Lore galore By Tom Brooker News-Chronicle Unlike other regions of the nation, where tulips and hyacinths give testimony to the onset of spring, Wisconsin's initial warmup brings out our own peculiar types of warm-weather wonders. You know it's May around here when, like groundhogs, the Harleys come out the garage and guys with snowmobile suits jump into their boats and cast minnows between cakes of ice. That has to explain why I received the following letter... Tito J. of Suamico writes: "You guys in the media do a (um ... blankety-blank) job of letting people know how fantastic it is to live on the Great Lakes. I mean, a stranger reading any of the newspapers in town or watching the local news on TV could just as well think we're in the middle of Nebraska. What do you do, run your news through the Dull Machine before reporting it? Where's the mystery and the romance usually associated with portside life?" Answer: You're absolutely right, Tito, and let me be the first one to take the rap for this blatant neglect of the legend and lore of the Great Lakes. Perhaps my column can be the first step toward instilling an appreciation of our big-water heritage. Indeed, poring over our three-centuries-worth of archives, I came across dozens of fascinating stories related to sea-faring locals to whom liquid fate dealt strange hands to play. F'rin-stance ... - In 1937, the owner of the luxury yacht Buda Boom disappeared without a trace off Hog Island in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. The Boom, owned by the alleged head of the Stiles Junction mob, Tony Contralto, was found adrift and unmanned a week after it left port. Rumors were rampant that Contralto got whacked by a rival gang from Goodman, but those closest to him felt it was a suicide. Contralto was being treated for depression and panic attacks and, his buddies said, he decided to sleep with the fishes. Whaddya gonna do? - The weird remnants of a primitive colony have been discovered by archaeologists doing recent digs on Chambers Island. It is theorized the island may have been inhabited by the men who mutinied from The H.M.S. Wasteland, a British cargo ship which was plying the waters of Green Bay in the mid-1700s. The unearthing of rudimentary lemonade stands led researchers to deduce the British mutineers coupled with the native Algonquin woman, producing a generation of entrepreneurial "Brit-gonquins." Lending more credence to this theory is the fact that strange devices, crudely fashioned out of brass and laden with clam shells, were found at the northern tip of the island. It's now believed these may have been the very first slot machines ever manufactured. - In 1944, the S.S. Red Herring mysteriously vanished. Authorities suspect the commercial sheepshead fishing vessel was sunk by a German U-boat headed for a trout boil in Fish Creek. - The legend of "Big Greenie," a fresh-water sea monster spotted from time to time off the shores of Pensaukee, was fun while it lasted. For years, bay-watchers told of seeing a green-humped creature that undulated along the surface. Some described it as being 30-plus feet long, others longer, but all had consistent stories about the stench it carried, "like Satan's breath itself," as one witness was quoted in 1973, the height of the Greenie-spotting craze. Strangely, sightings abruptly stopped right around the time the city of Marinette upgraded its sewage treatment plant several years ago. - In 1887, a hospital ship from Algoma, The Oozing Queen, got caught in a storm off Death's Door and sank. It carried 74 patients with advanced forms of leprosy. Although they were able to man lifeboats and get safely to land, all hands were lost. - Then, there's The J.L. Curtis, a schooner that set out from Green Bay on Halloween night, 1807, and was never heard from again. To this very day, there are reports of a ghost ship sometimes seen coming through the fog toward the shore of Dykesville with a man in a hockey mask standing deathlike on its bowsprit, holding a carving knife in one hand and an American Family life insurance policy in the other. - Not all sea-wreck sagas end in tragedy. There's the happy-ending story of The Ittsy-Bittsy-Fishie, which washed up on shore at Egg Harbor in 1982. A three-month air-and-sea search proved futile, and eventually it was abandoned. The crew was believed lost until Ernst Lundegaard, a commercial sucker netter, happened upon a tiny, uncharted island in the middle of the bay, between Peshtigo and Potawatomi State Park. There he found the Fishie's occupants, rattled but otherwise healthy. The castaways - a professor from UW-Green Bay, a model from Brussels, a wealthy couple from Waukesha, a portly captain and his rather dim-witted first mate - were taken back to the mainland by Lundegaard, who said they bickered with each other the whole while. There was talk of making a television series out of their adventure, but it never panned out. So, there you have it, Tito - a sampler of the rich lore belonging to our little slice of the Great Lakes. It doesn't get much more romantic than this, an' so? Brooker is editor of The Green Bay News-Chronicle. You can ask him anything through e-mail ([email protected]), or write to him at P.O. Box 2467, Green Bay, 54306.