Scoop Turner

Gordon "Scoop" Turner was already old when I moved to Cheboygan in 1967. He had come to town around 1920 to take a summer job at the Cheboygan Daily Tribune and worked there almost up to his dying day, around age 90. When I arrived, Scoop was the City Editor, the number two man in a two man and one woman newspaper. After the owner-editor-publisher died, his wife tried to keep the paper going for awhile, but she finally sold it to an outfit in the U.P. that already owned a couple other small town papers. That outfit itself has been sold a few times since then, but the Tribune has survived until this very day. Scoop lost his prestigious title somewhere along the way, but he stayed on at the Tribune in one capacity or another for his whole career. He never did get the hang of those new fangled computers, so he typed his stories on a mechanical Underwood that was about as old as he was, and other people copied them onto the computer for him. After Turner died, the Tribune staff installed the Underwood on a pedestal and displayed it like the museum piece that it was. As far as I know, it's still there.

Gordon was a funny looking guy who had some sort of back problem that forced him to walk bent forward at the waist. People used to kid him about looking for money on the ground, and he admitted that he did find the occasional lost coin. He would save up those coins until he had a dollar's worth, and then would buy a lottery ticket with the money, but he never won the jackpot. Despite his doddering appearance, Scoop was a good reporter with a sharp mind, and everybody liked him. He wrote a lot of historical features for the paper, which is how he came across the legend of the lost locomotive.

One of the reasons the engine was never found was that all of Turner's sources hadn't seen it for decades, and the woods had changed in that time. After the old growth trees were logged off, the forest regenerated itself, was logged off again, and has since regenerated again. The second group of loggers did not always follow the old trails, abandoning them when their heavy equipment made them rutted and impassable, and cutting new trails to take their place. That part of the woods is not far from Beaglesonia, but I never go there anymore because I have my own land for hunting and forestry work. If I went back there today, I'm sure it would look different than I remember it from the 1970s.

In the course of his research, Turner came across two similar stories from two separate communities in the region, so maybe there were three lost locomotives. It's also possible that this is just the kind of story that has universal appeal, like the "Jam on Gerry's Rock". There are three U.S. states and two Canadian provinces that claim to be the home of the original Gerry's Rock, the subject of one of the most popular logging folk songs, and I figure there's a good chance that at least one of them is correct.

I was planning to answer Old Dog's questions about muzzle loaders, but that's a whole nother story, and it's getting late. Maybe tomorrow.