year-old Jon Anderson, a clerk in downtown's Copper World store. "When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the doors opened inward, and with all the people pushing behind them, they couldn't get them open."

There are dozens of versions of the story: that candles on a Christmas tree had started a small fire; that a blaze had erupted in the chimney of a downstairs bar; that anti-union activists yelled "fire" with the intention of disrupting the festivities.

The coroner's inquest heard days of conflicting testimony from survivors and finally concluded that there was no way to know exactly what happened.

"The fact is that we're doomed to never know the truth," says Kathleen Masterson, 51, the opera's librettist and director of the New York State Council on the Arts' literature program. "People remembered details for political reasons or for personal reasons. It wasn't that they were twisting facts. They needed to resolve it in their minds. Otherwise, there's this sense of incomplete mourning that takes place if it's just one of those things that happens in life."

Enormous expectations are being heaped on the opera -- few of them about its artistic merits.

There are those who see the work as a chance to commemorate, on a grand scale, the most horrific tragedy in the village's history. Then there are people who see an opportunity to catch the attention of a world that has largely ignored the community since the end of World War II.

In the early years of the last century, the area around Calumet had more than 60,000 residents. Today, the township of Calumet has just 7,000. The village, just over 800.

Calumet & Hecla, the Boston firm that built Calumet into a boom town, sold its remaining property in April 1968. Four months later, the mines closed.

"They were down to 1,400 jobs by then," says Paul Lehto, a former C&H employee who is now supervisor of Calumet Township. "You have no idea what that was like -- that would be like losing 280,000 jobs in Detroit, all at one shot. And what did they leave us? They closed the library. They didn't even fill up the holes in the ground. And they left a bunch of people who put 30-40 years into it and got, on average, $45 a month pension."

The departure was particularly painful because ever since C&H moved into Calumet in the mid-19th Century, it was the community's sole benefactor. It owned the hospitals, the fire departments, the public utilities. It not only owned and staffed the schools, but also shaped the curriculum. It brought the community the first paved sidewalks in the state.

"People were particularly bitter about the fact that so much of what they took out of the earth in Calumet left the area and financed the flourishing of Boston," says Ed Yarbrough, 34, general manager of the Quincy Mine Hoist Association, which runs tours of an abandoned mine near Hancock. "The amount of money that left Calumet and went to Boston was astronomical. It far surpassed anything that the Gold Rush produced. Harvard, the Boston Symphony, the Boston Athenaeum -- they were all built up with money from Calumet."

Now, though, the paternalistic relationship that had provided stability and a future for thousands of people -- most of them immigrants from England, Finland, Slovenia and Italy -- had come to an end.

In its rush to leave, Calumet & Hecla left something behind: buildings. More than 100 of them: shaft houses, warehouses, powder buildings, private residences that had been leased to employees.

A handful of the commercial structures have been converted to modern-day use, but the majority of are modern-day ruins, abandoned hulks scattered around the village. Over the years, there has been talk of razing them, but because the village was always strapped for money, nearly all are still standing. These will be the building blocks of the Keweenaw National Historical Park.

But the building that many regard as the most significant -- the Italian Hall -- is gone.

In an astonishing display of shortsightedness and misinformation, it was leveled in 1984.

"The building had developed a huge crack down the middle of it," recalls Audrey Frair, archivist at the Calumet Theatre, which served as a morgue after the tragedy. "They tried to hold it together with a huge bolt. But there was an elementary school right next to it and people were afraid that children would get hurt playing on the property."

There was a small, unsuccessful fund-raising effort. "There wasn't the motivation or the money," says Frair.

When they went to tear it down, though, it proved structurally solid.

"It probably could have stood for another 100 years," says Lehto, who had not yet become an elected official at the time. "I didn't have any feelings about it then, one way or the other. But I do now. I guess I'm more aware that some of these buildings are important to people."

Today, all that's left of the hall is a ring of scraggly bushes and the bit of brick that arched over the doorway where the victims died. There are a few small plaques mounted on it: "Mourn for the dead; fight for the living" reads the one from the AFL-CIO Northwest Upper Peninsula Labor Council; "Sleep in Heavenly Peace" says the one from the Calumet, Laurium and Keweenaw Council of Churches.

As memorials go, it's oddly unmoving.

That's where the opera comes in.

Seitz and Masterson are holding rehearsal in the basement of St. Albert the Great Church. As the piano pounds out a frantic cacophony, nearly 15 people are twisting and falling to the ground, a slow-motion re-creation of the horror at the Italian Hall.

Even in this poorly lit room, it's chilling. Finally, everything is silent; bodies twisted together, mothers hugging their children in death, bystanders stunned at the tableaux in front of them.

It's the first time the chorus has staged the scene, and there's an eerie moment of silence before nervous chattering sweeps through the group.

Seitz and Masterson are beaming. It's exactly what they'd hoped for.

"It was difficult knowing precisely how to present some of this material," says Seitz.

They opted for simplicity, to let events speak for themselves rather than inflate them into the overwrought spectacles of a stereotypical opera. Much of the text in the second act is taken directly from transcripts of the inquest.

The pair took their greatest risk with the finale.

In a scene that lasts nearly six minutes, the performers sing the name and age of each of the 74 victims. "Luoma, Lydia Johanna," sings the chorus. "Murto, Walter; Koskela, Johan Hendrik, age 10; Krainatz, Mary, age 11; Saari, John, age 5."

Finally, the list exhausted, the entire ensemble sings: "We are still here ...Here we are / We've never gone / We are still here / We've been here all along."

It's as much a song about Calumet as it is about those who died.

"Part of what we're saying is that it doesn't matter as much now who caused this," says Masterson. "It doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility. It doesn't remove the sense of guilt. It was the sort of thing that happens in human communities. What matters is that those who were lost were human beings and that they're still cherished. " Contact DAVID LYMAN at 313-222-6823 or dlyman@freepress.com.