Tulip City Dispatch

  Not So Shabby Marketplace  is an antique mall located at 2975 West Shore Drive in Holland Township, sorta near the Harbor Freight and the mold and fire hazard Springhill Suites .  It's a wonderful setting, with some 70 booths selling everything from handmade soaps and lotions to HO Scale trains to mall photographs !   I myself have purchased a bitchin' Urban Cowboy-era Resistol hat from them, as well as a handful of printed books that I've used for this very blog.  Basically, if I'm out on the ol' thrifto trail on my weekends, and I'm up around West Shore Drive, I'll stop in...it's not a  regular  stop for me, but it's one of my favorite antique stores.  Now, in the book  100 Things To Do In Holland Before You Die , the title of this particular entry is "Make A Stop On The Antique Trail At Not So Shabby Marketplace."  The Antique Trail is an association of antique shops .  The ones mentioned in  100 Things To Do ...

 

Going back almost a month to my Country Music article , as well as the Nashville series I wrote last year , I've been mulling over a lot of things lately.  Specifically, I've been trying to figure out a way to write 2,000 words about how I don't get Hank Williams...but even with that thesis statement, I can't elaborate for more than a paragraph or two. Sure, he's highly influential...but he's exactly of his time .  His overall tone and sound are exactly what you'd expect from a 1940s country artist.  He's memorialized and venerated due to his short career, that's all cool and good, but I don't understand the reverence and sanctity that are held around his name.  Again, that's all on me.  I lack the context of being involved in mainstream country in a pre-Hank world, and simply cannot appreciate the changes that he and his popularity brought to mainstream country. The closest analog that I have context for is the paradigm-shifting song, Crui...

Not pertinent to anything, but I don't have any other proper outlets to write this. I've been making a conscious effort to listen to my entire record collection lately - rough estimate, I own somewhere around 100 to 120 records, most of which were purchased over the years at thrift shops for $20 or less (my favorite era was the 2010-2020 era when records were as cheap as 3 or 4 for $1).  I've got them arranged alphabetically by artist, then title (or simply title in case of a compilation/anthology or soundtrack), and marked with a sticky note in the corner to show which ones have been played:  I'll remove the little sticky note flag when I play one.  As vinyl has had a recent resurgence, I have maybe a dozen new purchases from merch tables at my Year Of Concerts , or online from various podcasts about music . I started buying records right around 2013 or 2014, searching thrift shops for specific titles which I'd cut into guitar pickguards, as seen in this Etsy pos...

 Our Brewing Company (76 E 8th St, Holland, MI 49423), opened in 2012, has been a staple of the Holland beer scene since they opened with a bang, running out of beer during their grand opening celebrations, and having to shut down for 2 weeks to build up stock again.  They're a personal favorite of mine - I've had a mug club membership there for 10 years now.  The atmosphere is great, and they're not afraid to experiment with different, cool, and obscure beer styles! In 2019, they started experimenting with distilling.  Everything was brewed, distilled, aged, and packaged in house for their bourbons, so everything was done under their control - no MGP stuff here (unlike Coppercraft Distillery, north of downtown Holland).  Their first release of this batch was aged for 3 years, in 2022.  Each subsequent offering was released at 1 year intervals:  4 year in 2023, 5 year in 2024, 6 year in 2025, and 7 year in 2026.  I've been fortunate (through my mu...

 By now, we've all seen the video of a McDonald's CEO timidly taking a bite of their Big Arch burger before telling us that "we're all going to love the product," in what appears to be a hostage video perpetrated by Linda At The Front Desk .  All publicity, they say, is good publicity, and what was originally a botched promo video did indeed inspire me to buy not one, but two, Big Arch combos from McDonald's.  I don't normally eat at McDonald's, since the ones around Holland seem to be more expensive than other local areas, plus if I'm grabbing junk food on Saturday, I'll often err towards Burger King or some sort of sub sandwich like Jimmy John's. The Big Arch "start[s] with the two juicy quarter-pound 100% beef patties, layered with three slices of melty white cheddar cheese. It’s then topped with both crispy and slivered onions, zesty pickles and crisp lettuce, but what truly sets it apart is the new BIG ARCH Sauce—tangy, creamy...

 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...

 

On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost in Lake Superior.  With her, the souls of 29 sailors were lost as well. Lakeshore Drive, Marquette Michigan, autumn 2009 Being a graduate of Northern Michigan University, I learned to respect Lake Superior and the weather she brings with her.  There's something awe-inspiring about seeing waves cresting over a 5' tall breakwall and breaking over a road.  There's something awe-inspiring about seeing waves crash over the Black Rocks geologic formation at Presque Isle.  There's something awe-inspiring about SCUBA diving beneath those waves and feeling the chilling water swirl around you.  Lake Superior can be beautiful and serene; she can also be a tempestuous bitch.  But, I guaran-dam-tee you that if I could arrange a job back in the UP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. The reason the Edmund Fitzgerald is so important is because of how modern it is.  This ship was lost in 1975!  We had RADAR and color t...

 Congratulations to Abby Klomparens and Tim Marroquin for unseating the incumbents on the Holland City Council, and congratulations to Tim Vreeman and Scott Corbin for retaining their seats!  Mayor Nathan Bocks held on to his seat, roundly defeating his challenger, Brian Everitt.  Sources cited are 2 MLive articles .  It's been fun following Ms. Klomparens and Mr. Bocks on Instagram for the past few years.  I loved Bocks' "...and we get to live here" hashtag on his posts especially during the CoVid era.  Klomparens ran against former mayor Nancy DeBoer in the Michigan State House election last year (2024). It's always interesting to see the more  progressive  candidates winning Holland city elections, while outerlying Ottawa County tends to swing HARD right-wing most of the time. 

 Spooky season is upon us, so I thought I'd look at haunted or supernatural occurrences in and around Holland, Michigan.  Early on in my blog journey, I spoke with Mr. Nick McNamara, who was a custodian/building & grounds technician at Hope College, who shared the following stories with me:   *Dimnent Chapel: Fall 2017 I was cleaning the chapel very early in the morning (around 3:00 am when this happened) in preparation for Christmas Vespers. I heard one of our locked entrance doors shut, but heard nobody else in the building. I was expecting a student to come help but he wasn’t coming until 5, so this freaked me out. Around 5:30 I had a light flash in front of me, like a camera flash, but the student was down in the handicap entrance and no lights around me had burnt out or blown. Right after that I heard a thump in the balcony above me, but when the student went up there and came back he never mentioned seeing anything that might have fallen.   *Voorhees Hall, ...

 In early August, my wife and I took a long weekend to Nashville.  I wrote the little poem here about it , because I realized that I was in a creative rut.  I've been mulling over the whole thing for over 2 months now, and sorta realized that Holland, in essence, has no culture. We stayed in a hotel near Midtown Nashville, not far from Vanderbilt and not far from the main drag of Broadway.  The hotel we were in was built in the 70s, but renovated and doubled in size in the 2010s.  We walked to the Exit/In for a show and walked past an entire block of businesses that was burned out, graffitied over, and in general disrepair.  But, they almost all had old gig posters and stickers all over the windows.  The reason I was drawn to the Exit/In was because of the book Outlaw (ISBN 0062038192) and the stories of the venue that Kris Kristofferson, in particular, told . We walked from our hotel past Vanderbilt University and saw The Parthenon...got to readi...

Part of the whole ethos of the book "100 Things To Do In Holland Michigan" is about highlighting the culture and community that we have in Holland, Michigan. As such, the book is divided up into sections: Food And Drink; Music And Entertainment; Sports And Recreation; Culture And History; and Shopping And Fashion. It's followed up with suggested inteneraries and activities by season. As I was entering a transitional phase in my lil' ol' blog here, a serendipitous discovery at Barns & Noble one idle Saturday led me to the actual book itself. I took advice from the book, and went to a local store to actually purchase it . As it pertains to Action Item #37   Expand Your Mind And Your Digital Experience At Herrick District Library , that's literally how I started this very blog .  I was unemployed and trying desperately hard to maintain some semblance of a normal schedule with my time.  Basically, I'd wake up at my normal schedule (up at 6:30, shower...

As I walked the city streets of Nashville I realized I was surrounded by ghosts   Beneath the neon clad celebrity bars were the ghosts of trendy artists  And the memories of thousands of celebrations   Beneath the boarded up storefronts were the ghosts of businesses past  And the memories of dreams forsaken   Beneath the echoes of historic venues were the ghosts of the legends   And the memories of iconic performances   Beneath the facade of dive bars were the ghosts of desperation  And the memories of times gone by   Beneath the walls of 19th century tenements were the ghosts of folks who lived there And the memories of their own vivid lives   Beneath the shadows of sentinels guarding the skyline Were the ghosts of centuries of liveliness  And the memories of the past   Nashville is a city of ghosts

 Honestly, this entry could be a series.  I have at least a full page of notes in my old blog notebook about Tunnel Park.  As I started this blog back in 2019, this particular book kept on coming up in my early research.  The area north of Holland proper was incredibly touristy in the early 20th century, and featured many lakeside resorts and attractions - not the least of which was Tunnel Park (subject of this entry).  Located on 22 acres north of Holland, the park's namesake tunnel actually goes through the dune.  There are stairs and everything, but - why a tunnel? And, what's this got to do with The Farm That Was A Zoo? See, the land that Tunnel Park sits on was donated by Chicago industrialist, George Getz, who owned the aforementioned  Farm That Was A Zoo , to Ottawa County in the 1920s, in an effort to get beachgoers away from his property - he set Tunnel Park up as strictly beach access.  The tunnel?  There's an urban legend that it ...

 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.

  "The Cult of Tradition" This is couched in the prevailing belief that things were better "back in the day," ignoring hardships of the past and focusing instead on rose-colored nostalgia.  When you're specifically looking at the culturally syncretistic aspect of this point, you're merging aspects of religion or socially conservative movements into that rose-colored view of the past.  We uphold folks like John Wayne as idealistic 'men,' when we're ignoring the fact that he was an actor and most of his mythos comes from fictitious characters.  This is an appeal to history, asking voters to support things like making a country great again.   "The Rejection of  modernism " This goes hand-in-hand with "The Cult Of Tradition."  If things were truly better "back in the day," that must mean that modernity is worse off.  This is at the root of things like anti-DEI measures, because that's "modern," and as we al...

 The good: My top post (by page views) in 2024 was the review comparing Chocolate Payday to Baby Ruth .  Odd because I honestly forgot about writing that one.  And, I spent a LOT of time promoting other posts on various Discord servers and on BluSky . Speaking of BluSky, I've gotten consistently more hits from links on that site than I ever did from Instagram or from Twitter.  Give me a follow if you haven't already!  https://bsky.app/profile/tulipcitydispatch.bsky.social Got to meet a few Instagram followers in real life, which was kinda cool I've been hitting up bookstores a little more, and have acquired a few local history books that I hope to dive into Doeb's Pizza has really  come into their own this year.  I always knew they had a lot of good potential, and they're absolutely hitting it on all cylinders I've recently discovered the deli/sandwich shop inside Ryke's Bakery and it's amazing.  There's high competition with Electric Hero f...

 ...ok, so the official title is "Pet A Pig Or A Pony At Fellinlove Farm," but hear me out:  Shortly after Fellinlove opened, we went to a Live Nativity at Fellinlove!  The flier that I linked was dated 2016, which definitely lines up with my memories of the event.  For some reason, we were brought into the animal area - we might've gotten there toward the end of the actual live nativity happenings or something.  There was a little nudge on my leg, so I looked down and saw a goat staring up at me.  I scratched the lil' guy behind the ears, and he nudged my leg again.  I started walking away and he followed.  Ever so gently, he reached up and nibbled my fingertips.  I can't reiterate how gentle it was. Turns out, the goat was very tame, and had gotten accustomed to getting treats whenever a guest came into the animal area...normally, guests are sequestered from the animal area, and only volunteers are allowed.  The goat, through no faul...

 "Put your fingers in the holes of the exterior wall of The Warm Friend in downtown Holland," Ms. Bareman implores us, "to get the feel of some real-life history." This part of her book is about the Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery, which I covered in 2020 !  I keep threatening to start a bike ride at that intersection and make a time-lapse video of the escape route that the bank robbers used out of Holland and into Drenthe, but I don't actually own a GoPro or anything. Anyway, whenever I'm in the Holland Social District walking around with friends, I always regale them with the tale of the Eddie Bentz bank robbery.  You know, like some folks go on and on about how New Holland Brewing used to be the JC Penney, or maybe it was the Woolworths, or was it Thompson's Hardware or Sears And Roebuck?  Point is, all my friends have heard the story a dozen times thus far, so it's gotten pretty boring.  But it's still a rad as hell story, and would actually be wor...