Pope Leo's Connection To West Michigan

Robert Prevost, now known as Pope Leo XIV, has some interesting connections to West Michigan, and specifically, some content that this very blog has covered! According to Wood TV 8, Pope Leo attended the St. Augustine Seminary in Laketown Township, between Holland and Saugatuck. Where have we heard that name before? Oh yeah, it's Felt Mansion! After inventor Dorr E. Felt passed away, the property was sold to the Archdiocese Of Chicago, where it was converted to a boarding school in 1962, before closing down in 1977 and being sold to the State Of Michigan to become a minimum-security prison complex.

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The Melon Heads of Felt Mansion

The Melonheads of Saugatuck Dunes are a truly unique bit of local lore and urban legend. While most urban legends have a grain of truth in them, my research into the Melonheads has turned up many dead-ends and false leads. Here's what we know for sure: Felt Mansion was built by Dorr E. Felt, a wealthy businessman from Chicago, situated on Shore Acres Farm (present location of Saugatuck Dunes State Park). Within a few days of being completed in 1928, Agnes Felt passed away. Within a year and a half, Dorr Felt himself passed away, in 1930. This is all freely available information from Allegan County. In 1949, the estate was sold by the family to the Archdiocese of Chicago and was used as a seminary, called Saint Augustine Seminary. By 1962, cloistered nuns moved in, and a boarding school was established. This is all verifiable by Archdiocese of Chicago records, and by yearbooks, available at Herrick District Library in Holland. The Seminary was closed and the property was sold t...

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...

Tulip City Dispatch

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